Reseeding Religious Life Through Global Sisterhood - by Susan Rose Francois & Juliet Mousseau (Paperback)

About the Book

"In Reseeding Religious Life through Global Sisterhood, sisters from around the world reflect on a synodal vision and engage in a contemplative dialogue on the emerging future of religious life"--

Book Synopsis

2025 Catholic Media Association Honorable Mention, The Future of the Church

Sisters from around the world reflect on a synodal vision for the church and engage in a contemplative dialogue on the emerging future of religious life.

The story of religious life over the centuries displays two enduring qualities: constancy and change. God's love is constant, as is the changing state of the human condition lived on earth, our common home. Each generation of religious is faced with reading the signs of the times to faithfully navigate the intersection of constancy and change. But what are we to do in this time of renewal? In Reseeding Religious Life through Global Sisterhood, sisters from around the world reflect on a synodal vision and engage in a contemplative dialogue on the emerging future of religious life.

In this hopeful volume, sisters share perspectives on their rich heritage while continuing to till the soil of religious life with their encounters, transforming and deepening their charismatic identity with each conversation. Through this process, readers may come to understand how tending to the wounds of the poor and the planet becomes an awakening to embracing the intersection of the ecologies; social, economic, environmental, political, cultural, and spiritual. Reseeding Religious Life through the Global Sisterhood challenges all who dwell in faithfulness to God to a charismatic synodality: one that reveals the unfolding narrative of all our interconnections, calls us to nurture the conversations that will energize our distinct charisms, and inspires the flourishing of an emerging global sisterhood.

Contributors include:
Chioma Ahanihu, SLW
Monica Marie Cardona, VDMF
Ricca Dimalibot, CCVI
Susan Rose Francois, CSJP
Tracey Horan, SP​
Katty Huanuco, CCVI
Nkechi Iwuoha, PHJC
Sarah Kohles, OSF
Teresa Maya, CCVI
Juliet Mousseau, RSCJ

Review Quotes

"Reseeding Religious Life through Global Sisterhood is an insightful and beautiful representation of the real experiences of modern Catholic sisters. This book ought to become required reading for anyone who is concerned about the shifts occurring in religious life and curious about what God is creating anew. What a gift to the Church!"
Julia Walsh, Franciscan Sister of Perpetual Adoration, Messy Jesus Business podcast host and author of For Love of the Broken Body

-- (7/17/2024 12:00:00 AM)

"At a time when the average age in many religious congregations is in the eighties and the style of life they originally entered has all but disappeared, a courageous, committed and joyous new generation gives voice to its hopes and struggles in living the same dedication in radically different contexts. Their accounts of discerning how to re-seed a religious life that has been inexorably receding brim over with energy, creative imagination and unquenchable hope. The future of the church, as of religious life, is unknowable, but is all the richer for hearing the honest and courageous voices of the sisters of today and tomorrow."
Gemma Simmonds, CJ, director of Religious Life Institute, Cambridge, UK, and co-author of God's Call Is Everywhere

-- (7/19/2024 12:00:00 AM)

"One of the surest ways to start a new conversation is to ask new questions. Throughout Reseeding Religious Life through Global Sisterhood, the authors raise new questions that have the potential to seed new conversations about religious life, particularly as the U.S. context becomes more beautifully and richly diverse. While deeply personal in nature, the reflections address universal themes of identity, purpose, and belonging across generations and cultures. The authors' vulnerability is an invitation to our own honesty and depth and reminds us that God is remaking religious life again through our daily fidelities to grace and circumstance."
Mary Pellegrino, CSJ, former president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR)-- (7/31/2024 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author

Susan Rose Francois, CSJP, was a Bernardin scholar at Catholic Theological Union and has served in congregation leadership since 2015. She is the author of My Friend Joe: Reflections on St. Joseph (Kenmare Press, 2021).

Juliet Mousseau, RSCJ, currently serves as the vice president for academic affairs at the Franciscan School of Theology in San Diego. Trained as a historical theologian, her writings include medieval theology, the history of her congregation, and contemporary questions in religious life. She is the author of Prophetic Witnesses to Joy: A Theology of the Vowed Life (Liturgical Press, 2021).