For 125 years, the Sisters of the Holy Spirit and Mary Immaculate served the poor and, in particular, people of color. They are the first order of sisters founded in Texas. Their foundress, Margaret Mary Healy Murphy, built the first Catholic African American school and church in San Antonio, the second in the state of Texas. The sisters carried their mission and work beyond the Lone Star State's borders and included most of the South and a few metropolitan areas of the North. They crossed the Rio Grande and had several missions in Mexico and traversed a new continent when they opened a learning center in Zambia. The sisters were primarily known as educators and, in later years, worked in religious education and pastoral ministry. They have also operated orphanages and nursing homes and served in hospitals, homeless shelters, incarceration facilities, and immigration residences. The school they built over 100 years ago, now known as the Healy Murphy Center, serves the community as an alternative high school, and the sisters still teach there.

Since 1845, along the River Raisin in the southeastern Michigan town of Monroe, the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM) have distinguished themselves as educators, activists, and Catholic pioneers. At the congregation's peak, the motherhouse dispatched nearly 1,600 nuns to more than 100 schools across metropolitan Detroit and several states. For 175 years, the sisters taught the three Rs and the meaning of faith to nearly 700,000 students and established important metro Detroit institutions such as Marygrove College, Immaculata and Marian High Schools, and St. Mary Academy. Widely known by their initials, the IHMs have extended their reach worldwide. Monroe IHM members have served in key roles at the Vatican, as leaders of organizations representing Catholic sisters in the United States, as missionaries in Third World countries, and as groundbreaking activists and theologians. The Monroe IHMs today also attract lay women and men who dedicate themselves to the congregation's values and goals by becoming IHM Associates.

The author offers an interpretation of Mary that is theologically sound, spiritually empowering, ethically challenging, socially liberating, and ecumenically fruitful. She construes the image of Mary so as to be a source of blessing rather than blight for women's lives in both religious and political terms.

This is a study of how paternal race relations in San Antonio contributed to the rise of accommodation-minded African American leaders whose successful manipulation of the political and ethnic divisions provided goods, services and sustained voting rights during a period when African Americans throughout the South had lost such privileges. The unique demography of Mexican-, German-, Anglo- and African Americans; a service based economy of hotels, restaurants and saloons; and campaigns by white civic leaders to make San Antonio the premier commercial and vacation center of the Southwest nurtured a political machine that intended "to keep blacks in their place". This resulted in an assortment of Jim Crow laws; restrictive employment opportunities; and segregated schools, parks, and municipal services; albeit without mob lynching and racial violence.This paternal brand of racism resulted in the rise of one of the most powerful black political bosses of his time, Charles Bellinger. Challenges fromconservative white reformers and disgruntled black civil rights advocates failed to dislodge the hold Bellinger's machine had on the black community and the city, until the Great Depression. By examining employment, education, politics, and socio-cultural activities that contributed to the city's unique race relations; the study takes a hard look at whether "separate but equal" ever become a reality in San Antonio.

Grow more deeply in your relationship with God by knowing Mary more intimately. Let's explore the meaning behind the four Marian dogmas: Mother of God, Perpetual Virginity, Immaculate Conception, and her Assumption into Heaven. About the Series Faith Basics are concise explanations of various dimensions of the Catholic Faith aimed at a popular audience. They both inform and inspire readers to understand and live the Faith. Their convenient size makes them readily portable. They are economically priced and thus are ideal for distribution in evangelization efforts, RCIA classes, study groups, and various outreach programs.

Roman Catholic sisters first traveled to the American West as providers of social services, education, and medical assistance. In Across God's Frontiers, Anne M. Butler traces the ways in which sisters challenged and reconfigured contemporary ideas

In Subversive Habits, Shannen Dee Williams provides the first full history of Black Catholic nuns in the United States, hailing them as the forgotten prophets of Catholicism and democracy. Drawing on oral histories and previously sealed Church records, Williams demonstrates how master narratives of women’s religious life and Catholic commitments to racial and gender justice fundamentally change when the lives and experiences of African American nuns are taken seriously. For Black Catholic women and girls, embracing the celibate religious state constituted a radical act of resistance to white supremacy and the sexual terrorism built into chattel slavery and segregation. Williams shows how Black sisters—such as Sister Mary Antona Ebo, who was the only Black member of the inaugural delegation of Catholic sisters to travel to Selma, Alabama, and join the Black voting rights marches of 1965—were pioneering religious leaders, educators, healthcare professionals, desegregation foot soldiers, Black Power activists, and womanist theologians. In the process, Williams calls attention to Catholic women’s religious life as a stronghold of white supremacy and racial segregation—and thus an important battleground in the long African American freedom struggle.