The Pocket Contemplative

Howard Thurman was the great behind-the-scenes spiritual leader of America’s civil rights movement. Martin Luther King was said to carry a copy of Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited with him for inspiration on each march. But Thurman starts by being among the great nature mystics in the Christian tradition. Why do you (like everyone) love nature so much? For Thurman, that’s part of how we create...

I want to be happy. You want to be happy. But maybe our best pathway there comes by focusing instead on "living well.". MIT philosopher Kieran Setiya's book Life Is Hard helps Dave Schmelzer navigate those choices, with a particular look at how it applies when we feel like a failure or when we're hunting for meaning. Mentioned on this podcast: Kieran Setiya's book Life is...

Here at The Pocket Contemplative, we do deep dives into some of the richest Christian wisdom one can find about getting close to God. But one revolutionary thinker suggested that, while that's all wonderful and we should learn all we can from such people, these great saints did live in a very different world with very different spiritual dynamics than we live in. Many were cloistered. The ave...

Christian Contemplative Spirituality--alternately called Christian Mysticism--has gone in and out of favor over the millennia, but has rich roots from the Hebrew Bible forward. With help from the work of Carl McColman, Dave Schmelzer will help orient you as you look to navigate this vital, essential stream. Mentioned on this podcast:  Carl McColman's The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism: A...

Is there a secret of life? Contemplatives of many stripes suggest it surround cultivating a kind of trust and openness that endures through the hardest of times. Dave Schmelzer dives into wisdom on this from the most optimistic of contemplatives, Julian of Norwich (C.S. Lewis and Thomas Merton both said she was their go-to contemplative teacher). Julian lived through the bubonic plague and yet cam...

Christianity's most potent and lasting advice on aging well comes from one of its most remarkable contemplatives: Hildegard of Bingen from the 12th century. She was an explosion of creativity: she wrote the first known opera (by hundreds of years). She was an architect, a physician, a poet, a painter, a composer, a theologian and a leader of women. This podcast will look at her pitch that &qu...

Maybe the most-influential Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart, had profound thoughts about how our spiritual practice is meant to--even must!--empower our creativity. Dave Schmelzer dives into Eckhart's deep, generative waters here. Mentioned on this podcast:  Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior for Our Times , by Matthew Fox

Kieran Setiya--a philosopher at MIT who wrote the terrific book Midlife: A Philosophical Guide that Dave Schmelzer talked about on the last episode--joins Dave for a lively conversation about how philosophy can help with our deepest questions and about how it interacts with the spirituality we talk about here.  Mentioned on this podcast: Midlife: A Philosophical Guide , by Kieran Setiya LIfe is Ha...

Philosophers and theologians offer different answers to how we should feel about the losses we confront in midlife. Kieran Setiya, a philosopher teaching at MIT, wrote a terrific recent book on midlife crisis. Dave Schmelzer highlights some of Setiya's best stuff, including Setiya's takes on missed opportunities, why we can simultaneously regret and not regret where our lives have taken...

When Dave Schmelzer first started exploring contemplative spirituality, he had a hard time finding teachers who would get pragmatic in the "just do this, and then do this, and then do this, and here's what you should discover" sense. Mo Gawdat has written a bestselling guide along those lines called Solve for Happy. Dave walks us through Gawdat's pathway to get moving.  Mention...

As Dave Schmelzer and Vince Brackett talked about in a recent episode, faith looks very different than it did a few hundred years back--and even than it did sixty years back. Professor Andrew Root--who was Vince's enthusiastic teacher on the subject--walks us into some of the ins and outs of what this looks and feels like. Faith Formation in a Secular Age: Responding to the Church's Obse...

Dave Schmelzer's new favorite book on forgiveness (and maybe one of his favorite books period) is by Desmond Tutu and his daughter Mpho Tutu van Furth. Mpho joins Dave from Amsterdam to talk about what she's taken from the book in years since, her reflections on it being forged out of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and much more. Mentioned on this podcast: The Bo...

You'd think that apart from affirming that, of course, forgiving people who've hurt us is crucial to our happiness, there wouldn't be much more to say. But Desmond and Mpho Tutu wrote what seems like the final word on the subject in their wonderful The Book of Forgiving, which includes many stories from Desmond's leading of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commissio...

