Going the Way of the Dodo Bird

Abstract Since 1965, the number of American Catholic nuns has declined sharply. Contemporary media have portrayed this demographic decline through the lens of moral failure yet the sisters consistently describe experiences of peace, awe, and hope. The present article draws on ethnographic data gathered in a Franciscan convent in the United States over the past 15 years to ask why Catholic sisters seem to be able to find peace despite an uncertain future while others experience distress. We find that a lifetime of religious training has taught the sisters to experience time and death in fundamentally different ways than mainstream Americans. We suggest that the sisters’ specific hope practices, which we call timeless hope , involve skills developed through religious practice that can be understood as a form of religious intelligence .