It is 1971, and I find myself walking eagerly down a tree-shaded driveway in Fox Chase, Philadelphia, heading for an interview with the Medical Mission Sisters. I was 23 years old and the proud possessor of a shiny new master's degree in nursing. I hoped to discover if my God-search would find a home with this exciting international group of women.

I began my two-year novitiate with the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Philadelphia in the fall of 2012. That beginning meant the end of many things. At the age of 26, it meant leaving behind my major possessions, relinquishing access to my personal savings and leaving my job ministering at an inner-city parish’s community center.

Religious life on the Africa continent dates back to early Christianity. During the second and third centuries, the Egyptian desert and other parts of North Africa were alive with women and men, desert mothers and fathers, who “renounced the world,” and withdrew to the desert in order to have a deeper and a more intimate union with God.

If you ask director and filmmaker Richard Ray Perez if the story of Cesar Chavez chose him or if he chose to tell Chavez's story, he would say both. Following the screening of his new film, "Cesar's Last Fast," at the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress Film Showcase March 14, he told the audience that when he was 5 years old in the late 1960s, he first became aware of the table grape boycott while eating lunch at Head Start.

There is a powerful scene in the Gospels that shows in a flash how life-giving the encounter between Jesus and women can be. As Luke tells the story: Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath, and a woman came in who had been crippled by a spirit for 18 years. She was bent over and could not straighten up at all. When Jesus saw her, he called her forward and said to her, “Woman, you are set free from your infirmity.” Then he put his hands on her, and immediately she stood up straight and began to praise God. (Lk 13:10-13)

At the Fatima Center for Human Development, children learn farm and other trade skills to become self-sufficient in the Philippines, thanks to the dedication of Sr. Felicitas De Lima and other Daughters of St. Augustine.