Contemplify

Blessed Darkness and Blessed Light this Advent season. Here, In the midst of Season Two of Contemplify I am sliding in a bonus episode. This is the first episode of the 2nd annual Backporch Advent Outpost on Contemplify. This year there will be one poet in each outpost, offering their poetry to gild the thin space beyond waiting or reception. Pour a tea or a finger of rye, consider this your Adven...

Sister Joan Chittister is a member of the Benedictine Sisters, played a huge hand in developing the Charter of Compassion, was president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious., director of Benetvision, founder of Monasteries of the Heart, passionately advocated on behalf of peace, human rights, women's issues, and church renewal, written over 60 books, and has a bird named Lady Hildegard...

J. Drew Lanham is an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology, Master Teacher, and Certified Wildlife Biologist at Clemson University . He's the author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature and the collection of poetry and meditations, Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts , which is the focus of our conversation today. And I just gotta shar...

Gary Nabhan (aka Brother Coyote) is an Ecumenical Franciscan Brother, a first generation Lebanese-American, seed saver, agro-ecologist, ethnobotanist, agrarian activist, and author. A former MacArthur Fellow, he has been called the "father of the local food movement" by Time . He currently holds the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Food & Water Security for the Borderlands. Gary has engaged with farmers and...

On the cusp of season 2, I was ruminating on how I might introduce the tonality of this series of conversations. The September musing jumped to mind. In this musing, I reflected one some words to live by according to Ralph Waldo Emerson  And there was one Emerson line that stuck to my ribs. No matter how hard I scraped, it would not leave me alone.  "Nothing great is ever accomplished without enth...

September 2021 Musing on Ralph Waldo Emerson's philosophy of life. Season 2 of Contemplify is getting warmed up on the stove. I'll let you know when it is ready to be served. Visit contemplify.com

This marks the 100th episode of Contemplify. We celebrate the triple digit with a musing and an announcement.

A contemplative musing on machines, lifeblood, and facing the facts of life.  Visit contemplify.com for more shenanigans  

Scott Ballew is songwriter from Austin, Texas. He earns his keep as the Head of Films and Commercials at YETI, producing and directing films that inspire a life well-lived. During the pandemic, Scott dusted off his guitar and got to writing songs, polishing them, and then to his own surprise, releasing an album out into the wild. Scott Ballew's first album is called Talking to Mountains . In our c...

There is so much I can say about the poet and essayist Leah Purpura. I'll give this brief introduction, Lia was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the writer in residence at the University of Maryland, and has been published in all the notable places. I read her two most recent works, It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful , a book of poems, and All the Fierce Tethers , a book of ess...

Jeffrey Foucault is a top shelf songwriter. Foucault has a slew of albums worth your collection and his latest album, Deadstock , should be the first one you pick up.  Deadstock has been a real good friend to me in the ups and downs of this season. Foucault's music makes a grown man like me swoon, sway, and slyly sing his lyrics to myself. This is the type of music that keeps me sane and holds my...

Andrew Krivak is the author of three novels:  The Signal Flame  (2017), a Chautauqua Prize finalist, and  The Sojourn  (2011), a National Book Award finalist and winner of both the Chautauqua Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for fiction, and his latest novel,  The Bear .  In our conversation you hear of Andrew's formation as a Jesuit, our dwelling in the depth dimension of now, how his no...

Fred Bahnson is an immersion journalist of the soul and one of my favorite public contemplative intellectuals. If you've been hanging out around Contemplify, you have likely heard his name or seen links to his work. And I am sure that won't be changing anytime soon. His most recent piece appears in Harper's Magazine and is called ' The Gate of Heaven is Everywhere '. It charts the contemplative tu...

Beverly Lanzetta is a profound teacher who invites her readers and students to engage in the fullness of Mystery each day through the cultivation of practice and rhythm. I was elated to get my mitts on her latest book A New Silence: Spiritual Practices and Formation for the Monk Within . Our conversation flows out of this work, we talk about contemplation rhythms, parenting, the archetype of the m...

I'm closing this Advent Series out with some poetic gifts. A few friends are stopping by to raise a glass and offer a poem or prayer, though I am unsure of the difference anymore. In this final Advent outpost, the Mystery is stirred by a couple of my favorite poets, Teddy Macker and then Todd Davis , before contemplative teacher Beverly Lanzetta brings us home with a prayer. Like I said, prayers a...

I've asked some friends to swing by and offer a few words. In this second Advent outpost, we move throuogh the course of a day, from dawn to dusk. one of my favorite poets,  Chris Dombrowski , kicks us off with a dawn poem from his book  Ragged Anthem . I have some words on attention for the life of a day. And artist  Jonathon Stalls  leads us on a sunset walking meditation to round us out. So lac...

My wife and I started an Advent neighborhood get together last year; soup, wine, bread, cheese, poetry, stories, hymns, and children bellowing. A eucharist of sorts, but more with an ancient turn to honoring both the light in the darkness, and the darkness itself. Due to Covid this will not be happening this year. So I am attempting to put the spirit of what I experienced in that neighborhood Adve...

It took me months to read Douglas E. Christie's book Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology . I found it a joy to read slowly, soaking in the poetics married with scholarship on the Christian contemplative tradition which I so dearly love. It felt like a love letter, albeit in academic one, to a tradition that is still bursting with so much fruit waiting to be tasted by the m...

Today's episode is first. It is one voice among many podcasters from around the globe releasing the same episode, a collective call for awareness, grief, and loving action in our climate emergency and our sacred duty to participate whole-heartedly-bodily-mindfully in the healing of our home in the cosmos. This episode includes Scientists, activists, farmers, poets, and theologians who talk bravely...

Ruminations on divine union and the contemplative uprisings available in each moment. Visit contemplify.com to sign up for the Contemplify NonRequired Reading List

Exploring the subtle sacraments that animate our lives and the process of quieting the mind in words and silence. Visit contemplify.com to sign up for the Contemplify NonRequired Reading List

"The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours …but it is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day."   - Henry David Thoreau

A plucked musical movement, hairpin poetic turns, mythical stories in rough harmonics. Baptize me into this Kitchen Music Society of Delights and Sorrows. No time like a pandemic to establish a new society. Perhaps by the end of this, you'll join the membership. To learn more about Contemplify, head over to contemplify.com

"Christian Miller teaches us that the road to virtue lies in humility about our own virtue and an acceptance that others are struggling with their flaws. This is a very valuable book at a moment when our society could use a dose of openness and a sense of forgiveness." - E.J. Dionne Jr., Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution and University Professor in the Foundations of Democracy and Culture, Geor...

"Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection." Wendell Berry , Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front In this episode, we'll explore the God of tree trimmers and the souvenir of deep breathing.