About Ted Dunn

I come to this work as a seeker, not an authority — a layperson who has spent more than thirty years in the company of people doing the deepest work there is: staying faithful to what matters while everything around them changes.

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I was raised Catholic, though my upbringing was never tidy about it. My mother was Protestant, and Sunday after Mass she would gather us up and bring us along to the Congregational church, the Unitarians, the Episcopalians — wherever the Spirit seemed to be breathing that week. For a year I even studied at a Jewish day school. None of those traditions handed me a finished set of answers. Together, they lit a hunger — for a living, breathing spirituality beneath the codes and creeds, for the God who is found in the searching itself.

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That hunger has kept me reading across a wide table: Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr, and Ronald Rolheiser for their human and spiritual touch; Ilia Delio, John Haught, and Ken Wilber for the courage to hold science and faith together without retreating into magical thinking; and the long conversation between Buddhist practice, psychology, and the spiritual life. I don't offer this as a credential. I offer it because it is the well I draw from when I sit with a community trying to discern its future.

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Most of those years have been spent alongside Catholic sisters and brothers and their congregations — in leadership councils, in Chapters, at international gatherings — as they face honest and often painful questions about renewal, diminishment, and what is being asked of them now. My own path deepened through my marriage to Beth, who drew me further into this work. I do not come as a member of any hierarchy. I come alongside.

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Let me say plainly what I am and am not. I am not a theologian, and I am not a model of doctrinal observance. I am a fellow traveler who has learned to speak the language of religious life with love — and who believes that beneath the structures that have grown tired, there is wisdom worth carrying forward and a future worth discerning. My work is to offer new language, new understanding, and the courage to go further than the codes alone can take us.

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What I hope to bring is the ability to help people listen more deeply, speak more honestly, and imagine a future they could not yet see alone. Others have described that as empathy and challenge held together. I simply know it as the way I've learned to be in the room.

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Graced Crossroads grew naturally from these years of accompanying communities through profound change. Over time, it became clear that the questions emerging within religious life were also appearing far beyond it. This work is an effort to gather what those decades have taught and offer it to a wider community navigating deep change and transformation.

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Much of this work has been shared. Beth Lipsmeyer—my wife, a clinical psychologist, and a former Sister of Mercy—founded Comprehensive Consulting Services in 1985. I joined her the following year, beginning a professional partnership that has continued for four decades. Her insight, intuition, and deep understanding of religious life have helped shape the work that now finds a new expression in Graced Crossroads.

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Beth has stepped away from extensive travel and large-group facilitation, but she continues to offer selective consultation by Zoom to individuals, leaders, and leadership teams.

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Learn more about Beth and her consultation work →

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A selection of Ted’s published articles is available for those who wish to explore these themes more deeply.

 

If any of this resonates, I would be glad to walk a stretch of the road with you.