“If I know so little about my family four generations ago, the assumption follows that in four generations, they will know little about me. It changes the way you think about your life.”

Mercy Sr. Mary Ann Walsh was surprised at her home at the Sisters of Mercy motherhouse in Albany March 12 when visitors presented her with the Catholic Press Association's St. Francis de Sales Award. "Her life of service to the Catholic press, the USCCB and the church is outstanding and a model for all," said Rob DeFrancesco, president of the CPA and associate publisher of the Catholic Sun in the Diocese of Phoenix, in explaining the decision to bestow the award.

When Nuns Rule - “What would you do, Jo?” was one of the refrains Sr. Ephigenia Gachiri kept using as she described to me how she came to find herself on the frontlines fighting against the practice of female genital mutilation in Kenya. In this instance she wanted to know what I would do if I were confronted, face-to-face, with the mutilation of a young woman half my age.

"Climate change can only be stopped by our changing."

GSR Today - By now, most people are aware that working women earn less than working men and not, as the common refrain goes, because women opt for lower-paying career fields. Study after study has shown that women doing the exact same job as men and with the exact same level of experience, still make less than their male counterparts. I’ve been indignant about this for years, even though, as it turns out, I didn’t have all the facts.

I had been teaching at a prestigious higher level school for girls in Delhi. I loved teaching and being with the young. But the restlessness began and continued to grow. Fast forward and I have been directly engaged with the people on the margins for 25 years now. My passion for the urban poor has taken me to new paths. They have taught me a new theology. They have given me a new spirituality.

Too many atrocities bombard us when we pick up a newspaper, watch the news or read the many blogs and websites that come to us on a daily basis. The challenge for people of faith and those of us practicing contemplation is: How do we respond? Where do we begin to address these injustices? Two incidents which recently happened in and around Detroit (where I live) caught my attention, and I offer them as a reflection on exercising contemplative power.

The Association of Sisterhoods of Kenya (AOSK) is a pilot project for a revolutionary program that will connect sisters in Africa directly with donors around the world. Sr. Agnes Wamuyu Ngure, an Elizabethan Sister who is the executive secretary of AOSK, stressed that the biggest benefit in working with Global Impact will be towards improving the sustainability of their programming.

GSR Today - Today we're shining a spotlight on three African nations where new solutions are helping keep people nourished, from CRS's Rice Bowl results in Niger, to using church-land for farming in Kenya, to bishop-led policy changes in Malawi designed to keep arable land safe from the effects of climate change.

In Kenya’s biggest slum, women trained as local peacemakers keep a tense situation from degenerating into further violence. Since 1999, the Association of Sisterhoods of Kenya’s Justice and Peace Commission has trained 340 women during a summer-long intensive seminar. They hail from across the country and gain tools for defusing small, local conflicts, like disputes over fences or resources. These 340 women returned to their communities in all 25 dioceses of Kenya and shared their knowledge by creating “peacemaking circles,” groups of women from the neighborhood whom they train to act as local mediators.