In Part 1, we looked at how churches seem to be in the midst of a transition to something new. Here, Vince Brackett and Dave Schmelzer will take a deep dive into the thoughts of the big kahuna on this subject, Charles Taylor, and of his brilliant student, Hartmut Rosa. What if our world is set up to tell us that if we only had more resources we could have the life we want? And that our lack of res...

While churches are rapidly declining in numbers, new things are popping up. Dave Schmelzer will explore what's happening and the hope for what might be next with rich perspectives from thinkers like Phyllis Tickle, Charles Taylor, Hartmut Rosa and others... alongside some anecdotes from his friends that might ring a bell for you. Mentioned on this podcast: Charles Taylor's A Secular Age...

Christian contemplative spirituality got forgotten for about three hundred years, after Brother Lawrence's famous teachings in the 1600s. The person who brought it back and set the stage for a whole new era of Christian spirituality--and people like Richard Rohr and Thomas Merton--was an unlikely candidate, an upper-middle-class British woman named Evelyn Underhill. Dave Schmelzer starts with...

Last episode had Gary Neal Hansen telling Dave that among the ten ancient Christian prayer practices he teaches and write about, the two that have most popped for people are the Jesus Prayer (the subject of a recent podcast) and what's called Praying the Office (first popularized by St. Benedict), which is how a large swath of Christians have prayed for centuries. Dave hasn't been drawn...

Gary Neal Hansen has taught ten ways to pray from very different Christians traditions to lots of people. Gary (who wrote Kneeling with Giants: Learning to Pray with History's Best Teachers ) talks with Dave Schmelzer about what he's learned both from the practices themselves and from how people have found them helpful or not. He and Dave also spend some time on what prayer itself is act...

Medieval monks and modern business school profs agree that our bone-deep addition to distracting ourselves is keeping us from happiness, meaning and productivity. Which perhaps will be no surprise to people listening to a podcast called The Pocket Contemplative! That said, Dave Schmelzer dives into the wisdom from those monks and professors and how it might both cheer you up and empower a fresh wa...

A good chunk of any modern teaching on contemplation for Christians goes back to one mega-influential book called The Cloud of Unknowing from the dusty past of the 14th century. And yet generations of would-be contemplatives have found it is a fountain that doesn't run dry very quickly at least. Dave Schmelzer will give you a quick overview of why this book has been such a biggie, why--like m...

The biggies in Christian history tell us a story of faith that's surprising to many of us, but which turns out to be exactly what we need to find ongoing joy. Dave Schmelzer chats about this with Jason M. Baxter, a scholar who wrote An Introduction to Christian Mysticism: Recovering the Wildness of Spiritual Life, which Dave podcasted about recently. Jason walks us into how this look at the &...

Russian Orthodox friends suggest that a fast track to spiritual progress might come through a ten-word prayer that gets repeated. Ten words! Is it too good to be true? Dave Schmelzer, with help from Gary Neal Hansen's book Kneeling with Giants, does a deep dive into this pathway to God and reports on how it's been going for him. Mentioned in this podcast Kneeling with Giants: Learning to...

Have the great Christian saints, over millennia, been in agreement about some central points and practices if we hope to continue our growth? One scholar says they have been indeed. Dave Schmelzer runs down some key points of interest, not least the happy surprise that, if we keep at this, our reward will be an overflowing playfulness in our lives.  Mentioned on this podcast: Jason M. Baxter'...

As we age, we face more and more life circumstances that can seem lose/lose. Take care of our aging parent and lose any margin in our lives. Start a needed side hustle that has a substantial chance of failing. The Bible encourages us to trust God enough to ask for all the things we want, but it then pivots to a different, contemplative approach that might grow our faith through these tough challen...

Thoughtful happiness tips can be opportunities for mindfulness, for noticing ways to live that we'd previously been blind to or reactive against. Dave Schmelzer talks a bit about that and then details two dozen such tips from the mega-popular book The Happiness Experiment . Mentioned on this podcast: Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Mor...