by Melanie Lidman

View Author Profile

Sr. Jane Wanjiru is the Kenya coordinator for a program that utilizes sisters working as early childhood educators to help the country’s 150 congregations reflect on their strengths and weaknesses to improve sisterhood there. "We learned that sisters do not learn from each other." Her work is changing that.

Catholic sisters have always gone to minister where the people are: they’ve crossed prairies and oceans, entered slums and prison cells, healed the sick and taught children, prayed with and counseled those discerning big decisions. In today’s global culture linked by digital media, the people instead can come to the sisters, especially Srs. Julie Vieira and Maxine Kollasch, whose brainchild, A Nun’s Life Ministry, is an online gathering place for thousands of users from all over the world.

 

GSR Today - Most people who know me would not consider “frivolous” an apt description. But that’s how I felt when visiting Peru, faced with the realities there and my life here in the United States. I was haunted by the Gospel story of Lazarus and the rich man and the chasm between them, between Celia and myself, the people of Peru and the people of the U.S.

Three Stats and a Map - If you’re like Global Sister Report’s U.S. sister liaison, Franciscan Sr. Jan Cebula, on Monday night, you were watching Independent Lens’ documentary about race on PBS. It’s a timely piece – it seems that we’re talking about race now more than we have in decades.

GSR Today - It’s a big thing to understand that you – just as you are – are beautifully and wonderfully created in the image of God. It makes me cherish the work of people like the Kenyan Elizabethan sisters profiled in Melanie Lidman’s latest piece for Global Sisters Report.

GSR Today - The International Union of Superiors General (UISG), the world’s most representative women religious leadership organization, is moving into a new phase of drawing up a comprehensive strategic plan aimed at revitalizing the group and giving it direction in the coming years.