When the time came for Sandy Grees, an incoming junior at Sacred Heart High School in Atherton, to do her final class project in social ethics class this year, she remembered the 2017 headlines about the humanitarian crisis in Southeast Asia caused by the violent displacement of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar, a predominantly Buddhist country.

Margaret Anne McGowan was in seventh grade when she began playing the church organ at St. Paul, her family’s parish in San Francisco’s Noe Valley. The weekend before she died on June 20 at age 87 she was still at the organ bench of the church where she was baptized in 1932, married in 1953 and finally mourned on June 25.

St. Peter School in San Francisco’s Mission District ended the academic year on a very high note this year, with students of the 140-year-old K-8 school experiencing the highest growth in reading and mathematics scores since a new learning strategy was introduced four years ago.

Formerly incarcerated women hoping to turn their lives around at the St. Vincent de Paul of San Mateo County’s Catherine Center can now retreat to an in-house prayer and meditation room thanks to the generosity and goodwill of a local evangelical Presbyterian church.

Newly retired Woodside Fire Protection District Chief Dan Ghiorso admits to some parallels between fighting fires and the priesthood, a vocation he discerned for a time as a young man. But he thinks the path he chose was probably the easier one.