It is true that in apostolic religious life we seek to live a balance between ministry and contemplative prayer – one feeds the other. We bring our ministry to prayer and prayer supports us in our ministry. This is the ideal. If we are not careful, though, our ministry can overtake the contemplative space in our lives. Our world is in such great need. There are more injustices, marginalized and oppressed peoples, and persons in abject poverty than I can list in this article. And it is true that it is our moral obligation to address these needs in the ways we are able. But in so doing we cannot afford to lose our center, our foundation, our very souls.

Sr. Barbara Moore wanted to see the film "Selma," but by herself "because emotionally I knew it would probably be impactful." So the Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet sat alone in a St. Louis theater in January and watched the movie about the events of 50 years ago this March – the voting rights marches and protests led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama.

"Most good things have been said far too many times – and just need to be lived."

See for Yourself - There I go again. My years-ago-learned touch-typing skills just failed me once more. After completing a document and proofing it, there it was: a glaring typo. My intended word was "passion," but what was actually in print was "passon." Pass on. I had skipped over the "i."

Sr. Deborah Borneman thinks about vocations and religious life a lot – not just because she’s a Sister of Saints Cyril and Methodius, but because it’s her job. But of course, it’s more than just a job. Borneman is passionate about religious life, which comes through quickly when speaking with her. Many will find out for themselves when Borneman will speak at the "discern. Conference" at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Love returned two hundredfold - Contemporary conversations about how we approach dying are in part a reaction to 20th-century traditions like embalming, funeral homes and spending one’s last days in hospitals. In this midst of this lively and often graphic debate, some members of the Sisters of Mercy, one of the larger religious congregations in the Americas, are offering an alternate perspective, one that balances the certainty of human mortality with their strong faith.

Out of the last half of the 14th century comes an unknown writer giving us a spiritual treatise called, The Cloud of Unknowing. This it seems is the basic state of our relation with God – a state of unknowing, symbolized by a dense cloud between us. Sometimes, mercifully, the cloud is pierced by God’s “dart of longing love.” Most of the time we live with the cloud of unknowing above and the cloud of forgetting below.

GSR Today - Notre Dame Sr. Bui Thi Kim Ngoc is a cheerful soul. She has a buoyant personality and smiles a lot as she stumbles through her English, laughing at her own mistakes. You can’t spend more than a few minutes with her without feeling refreshed, uplifted. At age 38, Kim Ngoc is the principal of the Anh Linh Free School in bustling Ho Chi Minh City, which locals continue to call Saigon.

There is much talk these days about the upcoming encyclical of Pope Francis on the environment. Scholarly conferences, workshops, articles, talk shows and interviews are focused on what the pontiff might say on the environment and the looming consequences of global climate change. It is an extremely important area to engage, since polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising and the biological niches of fisheries and natural flora are radically changing. Ecology has become such a hot topic in the public sphere, especially among political and religious circles, that we have not paused sufficiently to ask, what exactly are talking about?