This book traces the journey taken by the Canadian Province of Our Lady of the Missions (RNDM) from their establishment in Manitoba in 1898 until 2008, when the congregation as a whole redefined its mission and vision. Using archival research conducted in Winnipeg, Manitoba as well as in England and Italy, and incorporating oral interviews with RNDM sisters, this book explores the historical work of sisters in schools and the part they played in the educational state in formation. The details of the congregation's activity in schools show how the sisters' educational work was related to the social characteristics of the communities (e.g., those of French Canadian settlers, British immigrants, the M?tis population, and continental European immigrants), first in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and later in Ontario and Quebec. The Sisters of Our Lady of the Missions examines the impact of Vatican II in the 1960s, and into the 2000s, as well as the dismantling of neo-scholasticism and the process of secularization of consciousness in society at large. The emerging issues led the congregation and the province to examine their individual and collective identity at the intersection of feminist theology, eco-spirituality, and a critique of western cosmology.

When Sr. Miriam James Heidland’s life as a successful college athlete proved unfulfilling, she went searching for something deeper and ended up falling in love with Jesus. By charting her own journey toward wholeness, Heidland invites young Catholics to pursue their own relationship with Jesus. Although originally full of athletic ambition and goals for a career in sports news, Heidland was transformed in a very slow but deep way during her undergraduate years, moving from party girl to bride of Christ. In Loved as I Am: An Invitation to Conversion, Healing, and Freedom through Jesus, Heidland helps readers learn from her experience of seeking love in the wrong places and instead finding it in Christ. She shares her struggles—learning she was adopted, battling alcoholism, and healing from childhood sexual abuse—as signs of hope that anyone who desires to know Christ can find him and be loved intimately by him in return. By bringing readers into Heidland’s healing process, Loved as I Am provides a gentle and subtle template for finding peace and freedom in Jesus.

The sisters of the Order of Saint Rita captain their living ship into the reaches of space in Lina Rather's debut novella, Sisters of the Vast Black. A Golden Crown Literary Society Award Finalist Years ago, Old Earth sent forth sisters and brothers into the vast dark of the prodigal colonies armed only with crucifixes and iron faith. Now, the sisters of the Order of Saint Rita are on an interstellar mission of mercy aboard Our Lady of Impossible Constellations, a living, breathing ship which seems determined to develop a will of its own. When the order receives a distress call from a newly-formed colony, the sisters discover that the bodies and souls in their care—and that of the galactic diaspora—are in danger. And not from void beyond, but from the nascent Central Governance and the Church itself. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

A National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Honoree “An enchanting, sparkling book about the many meanings of sisterhood.” —Kristin Iversen, Refinery29 Claire Luchette's debut, Agatha of Little Neon, is a novel about yearning and sisterhood, figuring out how you fit in (or don’t), and the unexpected friends who help you find your truest self Agatha has lived every day of the last nine years with her sisters: they work together, laugh together, pray together. Their world is contained within the little house they share. The four of them are devoted to Mother Roberta and to their quiet, purposeful life. But when the parish goes broke, the sisters are forced to move. They land in Woonsocket, a former mill town now dotted with wind turbines. They take over the care of a halfway house, where they live alongside their charges, such as the jawless Tim Gary and the headstrong Lawnmower Jill. Agatha is forced to venture out into the world alone to teach math at a local all-girls high school, where for the first time in years she has to reckon all on her own with what she sees and feels. Who will she be if she isn’t with her sisters? These women, the church, have been her home. Or has she just been hiding? Disarming, delightfully deadpan, and full of searching, Claire Luchette’s Agatha of Little Neon offers a view into the lives of women and the choices they make.

Mary In Our Life: An Atlas of the Names and Titles of Mary, The Mother of Jesus, and Their Place in Marian Devotion presents the 1,969 names, titles, and appellations used to identify the Blessed Virgin Mary over the centuries in terms of their history and related events. Within these titles and their history can be seen the official and private attitudes and prejudices of the times; government pressures, conflicts, and interdictions; internal problems within the Catholic Church; and startling examples of dedication, devotion, and piety. Taken together, Marian titles are a real-life story of the Catholic faith.

