From A Nun's Life podcasts - Are sisters conducting surveillance to find new recruits? A listener asks the sisters about that phenomenon. Global Sisters Report is delighted to share short clips from A Nun's Life Ministry's engaging shows, including “Ask Sister,” “In Good Faith” and “Motherhouse Road Trip.”

GSR Today - When it comes to comments from strangers, the Internet can be a vile and scary place for women. What’s nice about the Global Sisters Report is that: A) we don’t have a comments section (although you can comment on stories you like on our Facebook page); and B) our readers are, for the most part, civil.

 “Literacy is a key lever of change and a practical tool of empowerment on each of the three main pillars of sustainable development: economic development, social development and environmental protection.”

GSR Today - Sr. Simone Campbell, executive director of NETWORK lobby, is set to launch a new – the third – Nuns on the Bus tour next week. Global Sisters Report will be there covering the Sept. 17 kick off in Des Moines, Iowa, and our liaison to women religious in the U.S., Sr. Jan Cebula, OSF, will even be on the bus for the first five days of the tour.

This time it’s the Catholic sisters versus the Koch brothers. That’s one way to look at the upcoming Nuns on the Bus tour, which hits the road next week (Sept. 17) for the third time in three years, a month-long trip through 10 key U.S. Senate battleground states to campaign against the influence of outside money on politics.

Pope Francis mourned the deaths of three Xaverian Missionary Sisters of Mary, who were murdered in two separate attacks in their residence in Burundi. Sr. Lucia Pulici, 75, and Sr. Olga Raschietti, 82, were found dead Sept. 7 in their mission residence in the capital of Bujumbura. Sr. Bernadetta Bogianni, 79, who had found the bodies, was killed the next night.

Nineteenth-century missionaries arrived in Africa with a Bible in one hand and a plough in the other. Jesuit Br. Paul Desmarais still has a Bible, but he's given up on the plough. For 40 years, Desmarais has run the Kasisi Agricultural Training Centre in Zambia. But over the past 20 years he has rethought almost every aspect of conventional Western agriculture and how it's applied in Africa.

"Social justice very much has to include justice for the environment. Within that, there has to be a concern for women's rights. It's all part of it."

The National Directory of the Nigeria Conference of Women Religious is not a flashy book. Tan cover, very few pictures, 144 pages. The pages are filled with the names of the more than 6,000 sisters who make up 52 recognized congregations in Nigeria, which doesn't exactly make for gripping reading. It may not be an exciting book, but the directory is much more than a simple list: it's a tool of empowerment that is enabling women religious to regulate and improve the organization of sisters across Nigeria.

GSR Today - Jo Piazza’s new book, If Nuns Ruled the World, is getting a lot of attention. Piazza is a New York journalist and author of several books, and in her newest work she profiles 10 women religious who gloriously challenge stereotypical portrayals of women religious in pop culture, including Srs. Joan Dawber, Jeannine Gramick and Megan Rice.