I responded to the first inklings of a call to religious life as if playing the arcade game, Whac-a-mole. When God’s invitation started slowly popping up in different ways, like those little moles, I would promptly “swing my black mallet” and stuff them right back down. Eventually, the “vocation moments” were jumping up like maniacs all over the place until I couldn’t ignore them anymore. I reluctantly gave in and began to find my way through a discernment for which I didn’t quite feel prepared.

For the last seven years, Maryknoll Sr. Julia Shideler has been on mission in East Timor, teaching everything from English and Portuguese to theology, biology and geology. The tiny nation is one of the poorest in Asia (and Shideler’s district, Aileu, is one of the country’s least developed), but from her classroom, Shideler has a plan to break the cycle of poverty one student at a time. Shideler spoke to Global Sisters Report from the Maryknoll Sisters Center in New York, where she recently made her final vows and is now wrapping up a year-long period of reflection before heading back to East Timor next month.

See For Yourself - We’ve no doubt heard the old joke, “What’s the opposite of PROgress? CONgress!” While there may be a wily truth to that, the difference between pro- and con- spans globes. If I’m actually for something, just think what distance it would take to support the opposite view and be against something. Those opposites make for interesting conversations.

GSR Today - As a conscientious consumer, I’m aware that any brand new iPhone 6 or any computer is made possible only by inclusion of conflict minerals, that is, minerals extracted from the Congolese mines for which much blood has been shed in a near-constant battle for power between government and rebel troops. Furthermore, as Clare Nolan wrote for the Global Sisters Report on this week, the conditions in some of these mines are troublesome, to say the least.

Three Stats and a Map - If you’re in the U.S. and you turned on the news today to check up midterm election results, chances are your political affiliation influenced your news source. That’s probably not shocking information, but in a recent poll, the Pew Research Journalism Project found that in addition to choice of news source, both consistent liberals and conservatives have very particular media habits

The headlines are confusing. The questions they raise are even more so. For instance, we "empowered" women, right? After more than 2,000 years, the Western world finally woke up, in our time, to the astounding recognition that women, too, were human. Almost. By 1922, most English-speaking countries, including the United States, finally allowed women to vote for political leaders. The struggle was a fierce one, and churchmen and politicians alike considered that breakdown in society to be simply the beginning of the decline.

Four Dominican Sisters of St. Catherine of Siena are providing about 1,500 displaced Catholics with shelter, food, hygiene and water. The people fled from Mosul, Qaraqosh and Bartella, Christian towns in northern Iraq overrun by the Islamist extremists in early August. The tent camp was ravaged by cold rainy weather in late October, so families now shelter inside and around a youth sports center in a Christian enclave of Irbil.

" . . . This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children . . . . "

It’s not a new issue or an isolated one – but that doesn’t make dealing with aging populations, a lack of new sisters, spiraling costs and falling incomes any easier for religious congregations to deal with. For some, like the Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, Ind., the process of realigning their priorities to their resources prompted them to undertake a “refounding” – where they dedicated themselves to rebuilding the 175-year-old congregation from scratch. But other orders have looked at their resources and realized no realignment or refounding is possible. And for them, LCWR's Transitional Services is there to help.

Power of Sisterhood exposes the richness of the multi-layered story of how women religious in America experienced the four phases of the apostolic visitation, 2009-2012. The various dimensions and facets offered by the sisters who contributed chapters deserve rereading and pondering. This is a story that could provide valuable insights applicable to other situations in the church.