Sister Addie Lorraine Walker, SSND

Sr. Addie Lorraine Walker, SSND, Ph.D., has been a School Sister of Notre Dame for 40 years. She served as provincial leader of the Dallas Province of SSND for nine years (2002-2011) before the merger into the Central Pacific Province of the School Sisters of Notre Dame. She is a Practical/Pastoral Theology professor at the Oblate School of Theology. where she teaches courses in both the master’s and Doctor of Ministry levels, including US Religious History, Spirituality and Culture, Faith Development, Christology, and Black Church Studies. She is the founder and Director of the Sankofa Institute for African American Pastoral Leadership, established in 2013 at the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.

After completing a Ph.D. in Religion and Education from Boston College in 1996, Sr. Addie Lorraine continued to minister as a pastoral and practical theologian in university, high school, and parish settings.

She also works as a facilitator and teacher/formator in seminary formation and with initial/ongoing formation programs for religious congregations. She lectures on charism, offers retreats, and does the spiritual direction with religious communities throughout the US and Africa.

Sr. Addie Lorraine is committed to working with intercommunity formation programs whenever possible. Since 2000, she has worked to provide workshops on vowed life, discernment, community life, and intercultural living within religious community life. She also facilitates retreats for various congregations, seminars on the contemporary living of the vows, and spiritual community life today: building communities of peace, justice, and reconciliation. In response to the Black Lives Matter movement and the widespread racial unrest in the U.S., Sr. Addie Lorraine provides facilitation to help groups actively identify racist policies and structures; and to become active, intentional antiracists.

Sr. Addie Lorraine is one of the contributing authors of the 2014 publication on Apostolic Visitation, Power of Sisterhood: Women Religious Tell the Story of Apostolic Visitation.

Other research and writing interests include spirituality and culture, SSND spirituality, the spirituality of religious life today, formation for a contemporary living of spiritual life, Christian Education in the 19th and 20th centuries, reading and reflecting on Catholic Social Teaching from a Black Perspective, and dialogue as a strategy for transformative education.