Miriam Therese MacGillis, a Caldwell Dominican sister, was a happy art teacher in 1968 when her complacency was broken by the questions of a student about the Vietnam war.  After a lonely, five-year period of questioning everything, she stopped teaching art, and became coordinator of Peace and Justice Education for the Newark Archdiocese.
Three years later she joined the staff of Global Education Associates. It was in her work with GEA putting together a conference in 1977 that Sister Miriam met Thomas Berry, a Passionist priest, geologian, and cultural historian.
Listening to his presentation on the contemplative tradition in Christianity, Miriam's life was again changed forever.
Berry became her life-long friend and mentor in what he termed the Great Work: the reinvention of ourselves at the species level by means of story and shared dreams, so that we may "transition from a period of human devastation of the earth to a period when humans will be present to the planet in a mutually-enhancing manner" (quote from The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future).
Thomas Berry and mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme provided the grounding for the Great Work in The Universe Story. This awe-inspiring narrative offers a new cosmology, explaining how we got here from 15 billion years ago when our universe first flared forth and began to expand.
After that fateful meeting with Thomas Berry, Miriam, another sister, and a young couple made a proposal to her congregation to found Genesis Farm, on land in New Jersey bequeathed to the Caldwell Dominicans by a family they didn't know. It was 1980, a time of awakening around critical environmental issues, so the co-founders knew that Genesis Farm needed to deal with ecology, sustainability, and agriculture.



Since then, the Earth Literacy Center at the farm has offered lectures, courses, and experiential learning, trying to align the way humans do things with the way earth does them. Genesis Farm's community supported garden (one of the first in the U.S.), provides a direct link between the farmers who grow nourishing, organic food and the members who buy shares in the produce. Miriam leads workshops and gives talks at the farm and internationally on the new cosmology, and the need to change our worldview before we destroy the planet.
Band of Sisters introduces viewers to Genesis Farm thirty years after it began. The farm has become one of the main prototypes for fifty ecological farms, earth learning and retreat centers founded by other women's congregations in the U.S. and Canada. As she ages, and the farm moves beyond its founding phase, Miriam is beginning to anticipate something new for Genesis Farm and thousands of movements like it: becoming embedded in the culture rather than on the edge.