NCR Today - Dust From Our Eyes: An Unblinkered Look at Africa is one of my favorite books about Africa. Journalist Joan Baxter, who spent 25 years in West Africa, challenges us to put aside a common image of Africa as the “Dark Continent” and begin seeing it as a continent of new light and creativity.

Lately, Catholic news has been confusing and upsetting, with required loyalty oaths and the condemnation of nuns. But there is still some good news.

Diane Bergant is a professor of Old Testament Studies at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. She shares her experience becoming a member of the Congregation of Sisters of St. Agnes, what religious life means to her and how things have changed over the years.

When the Minim Daughters of Mary Immaculate was established in Mexico in 1886, the founder named the sisters so because he felt Mary would watch closely over her youngest of daughters. Early on the congregation was called to aid a community devastated by flooding in central Mexico. The first Minim sisters ran medical centers, orphanages and schools.

"There are two problems for our species' survival – nuclear war and environmental catastrophe – and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly."

Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Srs. Margarita Martin, Angela Cordero and Marietta Jansen live in a trailer convent outside of Athens, Ga., among immigrants who work in agriculture and constructiony. With the help of university students, the sisters run a tutoring program for children and provide other services in a geographic area where almost three quarters of families live in poverty.

U.S. death penalty - Earlier this year, the Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life Project released the results of a 2013 survey of American Christians about the death penalty. While support of the death penalty is crawling back toward its 1960s national low, the majority of American adults say they support the execution convicted murderers.

From A Nun's Life podcasts - Sr. Elizabeth A. Johnson wrote a two-part column feature for Global Sisters Report, "Jesus and women: You are set free," and we were pleased to have that for our launch April 22, one month ago today. In this audio clip, A Nun's Life talks with Johnson about the two Marys – the Mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene – with insight as to new understandings about Mary Magdalene. The set-up question: " A tale of two Marys – one on a pedestal and the other . . . not so much?"

Sr. Mai Thanh, CND, former provincial of the Congregation of Notre Dame of Vietnam, 86, is now engaged in interfaith activities. A devoted daughter and poet, she was born to a Confucian family and converted to Catholicism, which her father, a government official and Confucian devotee, considered a foreign religion, especially because it banned its followers from conducting ceremonies to worship their ancestors.

As the environmental crisis has grown over the past 50 years, these and other similar critiques have led some to ask if the Christian tradition has anything positive to contribute to the preservation of the environment. To answer this question, we must take off the lenses that are often used by Christians to look at the environment and substitute new ones to form a revised Christian vision on the environment that clearly promotes the flourishing of Earth and its creatures.