Sister Cathy Nerney

Cathy Nerney, a Sister of St Joseph of Chestnut Hill is a theologian and professor at Chestnut Hill College, where she also founded and directs the college’s Institute for Forgiveness and Reconciliation. As a theologian, Cathy’s goal is to make contemporary and traditional understandings of the Divine and “truths of faith” accessible to all people and inclusive of all faith traditions as well as those who claim no faith. She does so by her commitment to storytelling, the sharing of personal experience, and collaborative, direct service to help heal a divided world in need of justice and inclusive love.

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Dr Nerney has learned much from the people of Rwanda where she spent a semester to gather stories of both victims and perpetrators of the 1994 genocide, which killed more than a million people in 90 days. The people who survived the Rwandan Genocide have chosen to work for forgiveness and reconciliation as the way to begin again, seeking restorative justice for all. Sister Cathy’s latest book, The Compassion Connection: Recovering our Original Oneness (Orbis Books, 2018) seeks to demonstrate and incorporate all that she has experienced and believes about compassion as part of our human DNA., which simply needs to grow within and among us in order to promote freedom, justice and equality for all.

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