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.

The latest remarks from the Vatican official overseeing the attempts to reform women religious in the United States show how far apart the two sides are, prominent sisters say. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith prefect Cardinal Gerhard Müller told L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s semiofficial newspaper, that the congregation’s five-year reform agenda for the Leadership Conference of Women Religious is in place not because the Vatican hates women, but to help them regain their identity.

For the last four years I have thought about what it would be like to make vows. I watched as sisters I knew made their first professions and as others made their final professions. Each year brought a new chance to observe. I took in the music, the atmosphere, the decorations and the spirit of the place . . . and pictured myself in the midst of it all. Each profession liturgy was as unique as the woman making vows.Yet there was a thread of similarity that sewed all of the celebrations together. At first, I couldn’t put my finger on it.

Three stats and a map - Last week, religion blogger Tobin Grant created a graph showing where America’s various religions fall on the political spectrum, based on data from the Pew Forum. While the original graph grouped all Catholics in a monolithic category, on Tuesday, Grant released a second graph breaking American Catholic down into eight groups:

See for Yourself - As our country celebrates the 120th anniversary of Labor Day on September 1, and while I’m sincerely grateful for the blessing of working, right now I’m also thinking of a friend whose job isn’t such a blessing. The other day this out-of-state friend, Marie, phoned.