Lift Every Voice: Contemplative Writers of Color

abbeyofthearts
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Join Abbey of the Arts for a monthly conversation on how increasing our diversity of perspectives on contemplative practice can enrich our understanding and experience of the Christian mystical tradition.

  1. Aug 31

    In the Beginning We Create with Nathan Lloyd Nicholson

    AbbeyoftheArts.com/lift-every-voice Christine Valters Paintner is joined by author Claudia Love Mair for a series of video conversations. Every other 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. This month we sat down with Nathan Lloyd Nicholson about his book In the Beginning We Create: Reflections on Collaboration, Creativity, and Rest. In the Beginning We Create, award-winning graphic designer and artist Nathan L. Nicholson reflects on God’s timeless patterns of creation, offering practical insights for how and what you create. Nicholson guides you through twenty-one reflective meditations inspired by God’s creative process, each paired with the author’s original artwork, uncovering how collaboration, creation, and rest are essential rhythms for expressing your unique creative vision. Nicholson explores how God is the ultimate Creator, and his creative abilities are beyond compare. In the Beginning We Create invites you to explore God’s creative process and discover how you canemulate his creativity in the creative gifts he has given you. Using the book of Genesis as the foundation, you’ll dive into the story of God creating the universe and find inspiration for your own creative journey. If the Creator of the universe took time to rest, the cycle of creation and rest is necessary for our healthy creativity as well. AbbeyoftheArts.com/lift-every-voice/in-the-beginning-we-create

  2. Apr 30

    The Way of the Desert Elders with Lisa Colón DeLay

    Welcome to The Lift Every Voice Book Club from Abbey of the Arts. Christine Valters Paintner is joined by author Claudia Love Mair for a series of video conversations. Every other 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. This month we they sat down with Lisa Colón DeLay for a conversation about her book The Way of the Desert Elders: How the Wisdom of Ancient Christians Sustains Us Today A spiritual expedition into the stories and wisdom of ancient, desert-dwelling Christians, who show us how to forge faith at the edges of empire. For all that bewilders and bedevils us, the desert mothers and fathers can help us face our circumstances and ourselves. In The Way of the Desert Elders, Lisa Colón DeLay asks: What if desert elders from more than a millennium ago could walk beside us and nourish our spirits now? In wise and vivid prose, DeLay introduces us to a cast of characters who were both devoted and flawed. Like us, the desert abbas and ammas wrestled with gluttony, lust, greed, wrath, acedia, despondency, vainglory, envy, and pride.  Desert spirituality doesn’t mean going it alone; it means finding companions to walk with us. With their ordinary longings and extraordinary commitments, the desert elders can lead us toward peace, spiritual growth, and intimacy with God. AbbeyoftheArts.com/lift-every-voice/the-way-of-the-desert-elders/

  3. Feb 27

    Liturgies for Resisting Empire with Kat Armas

    Christine Valters Paintner is joined by author Claudia Love Mair for a series of video conversations. Every other 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. This month they sit down with Kat Armas to discuss her book Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World. In Liturgies for Resisting Empire, Cuban American theologian and writer Kat Armas provides a roadmap for Christians seeking a countercultural way of living that prioritizes community and humanity over dominance and power. Armas combines spiritual practices and biblical theology to help us create authentic belonging to God, ourselves, each other, and creation. She begins by examining how empire affects us daily through its pervasive ideologies and systems of control. Drawing from decolonial and postcolonial biblical interpretation, she explores how the New Testament church resisted Roman imperial power while building communities centered on God’s kingdom values rather than worldly dominance. This book offers hope for Christians struggling to live faithfully within systems of exploitation and oppression. Armas provides practical spiritual disciplines, community-building strategies, and theological frameworks that empower readers to resist empire’s dehumanizing effects while cultivating spaces of authentic belonging and liberation. AbbeyoftheArts.com/lift-every-voice/liturgies-for-resisting-empire

