Lift Every Voice: Contemplative Writers of Color

The Spiritual Work of Racial Justice with Patrick Saint-Jean, S.J.

Christine Valters Paintner is joined by author Claudia Love Mair for a series of video conversations. Each month they take up a new book by or about a voice of color. The community is invited to purchase and read the books in advance and participate actively in this journey of deepening, discovery, and transformation.

The Spiritual Work of Racial Justice: A Month of Meditations with Ignatius of Loyola uses Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises as a framework for discussing the spiritual challenges of antiracism. Each of the Exercise’s four weeks are applied in practical ways to the work of antiracism, combining history, present-day events and data, the life and teaching of Ignatius, prayer, and guidance for personal reflection and journaling. An excellent resource for both group study and personal meditation.

Patrick Saint-Jean, S.J., PsyD, currently teaches in the psychology department at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, where he is also a psychotherapist. He enjoys jazz, traveling, and learning new languages; and he plays the guitar, harmonica, and drums. He also likes a cup of hot water in the morning.

Staying Awake with Tyler Sit

Christine Valters Paintner is joined by author Claudia Love Mair for a series of video conversations. Each month they take up a new book by or about a voice of color. The community is invited to purchase and read the books in advance and participate actively in this journey of deepening, discovery, and transformation.

Jesus asks his followers to stay awake, which begs the question: stay awake to what?

Staying Awake is a practical exploration of Christianity for people who want to show up for justice and stay in the movement. Discover nine essential practices to transform you for transforming the world. Complete with stories, worksheets, poetry, original cartoons, and a commitment to centering queer people of color, this book is here to support you in staying awake: to God, to the evils of oppression, and to the world’s coming liberation.

www.AbbeyoftheArts.com

Becoming Rooted with Randy Woodley

Christine Valters Paintner is joined by author Claudia Love Mair for a series of video conversations. Each month they take up a new book by or about a voice of color. The community is invited to purchase and read the books in advance and participate actively in this journey of deepening, discovery, and transformation.

What does it mean to become rooted in the land? How can we become better relatives to our greatest teacher, the Earth? Becoming Rooted invites us to live out a deeply spiritual relationship with the whole community of creation and with Creator.

Through meditations and ideas for reflection and action, Randy Woodley, an activist, author, scholar, and Cherokee descendant, recognized by the Keetoowah Band, guides us on a one-hundred-day journey to reconnect with the Earth. Woodley invites us to come away from the American dream–otherwise known as an Indigenous nightmare–and get in touch with the water, land, plants, and creatures around us, with the people who lived on that land for thousands of years prior to Europeans’ arrival, and with ourselves. In walking toward the harmony way, we honor balance, wholeness, and connection.

Creation is always teaching us. Our task is to look, and to listen, and to live well. She is teaching us now.

www.AbbeyOfTheArts.com

The Seeker and the Monk with Sophfronia Scott

WINNER of the 2021 Thomas Merton Award awarded by The International Thomas Merton Society

What if we truly belong to each other? What if we are all walking around shining like the sun?

Mystic, monk, and activist Thomas Merton asked those questions in the twentieth century. Writer Sophfronia Scott is asking them today.

In The Seeker and the Monk, Scott mines the extensive private journals of one of the most influential contemplative thinkers of the past for guidance on how to live in these fraught times.

As a Black woman who is not Catholic, Scott both learns from and pushes back against Merton, holding spirited, and intimate conversations on race, ambition, faith, activism, nature, prayer, friendship, and love. She asks: What is the connection between contemplation and action? Is there ever such a thing as a wrong answer to a spiritual question? How do we care about the brutality in the world while not becoming overwhelmed by it?

By engaging in this lively discourse, readers will gain a steady sense of how to dwell more deeply within–and even to love–this despairing and radiant world.

Womanist Midrash by Wilda Gafney

Claudia Love Mair and Christine Valters Paintner have a conversation with Wilda Gafney about her book Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne.

Womanist Midrash is an in-depth and creative exploration of the well- and lesser-known women of the Hebrew Scriptures. Using her own translations, Gafney offers a midrashic interpretation of the biblical text that is rooted in the African American preaching tradition to tell the stories of a variety of female characters, many of whom are often overlooked and nameless. Gafney employs a solid understanding of womanist and feminist approaches to biblical interpretation and the sociohistorical culture of the ancient Near East. This unique and imaginative work is grounded in serious scholarship and will expand conversations about feminist and womanist biblical interpretation.

The Wild Land Within by Lisa Colón DeLay

Claudia Love Mair and Christine Valters Paintner have a conversation with Lisa Colón DeLay about her book The Wild Land Within.

In The Wild Land Within, spiritual companion and podcast host Lisa Colón DeLay offers a map to our often-bewildering inner terrain, inviting us to deepen and expand our encounters with God. Through specific spiritual practices from early desert monastics, as well as Latinx, Black, and Indigenous contemplatives, she guides us in cultivating lives of devotion.

Soul Care in African American Practice by Barbara Peacock

Claudia Love Mair and Christine Valters Paintner have a conversation with Barbara Peacock about her book Soul Care in African American Practice.

Soul care director Barbara Peacock illustrates a journey of prayer, spiritual direction, and soul care from an African American perspective. She reflects on how these disciplines are woven into the African American culture and lived out in the rich heritage of its faith community.

Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God by Kaitlin Curtice

Claudia Love Mair and Christine Valters Paintner have a conversation with Kaitlin Curtice about her book Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God.

Curtice draws on her personal journey, poetry, imagery, and stories of the Potawatomi people to address themes at the forefront of today’s discussions of faith and culture in a positive and constructive way.

Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church by Barbara A. Holmes

Claudia Love Mair and Christine Valters Paintner have a conversation about Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church by Barbara A. Holmes.

Joy Unspeakable focuses on the aspects of the Black church that point beyond particular congregational gatherings toward a mystical and communal spirituality not within the exclusive domain of any denomination.

I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown

Claudia Love Mair and Christine Valters Paintner have a conversation about I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown. 

I’m Still Here is an illuminating look at how white, middle-class, Evangelicalism has participated in an era of rising racial hostility, inviting the reader to confront apathy, recognize God’s ongoing work in the world, and discover how blackness—if we let it—can save us all.