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 weight o...

"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 companioned by th...

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 further in the midst of life's busyness. Ben is the founder of the WITHIN Prison Meditation Project, serves as a hospice chaplain, and writes regu...

"[Jeffrey Martin writes] 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...

"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 'Shake the D...

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 Today, O Magazine , and New York Magazine to name a few. Her latest publication is her book Presence: The Art of Being a...

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 Faculty for the Center for Action and Contemplation and hosts the podcast, Learning How to See . Brian h...

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 host of Contemplating Now and Queering Contemplation podcasts. Her latest book is Queering Contemplation, Finding Queerness in the Roots and Future of Contemplative Spiritualit...

Dr. Larry Ward is a senior teacher in Buddhist Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh's Plum Village tradition, the author of the book America's Racial Karma , and co-author with his wife, Peggy, of Love's Garden: A Guide To Mindful Relationships . Dr. Ward brings forty years of international experience in organizational change and local community renewal to his work at the Lotus Institute. He holds a PhD in...

David James Duncan is the author of the classic novels The River Why and The Brothers K , the story collection River Teeth , the nonfiction collection and National Book Award finalist, My Story as Told by Water , the best-selling collection of "churchless sermons," God Laughs & Plays . And lest we forget his latest, and what some have called his magnum opus, Sun House . Sun House has a reserved sh...

Season Five Trailer Contemplify.com

A musing on time, eternality, and childeren

A musing on limitations

A musing on wild things and ingesting God

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 create the conditions for the gift of joy to emerge. The candle...

"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 a deacon,...

"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   Carmen Acevedo Butcher, PhD , is an author, teacher, poet, and award-winning translator of spiritual texts. Today Carmen and I talk about the importance of practice; chanting, l...

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 Us explores the dynamic relationships between ambient environmental landscapes and the religious imagination, especially in t...

"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, spiritual companion, and prof...

Lo-Fi & Hushed is weekly space for the contemplative practice of lectio divina with poetry. This practice is graceful, transformative, and subdued. Lo-Fi & Hushed is available worldwide, on Riverside livestream, and you can participate from the hallows of your own home. "I do not complain of suffering for love, it becomes me always to submit to her, whether she commands in storm or stillness, one...

"David Shumate's High Water Mark is absolutely fresh and unpredictable. . . . You will be surprised by your confrontation with the utterly first rate." — Jim Harrison David Shumate is the author of  The Floating Bridge  and  High Water Mark,  winner of the 2003 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared widely in literary journals and has been anthologized in  Good Poems for Hard T...

Douglas E. Christie, Ph. D., is Professor of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University. He is author of The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Early Christian Monasticism ; The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology ; and The Insurmountable Darkness of Love: Mysticism, Loss and the Common Life . He is the founding editor of the journal Spiritus and serve...

Carmen Acevedo Butcher , PhD, is an author, teacher, poet, and award-winning translator of spiritual texts. If I had to pick a favorite, it would be Brother Lawrence's Practice of the Presence. Her dynamic work around the evolution of language and the necessity of just and inclusive language has garnered interest from various media, including the BBC and NPR's Morning Edition. A Carnegie Foundatio...

Lisa Wells is an author, poet, and co-founder of a small, nonprofit press based in Seattle, Washington called Letter Machine Editions . Her latest work is Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World . In Believers Lisa locates folks who meet the climate catastrophe with a fierce and loving gaze, with their sights on restoring humanity's relationship with the planet as best they can. With a po...