What Is Yours to Do? with Michele Dunne of the Franciscan Action Network
Plus a review of this week's offerings and news of note from our guests.
Michele Dunne is a professed Secular Franciscan and the executive director of the Franciscan Action Network, a collective Franciscan voice seeking to transform United States public policy related to peace making, care for creation, poverty, and human rights.
Before coming to her current position, Michele’s career focused on the Middle East and US foreign policy. From 2006 until 2021, she headed programs focused on peace, human rights, and democracy in the Middle East at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Atlantic Council. Prior to that, she served for nearly 20 years in the US Department of State, including assignments in Jerusalem and Cairo. She holds a PhD from Georgetown University and currently lives in Washington, DC with her husband.
In this episode, Michele shares with us her spiritual journey and the gradual revelation of her Franciscan vocation—what she describes as “the greatest gift that God ever gave me, and also the most challenging and most humbling”—and explores those elements of the “life-giving and life-affirming” Franciscan Rule that have enriched and encouraged her along the way. We take a close look at the work of the Franciscan Action Network and its mission to “inform, inspire, and mobilize” its collective membership of religious communities, local affinity groups, and thousands of individual members across the country. Michele also touches on the relationship between Franciscan spirituality and activism and explains how the Network supports its members in discerning and carrying out their own unique calling.
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Humility and Humanity
Paul Nyklicek on healing our collective national trauma: “We are traumatized by how we are imposed upon by others and by how we impose ourselves on others. We experience the shame of being dehumanized and the shame of dehumanizing others. Reaching a critical mass of internal shame—or, worse, public humiliation—we become highly susceptible to violent behavior as an escape from this unbearable pain.”
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How Does God Choose?
Jim Hickey on the tension of religious responses to war: “Pope Leo XIV has been highly outspoken regarding prayer and conflict, notably during the Iran war conflict. In a Palm Sunday address in St. Peter’s Square, he stated that God ‘does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war’ and rejects prayers from leaders whose ‘hands are full of blood.’ Leo also declared that Jesus is the King of Peace and ‘no one can use [him] to justify war.’”
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Congratulations to our podcast guest Colette Lafia, whose book Leaving the Shore: Experiencing Poetry as Prayer (Monkfish Publishing) was named the Nautilus Book Award 2026 Gold Winner in the category of Lyric Prose or Hybrid Works. Our interview with Colette explored the relationship between reading and writing poetry and contemplative practice. She also shared poems from Leaving the Shore along with prompts for guided mediation.
Congratulations also to our guest Kurt Johnson and his colleagues at Light on Light Press. The Way of Unity: Essential Principles and Preconditions for Peace, written by Robert Atkinson and published by Light on Light, received a 2026 Nautilus Award in the category of Religion and Spirituality of Other Traditions. Kurt introduced us to the two-volume Interspirituality set compiled last year for Light on Light and gave us a rich synthesis of the history and current state of the interspiritual movement.
Look out next week for our interview with Mary Fontana, author of Strangers in the Province of Joy: Practicing Radical Hospitality on the US-Mexico Border (Orbis Books). We’ll also be featuring an article on the Kino Border Initiative, a ministry accompanying migrants in Nogales, Arizona, along with new poetry from El Salvador.