This book depicts the significant role played by American Catholic Women Religious in the broader narratives of modern American history and the history of the Catholic Church. The book is a guide to fifty foreign missions founded by Dominican and Maryknoll Sisters in the twentieth century. Sister Donna Moses examines root causes for the radical political stances taken by American Catholic Women Religious in the latter half of the century and for the conservative backlash that followed. The book identifies key events that contributed to the present state of division within the American Catholic Church and describes current efforts to engage in dynamic dialogue.

In matters of mission history, most major works that treat the full sweep of the church's missional self-understanding are less than helpful in understanding women's part of that narrative. Smith tries to redress the balance with a comprehensive history of mission that highlights the critical contributions of women, as well as the theological developments that influenced their role. --From publisher's description.

The stereotype of the woman missionary has ranged from that of the longsuffering wife, characterized by the epitaph Died, given over to hospitality, to that of the spinster in her unstylish dress and wire-rimmed glasses, alone somewhere for thirty years teaching heathen children. Like all caricatures, those of the exhausted wife and frustrated old maid carry some truth: the underlying message of the sterotypes is that missionary women were perceived as marginal to the central tasks of mission. Rather than being remembered for preaching the gospel, the quintessential male task, missionary women were noted for meeting human needs and helping others, sacrificing themselves without plan or reason, all for the sake of bringing the world to Jesus Christ.Historical evidence, however, gives lie to the truism that women missionaries were and are doers but not thinkers, reactive secondary figures rather than proactive primary ones. The first American women to serve as foreign missionaries in 1812 were among the best-educated women of their time. Although barred from obtaining the college education or ministerial credentials of their husbands, the early missionary wives had read their Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Hopkins. Not only did they go abroad with particular theologies to share, but their identities as women caused them to develop gender-based mission theories. Early nineteenth-century women seldom wrote theologies of mission, but they wrote letters and kept journals that reveal a thought world and set of assumptions about women's roles in the missionary task. The activities of missionary wives were not random: they were part of a mission strategy that gave women a particular role inthe advancement of the reign of God.By moving from mission field to mission field in chronological order of missionary presence, Robert charts missiological developments as they took place in dialogue with the urgent context of the day. Each case study marks the beginning of the mission theory. Baptist women in Burma, for example, are only considered in their first decades there and are not traced into the present. Robert believes that at this early stage of research into women's mission theory, integrity and analysis lies more in a succession of contextualized case studies than in gross generalizations.

A book that gives a profound explanation of how one can relate with the Immaculate by means of "the Marian Vow" of total consecration to the Immaculate that is transformative and life-changing. This book is a treatise on total consecration to the Immaculate, conceived initially by St. Maximilian M. Kolbe and has developed into the distinctive charism of the Franciscans of the Immaculate. Such charism finds its consummation in the profession of this Marian consecration in the form of a religious vow, known as, "The Marian Vow." Finding its original inspiration in St. Maximilian Kolbe who envisioned of a "fourth vow" of consecration that puts no limit to the missionary work of the religious, Fr. Stefano Manelli, the founder of the Franciscans of the Immaculate continued with the same inspiration and develop it to include both Marian and missionary character. This book is the theological and ascetical explanation of this Marian Vow. The book is not, by all means, exclusive to the Franciscans of the Immaculate. One can find universal insights based on solid spiritual theology of how one can relate in a more personal way with the Immaculate who ceases to be just a mere figure of veneration; she becomes alive and present to one's soul in a unique way that is transformative and life-changing. This book is utterly unique and inspired. As the Founder and Father General of the entire family of the Franciscans of the Immaculate (Friars, Sisters, Poor Clares, Tertiaries, and M.I.M.), Fr. Stefano has distilled, and put into writing for his children, the illumination he has received about the Marian Vow over the past decades. This work is the fruit of his life of prayer, study, and missionary activity. It is the fruit of his profound union with the Immaculate Heart of Mary.