Contemplify

“Dr. B was passionate about expanding our understanding of the Christian contemplative tradition, reminding us that contemplation isn’t the sole domain of those who can retreat to quiet places. She understood, from her own life and from the traditions she carried forward, that contemplative practices must also arise in the midst of struggle, in the heart of communities pressed against the we...

“I was recently giving a sermon and found myself spontaneously quoting from Amy Leach’s singular and surprising new book. I expect many readers will find their own lives troubled (in the Biblical sense) and enlightened by her fresh perceptions. She has lived into a hard-earned and entirely credible wisdom, the best evidence for which is her irrepressible sense of humor. One feels compa...

“A fantastically written, powerfully wise offering from Ben Katt…a gift to our world of pain and promise.” — Krista Tippett Ben Katt has worked with On Being , as an ordained minister, an advanced meditation teacher, and author. His first book, The Way Home: Discovering the Hero’s Journey to Wholeness at Midlife is a guidebook and memoir about the inner journey that calls us furt...

“Songs that are stark in their simplicity, yet emotionally rich in a way that can catch your breath in your throat or leave your eyes suddenly damp.” — Paste Jeffrey Martin is a musician with a number of albums under his belt. His latest, Thank God We Left the Garden , has been playing on repeat in my house since November of last year. That is not an exaggeration. Martin’s music has be...

“A powerful and important plunge into the reality of the mind and climate.” — Joan Halifax, author of Being with Dying and Standing at the Edge Susan Murphy is an Australian Zen teacher whose passionate feeling of kinship with the natural world began during her early childhood years living near the Great Barrier Reef and the Gondwanaland rainforest. A successful filmmaker, radio producer, and writ...

“In Touch the Earth , Drew Jackson’s poetry offers a word-weary world a new language of engagement, disruption, and insight. As with all great poetry, the words are spare, but the literary images loom large, creating indelible impressions on the reader. Like echoes that reverberate long after the first sound, the poems stay with you, they dance with your spirit. After reading the poem...

“This is a wonderful, wise, and tender book. Its elegant and gifted storytelling will change you.” — Jack Kornfield Tracy Cochran is a writer, meditation teacher, and editorial director of Parabola , an acclaimed quarterly magazine that draws on the world’s cultural and wisdom traditions to explore the questions that all humans share. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Psychology Toda...

“As rich and thoughtful as all of Brian McLaren’s work, but with a particular urgency!” — Bill McKibben Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, activist, and public theologian. A former college English teacher and pastor, he is a passionate advocate for “a new kind of Christianity” – just, generous, and working with people of all faiths for the common good. He is a core faculty member and Dean of...

“Hall retrains our imaginations for a spirituality that is more strange, more beautiful, and more honest than the doctrines we’ve often been cornered into.” — Cole Arthur Riley Cassidy Hall is an author, award-winning filmmaker, podcaster, ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, and leading voice in contemplative spirituality. She is the cohost of the Encountering Silence podcast and the...

“In this taut, fearless, and well-argued manifesto, Larry Ward offers us a deeply insightful analysis of America’s racial karma—of how it operates individually and collectively—and how it can be worked with and transformed. Drawing on Buddhist psychology, trauma theory, neuroscience, and years of practice … the result is a searing, liberative, and tender work—a book that is both urgent and necessa...

“ Sun House is not a mere book, but a singular world in which to reside, and to feel more alive. Laced with humor and high-lonesome lyricism, this sweeping tale locates the grand in the smallest particulars, reaches its heights by flooding us with light and loss, and arrives, ultimately, in hard-won hope.” — Chris Dombrowski, author of The River You Touch: Making a Life on Moving Water...

We are at the dawn of Season Five, it is just peeking over the horizon, a collection of conversations with contemplatives breaking through the noise of the day, to hallow the fields, seas, and trees of life with presence. This infilling of presence reaches out like the chirpings from the old Psalm book, “Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; let the sea roar, and all that fills it; l...

