Monica Appleby and Helen Lewis reveal the largely untold story of women who stood up to the Church and joined Appalachians in their struggle for social justice. Their poignant story of how faith, compassion, and persistence overcame obstacles to progress in Appalachia is a fascinating example of how a collaborative and creative learning community fosters strong voices. Mountain Sisters is a prophetic first-person account of the history of American Catholicism, the war on poverty, and the influence of the turbulent 1960s on the cultural and religious communities of Appalachia. Founded in 1941, The Glenmary Sisters embraced a calling to serve rural Appalachian communities where few Catholics resided. The sisters, many of them seeking alternatives to the choices available to most women during this time, zealously pursued their duties but soon became frustrated with the rules and restrictions of the Church. Outmoded doctrine—even styles of dress—made it difficult for them to interact with the very people they hoped to help. In 1967, after many unsuccessful attempts to persuade the Church to ease its requirements, some seventy Sisters left the security of convent life. Over forty of these women formed a secular service group, FOCIS (Federation of Communities in Service). Mountain Sisters is their story.

"For Linnet, owner of a Bed and Breakfast in Mountain Springs, Pennsylvania, life has been a bit complicated lately. Hundreds of snow geese have died overnight in the dam near the B&B, sparking a media frenzy, threatening the tourist season, and bringing her estranged sister, Myna, to town. If that isn't enough, the women's father has been charged with investigating the incident. But when a younger expert is brought in to replace him on the case and then turns up dead on Linnet's B&B's property, their father becomes the primary suspect. As the investigation unfolds, the sisters will have to confront each other, their hidden past, and a side of Mountain Springs not seen before. Karen Katchur has written a thrilling novel of sisters and the secrets that bind them that is sure to appeal to readers of her acclaimed first novel, The Secrets of Lake Road"--

It is perhaps the critical issue of our time: How can we, as human beings, find ethical and sustainable ways to live with one another and with other living beings on this planet? Inviting us into the world of “green sisters,” this book provides compelling answers from a variety of religious communities. Green sisters are environmentally active Catholic nuns who are working to heal the earth as they cultivate new forms of religious culture. Sarah McFarland Taylor approaches this world as an “intimate outsider.” Neither Roman Catholic nor member of a religious order, she is a scholar well versed in both ethnography and American religious history who has also spent time shucking garlic and digging vegetable beds with the sisters. With her we encounter sisters in North America who are sod-busting the manicured lawns around their motherhouses to create community-supported organic gardens; building alternative housing structures and hermitages from renewable materials; adopting the “green” technology of composting toilets, solar panels, fluorescent lighting, and hybrid vehicles; and turning their community properties into land trusts with wildlife sanctuaries. Green Sisters gives us a firsthand understanding of the practice and experience of women whose lives bring together Catholicism and ecology, orthodoxy and activism, traditional theology and a passionate mission to save the planet. As green sisters explore ways of living a meaningful religious life in the face of increased cultural diversity and ecological crisis, their story offers hope for the future—and for a deeper understanding of the connections between women, religion, ecology, and culture.

Appalachian Mountain Christianity examines the beliefs and practices of certain Protestant religious groups, primarily Baptists and Holiness Pentecostals, whose history is shaped in and by the Central Appalachian context. Particular attention is given to Primitive and Old Regular Baptists as well as certain denominationally connected or independent Pentecostal communions. Bill J. Leonard explores the ways in which Appalachian cultural and religious transitions and upheavals impact these traditional faith communities; the style and significance of their rituals including preaching, worship, baptism, foot washing, and glossolalia; their varied approaches to scripture and doctrine as evident in their views on salvation and women’s roles in church and home; and in the dramatic nonconformity of two specific Appalachian traditions, the Pentecostal Serpent Handlers and the Primitive Baptist Universalists. Through his examination, Leonard suggests that the ideas and actions of these Appalachian Christians reflect the spirituality of otherness. This is not the otherness of inferiority or ignorance by which Appalachians and their churches are often caricatured but the otherness of religious experiences that focus on encounters with the Divine and contribute to individual and collective spiritual insight and “inwardness.” Those traditions and the spirituality that centers them are worth exploring, even for those who do not join them.

For many Americans, nuns and sisters are the face of the Catholic Church. Far more visible than priests, Catholic women religious teach at schools, found hospitals, offer food to the poor, and minister to those in need. Their work has shaped the American Catholic Church throughout its history. McGuinness provides the reader with an overview of the history of Catholic women religious in American life, from the colonial period to the present.