The Shakers, who arrived in America in 1774, are a religious community facing extinction. Their decline means nothing less than the end of an idea of heaven.
The sisters I met along the border know well the intractability of poverty, disease, and violence. That does not keep them from working to relieve them.
I’m nineteen years old, the year is 1958, and I’ve already made it through the first nine months of probation. More than anything in the world I want to be a saint.
A city is noisy, dirty, sometimes cruel, sometimes surprisingly kind, always restless, constantly building over its own past. Like all things, it needs prayer.
The Catholic Church now has a stronger theology of women deacons than it did during the fraught time of Paul VI. But now political conditions are less auspicious.