5th century Chinese poet T’ao Ch’ien said, “a thousand years may be beyond me / but I can turn this morning into forever.” I find that to be really lovely. And true. Yesterday my daughter turned 9, and It has me musing on time. The swiftness and dawdling of time. When a year is marked or a height is measured and dated on a doorway, I fall prey to predatory thief of time. I look around saying – now...

I am going to begin with a definition. Imposter Syndrome: the persistent inability to believe that one’s success is deserved or has been legitimately achieved as a result of one’s own efforts or skills. How many of you have experienced “imposter syndrome” in some area of life? show of hands. Good. There are multiple takes on imposter syndrome. Today I want to lean on its value for spir...

Maurice Sendak who wrote Where the Wild Things Are used to receive truckloads of letters from kids about that book, but he said his favorite was from a mother. It went like this….Dear Mr. Sendak, my 6-year old son, wrote you a letter and you wrote back with a drawing of one of your wild things. When he received the drawing of the wild thing, he loved it so much he ate it. Sendak said that was one...

“To know the dark, go dark.” — Wendell Berry Each solstice and equinox Contemplify offers a public Lo-Fi & Hushed contemplative practice session for both free and supporting subscribers of the Non-Required Reading List. For those interested, go tell it on the mountain… The third week of Advent salted on joy. Not because of the circumstances, but despite them. The work remains to cr...

“Oshida’s life and legacy is an experience of the spiritual senses knowing the mystical voice. Biblical in sources and Buddhist in form, reading this book took me as a reader to the great pause of silence.” — Sister Meg Funk, OSB Lucien Miller received his PhD in comparative literature from Berkely and taught Comparative Literature and Chinese at the University of Massachusetts. He is...

“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” — ‘ Wild Geese ‘ by Mary Oliver Listen to Carmen’s first conversation with Contemplify on her revolutionary translation of Brother Lawrence here . Carmen Acevedo Butcher, PhD , is a...

“A meditative blend of history and travelogue . . . brings the soundscape of the desert to life.” ―  New Yorker Dr. Kim Haines-Eitzen is a Professor of Religious Studies with specialties in Early Christianity, Early Judaism, and other ancient Mediterranean Religions at Cornell University. Her book Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks—and What It Can Teach U...

“I highly recommend What Makes You Come Alive to churches, religious and educational institutions, and spiritual seekers everywhere who are looking for an inward journey that finds its home in the world of nature, people, and things.” — Walter Earl Fluker  – Editor and Director of the Howard Thurman Papers Project Dr. Lerita Coleman Brown is a retreat leader, speaker, s...

Good morning, good people. Welcome to the grand experiment of Lo-Fi & Hushed, this very first one marks the passage of the Autumn Equinox. And since it is the very first one, I am going to use this space before Lectio to offer a brief introduction on Lectio Divina for those whom this is new for and then we will do a slightly shortened version of lo-fi and hushed. In future sessions, the though...

“I have been pursuing the love ‘born of and nurtured by darkness’ all of my life. In  The Insurmountable Darkness of Love , Douglas Christie invites readers to embark on a journey of ‘silent attention’ awakening, shedding, and finally the embrace of what cannot be known. So, how do you write about something that cannot be captured in words? Christie uses vulnerab...

“Everything is possible for those who believe, even more for those who hope, still more for those who love, and most of all for those who practice and persevere in these three powerful paths.” — Brother Lawrence Listen to Carmen’s second conversation with Contemplify on practice here . Carmen Acevedo Butcher, PhD , is an author, teacher, poet, and award-winning translator of spir...

“We are living in an extreme moment, and one where it’s very hard to know what effective action looks like against crises of a scale we’ve not before encountered. These accounts of people trying to grapple with that reality are sometimes inspiring and often cautionary, and always a spur to thinking about how the rest of us might accomplish the most we can.” – Bill McKibben, author of Falter:...

“When you look out his [Scott’s] window he’s painting for you.” – Eric Fischl Scott Avett is a visual artist, musician, and songwriter. No amount of descriptors quite do him justice. Scott’s work was met by my ears before my eyes. His songs slip into the ear stream, reverberate off the rib cage and remind the heart it was born free. Scott’s paintings hold your gaze in...