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.

GSR Today - Women’s voices are still shockingly underrepresented in the media, so it is absolutely essential that female reporters and editors be willing to push for stories that are both for women and about women – not because we aren’t “smart enough” to think outside of ourselves or because female audiences only care about female issues, but because our perspective matters.

A senior Vatican official on Tuesday tried to defuse the damaging rift between the Vatican and U.S. nuns after a recent rebuke over obedience and doctrinal differences.

GSR Today - The rate of incarceration in the U.S. has skyrocketed in the past three to four decades, and now the United States has the highest per capita imprisonment rate in the world, according to the International Centre for Prison Studies.

For Syria’s three-year armed conflict to come to an end, all foreign fighters and the external powers that support them must first leave the country, said Mother Agnes Mariam, a Carmelite nun in Syria, during a public lecture April 29 at Saint Mary’s College of California. That departure, she said, would allow the Syrian people the safety to resolve their political differences through non-violent negotiations.

I have been interested in doing some kind of jail ministry for many years. The women I have met in detention are often as honest and serious about their faith as those I’ve met anywhere. Their struggles are right up front, staring them in the face. Most do not hesitate long to talk about them.