As the first Jesuit missionaries spread out across the globe, Ignatius of Loyola and his brother Jesuits were confronted with the problem of how to keep the order together—how to find out what was happening with the brothers in Japan and China, New Spain and New France, Goa and Germany.  The solution (or at least, a key part of it) was letters. Every Jesuit missionary was required to write regularly to his superior—about his mission, the people he encountered, their culture and beliefs, the plants and animals, the land, the state of his own soul, the progress of his work and the challenges he faced. With a Jesuit volunteer in the family—now just a few months into his two-year mission in Andahuaylillas, Peru—I like to think that Ignatius would recognize and appreciate the blogs created and used by so many young Jesuit volunteers across the United States and around the world as a twenty-first century adaptation of that old Jesuit practice.

For those of us "back home," it's a way to get a glimpse of the breadth and depth of the Church's experience in communities that are, in many ways, very different from our own and yet are recognizably part of the same human (and church) family. For example, we all have joyous Easter songs:

"This is my favorite of the songs we sang for Easter mass. The singer isn't joking around. This isn't a picture of Easter painted with the same pastel colors used to dye eggs. This is a picture of the resurrection painted with the thick, bold strokes of a Diego Rivera painting."