Nancy Sylvester, IHM

Nancy Sylvester is founder and President of the Institute for Communal Contemplation and Dialogue (ICCD) which began in 2002. Nancy is committed to the transforming power of communal contemplation in one’s life and the life of the community. She believes it invites the shifts in consciousness so necessary to embrace our evolutionary journey and engage the critical issues facing us in ways that foster dialogue, relationships, compassion and justice.

Nancy is a past President of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and past vice-president of her religious congregation the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Monroe, MI. Nancy served on the staff of NETWORK, a national Catholic social justice lobby, for fifteen years, first as researcher, then lobbyist and ten years as National Coordinator. Prior to coming to NETWORK, Nancy taught secondary education in and around Detroit, Michigan.

Nancy guides many of ICCD’s programs including Enter the Chaos: Engage the Differences to Make a Difference, Transformation in a Time of Uncertainty, Exercising Contemplative Power and Engaging Impasse: Circles of Contemplation and Dialogue©. She also designs and facilitates processes related to these programs for various organizations and congregations nationally and internationally. Nancy is a known speaker having addressed diocesan conferences, university institutes, assemblies of women religious, and major national and international conventions. Her topics include learning to listen and speak from a contemplative heart, societal shifts in the world and church; leadership for transformation; the new universe story; development of consciousness; and evolutionary Christianity.

Nancy writes for ICCD’s website, as well as monthly for Global Sisters Report, part of National Catholic Reporter. She is one of the persons featured in the documentary, Band of Sisters. She wrote an essay in the book, Building Sisterhood: A Feminist History of the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, published by Syracuse University Press. She co-authored a book with Maria Riley, OP, Trouble and Beauty: Women Encounter Catholic Social Teaching. Nancy’s articles have appeared in America, Sisters Today, Catholic World, and Maryknoll Magazine.

She wrote for and co-edited Crucible for Change: Engaging Impasse Through Communal Contemplation and Dialogue which she has reissued this year as an eBook. Her most recent book is Journey-Faith in an Entangled World which is both a paperback and an eBook. Both of these are available on Amazon.com.

Nancy has served on numerous Boards and committees including: the National Board of Mary’s Pence, the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice where she was a founding member, the National Board of the Africa Faith and Justice Network, the National Governing Board of Common Cause, the Board of Trustees of Marygrove College, Detroit, MI, and has served as an advisor on the United States Bishops’ International Policy Committee. She currently chairs her congregation’s Responsible Investment Committee and Mission Integration Sponsorship Committee.

Her undergraduate studies at St. Louis University were in philosophy and political science, and her graduate studies at St. Mary’s University, Winona, MN, in human development concentrated on economics and theology.