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.

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.

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.

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.