The mother and baby's homes were often run by nuns.

I went to this very proper Christian school taught by nuns, fathers, brothers, sisters.

I went to this very proper Christian school taught by nuns, fathers, brothers, sisters.

I was the black atheist kid in the all white Catholic school run by nuns.

It was in places like this. This a school set up by some nuns in another slum called Nakuru.

The Burmese monks, together with nuns in pink robes, were soon joined by students, actors, and others who want to be rid of the military junta. But it was the monks and nuns who took the first step they dared to protest when others had mostly given up.

I was getting reports from Catholic nuns, Jewish Rabbis, Muslims, Christians everybody writing in, united by their love of life.

Many monks and nuns have been abused and beaten, and thousands who have been arrested endure continued brutality. More than 1,000 are missing, and many are presumed dead.

Now, when we do studies we have, with other colleagues around the world, done over 8,000 interviews of people from Dominican monks, to blind nuns, to Himalayan climbers, to Navajo shepherds who enjoy their work.

But rather all of these different practices you know, the ancient swamis and rabbis and priests and monks and nuns didn t develop these techniques to just manage stress or lower your blood pressure, unclog your arteries, even though it can do all those things.

And I was watching this crowd of monks and nuns, many of which I had just interviewed, and heard their stories, and I watched their faces, and they gave us a little FM radio, and we could listen to the translation of his teachings.

The Marcos regime in the Philippines was doomed in the mid 1980 s from the moment the Catholic Church turned against it. Thousands of ordinary citizens defied the tanks when Marcos threatened to crush People Power with force, but the presence of priests and nuns gave the rebellion its moral authority.

Francis shies away from the retrograde rhetoric that his predecessors used in raising alarms about the role of women, and he has not gone out of his way to follow up on the Vatican s visitation (read Inquisition ) of uppity American nuns. But he has kept that last episode on the books, and he continues to wax traditional about homosexuality.

The US is often said to be more charitable than other countries but, in terms of the proportion of the population donating money, Myanmar, Malta, Ireland, the UK, Canada, the Netherlands, and Iceland all do better. In Myanmar, 91 of the people surveyed had given money in the past month (the corresponding figure for the US is 68 ), indicating the strong hold of the Theravada Buddhist tradition of donating to support monks and nuns.

This underscores the extent to which authorities have to carry out internal repression to perpetuate one party rule and maintain control over the restive ethnic minority homelands that make up more than 60 of China s landmass. But it may also explain why one self immolation in Tunisia helped to kindle the Arab Spring, whereas some three dozen self immolations by Tibetan monks and nuns have failed to ignite a similar popular movement against the Chinese state.