Last week Pope Leo XIV issued his first major writing to the global Catholic church, an Apostolic Exhortation – an urgent word of encouragement – on love for the poor, Dilexi Te. As a Mennonite, this theme caught my attention.
News
The Beginning of the End
May 19 2025
Today was our final day with our host families! We started off the day going to church, and a small group of us sang La Paz de la Tierra (The Peace of the Earth) for the congregation. At lunch, the old reliable Five Crowns card game got pulled out. (Not to call anyone out, but one particular person playing that game won in one turn. Literally 30 seconds in!) We ate the classic: all reliable rice and beans. After saying our final goodbyes to our host families, we took an hour(ish) bus ride to our final destination. Here, the elephant in the room was the number of outlets (for 20 of us in one room, there’s only 4. Can you imagine?) and it quickly took over the topic of conversation. We shifted to dinner (spaghetti!) and had a wrap up discussion for the past week regarding how we felt about host families and the like, and then went back to figuring out how to split up the outlets.
by Cal
An urgent word from the Pope
‘Even in darkness, ever-rising joy’
We have experienced another hard week of gun violence in America. For me, it has been a week of intense emotions – heavy emotions as well as joy and hope. How do we escape the doom loop? How do we stop partaking when it is dished up to us from all sides of the media and culture that we swim in?
Directors’ Corner
Goshen College’s “SST for all” makes global education more accessible with flexible study options at home and abroad.