In December 1963 a shy Belgian nun took the #1 slot on the hit parade with her song, "Dominique", gathering fans around the world and inspiring many women to enter religious orders. In 1985 she would commit suicide with her life time companion, Annie Pécher, after years of substance abuse, sexual confusion and financial woes. This is the true story of the sad life and death of Jeannine Deckers, better known to the world as Sister Smile, the Singing Nun.

Witchcraft. Arson. Going AWOL. Some nuns in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy strayed far from the paradigms of monastic life. Cloistered in convents, subjected to stifling hierarchy, repressed, and occasionally persecuted by their male superiors, these women circumvented authority in sometimes extraordinary ways. But tales of their transgressions have long been buried in the Vatican Secret Archive. That is, until now. In Nuns Behaving Badly, Craig A. Monson resurrects forgotten tales and restores to life the long-silent voices of these cloistered heroines. Here we meet nuns who dared speak out about physical assault and sexual impropriety (some real, some imagined). Others were only guilty of misjudgment or defacing valuable artwork that offended their sensibilities. But what unites the women and their stories is the challenges they faced: these were women trying to find their way within the Catholicism of their day and through the strict limits it imposed on them. Monson introduces us to women who were occasionally desperate to flee cloistered life, as when an entire community conspired to torch their convent and be set free. But more often, he shows us nuns just trying to live their lives. When they were crossed—by powerful priests who claimed to know what was best for them—bad behavior could escalate from mere troublemaking to open confrontation. In resurrecting these long-forgotten tales and trials, Monson also draws attention to the predicament of modern religious women, whose “misbehavior”—seeking ordination as priests or refusing to give up their endowments to pay for priestly wrongdoing in their own archdioceses—continues even today. The nuns of early modern Italy, Monson shows, set the standard for religious transgression in their own age—and beyond.

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.

As a young girl, medieval saint, healer, visionary, exorcist, and composer Hildegard von Bingen was locked in a cloister’s cell after demonstrating a preterenatural sensitivity to the world around her. Sequestered with Hildegard is Jutta, a woman who has spent her life secluded in an effort to recover a whole self after deepest trauma. Under Jutta’s guidance, Hildegard attempts to reassemble her own fragmented self while her mentor proselytizes a rejection of brokenness. IN THE GREEN is a musical unlike any you’ve seen, an astonishingly sonically sophisticated saga of two exceptional women broken by the world and their journey of healing that changed history.

The show is a fund raiser put on by the Little Sisters of Hoboken to raise money to bury sisters accidently poisoned by the convent cook, Sister Julia (Child of God). -- Publisher's description.

Twenty-seven years after she adopted her baby in Ireland, Lena Molloy receives a call from the nun who set up the adoption. Sister Monica claims that she wants merely to tie up loose ends in her old age, but Lena becomes frightened that something more threatening lies behind the call, and she sets off on a journey to Ireland, with her best friend, to find her daughter's birth parents.

"This story is dedicated to Jeannine Deckers and the many other women who have left religious orders to join the secular world with no emotional support. It takes great courage to attempt the religious life and even greater courage to leave it"--Page facing t.p. verso.