  4. Jan 2

    Here: A Spirituality of Staying in a Culture of Leaving with Lydia Sohn

    Christine Valters Paintner is joined by author Claudia Love Mair for a series of video conversations. Every other 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. This month they sat down with Lydia Sohn about her book Here: A Spirituality of Staying in a Culture of Leaving. Lydia Sohn was a serial burn-it-down-and-make-a-fresh-start girl until, when in her late twenties, she encountered the Rule of St. Benedict with its vow of stability, and her world was transformed. Sohn took a pause to consider what she wanted out of life—identity, purpose, community—and had a lightbulb moment: Everything she needed to live the life she desired was already within her reach. Here pushes back against our age of constant reinvention and the cultural message that we should do whatever it takes to get wherever we want to go. Instead, Sohn’s message is the opposite: stay. Stay and cultivate the immense potential and beauty that currently lies dormant within your circumstances. Sohn understands the allure of nomadism. A nomadic life would protect us from the stress of relational conflicts that inevitably arise when we’re caught in the intricate web of commitments. But the restlessness, FOMO, and disappointment we’re trying to escape always come along for the journey. That’s because they’re not the result of our circumstances; they reside within us. Braiding personal narrative and spiritual reflection, Here inspires readers to both embrace and transform their circumstances through commitment and stability—in order that they might find true contentment right where they are. AbbeyoftheArts.com/lift-every-voice/here-a-spirituality-of-staying/

  5. 10/31/2025

    You Mean It or You Don't by Jamie McGhee and Adam Hollowell

    Christine Valters Paintner is joined by author Claudia Love Mair for a series of video conversations. Every other 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. This month they sat down with Jamie McGhee about her book co-authored with Adam Hollowell You Mean It or You Don’t: James Baldwin’s Radical Challenge. After a speech at UMass Amherst on February 28, 1984, James Baldwin was asked by a student: “You said that the liberal façade and being a liberal is not enough. Well, what is? What is necessary?” Baldwin responded, “Commitment. That is what is necessary. You mean it or you don’t.” Taking up that challenge and drawing from Baldwin’s fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and interviews, You Mean It or You Don’t will spur today’s progressives from conviction to action. It is not enough, authors Hollowell and McGhee urge us, to hold progressive views on racial justice, LGBTQ+ identity, and economic inequality. True and lasting change demands a response to Baldwin’s radical challenge for moral commitment. Called to move from dreams of justice to living it out in communities, churches, and neighborhoods, we can show that we truly mean it. Welcome to life with James Baldwin. It is raw and challenging, inspired and embodied, passionate and fully awake. AbbeyoftheArts.com/lift-every-voice/you-mean-it-or-you-dont/

  6. 08/31/2025

    Body Becoming: A Path to Our Liberation with Roberto Che Espinoza

    Christine Valters Paintner is joined by author Claudia Love Mair for a series of video conversations. Every other 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. This month they sat down with Rev. Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza about his book Body Becoming: A Path to Our Liberation. The body that Roberto Che Espinoza inhabits is a nonbinary body, a trans body, a body in two races–and a body continually in discovery. Theirs is also a body on sojourn invested in experience, body understanding, and engagement in and for human thriving. Espinoza relates coming into a new body story, beginning with the deep emotional work of connecting the abstract intelligence of their mind with their body’s intelligence, to explore the relationship between living and becoming, doing and listening. Combining that deep listening and living with their work in activism, Body Becoming offers us a way of understanding the body beyond constructions–political or medical-industrial-complex defined–toward cultivating the body as important in our endeavors to build a more inclusive vision for democracy. Mixing memoir and faith, somatics theory and body practice, Espinoza steers us through territory both familiar and difficult–as we discover embodiment as the primary place of deep wisdom, where culture shifts originate and materialize–and a better world becomes, as we too become. AbbeyoftheArts.com/lift-every-voice/body-becoming

  7. 04/30/2025

    The Spirituality of Transformation, Joy, and Justice: The Ignatian Way for Everyone by Patrick Saint-Jean

    Christine Valters Paintner is joined by author Claudia Love Mair for a series of video conversations. Every other 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. This month they sat down with Patrick Saint-Jean to discuss his book The Spirituality of Transformation, Joy, and Justice: The Ignatian Way for Everyone. Discover how rooting our beliefs and practices in relationship–with each other, the natural world, and the Source of All Life–leads us to transform ourselves and the world. At its heart, Ignatian spirituality is practical and experiential, offering modern readers a structure for pursuing inner growth that results in transformed action. While it is a deeply contemplative practice, Ignatian spirituality appeals to many of us who are looking for purpose and meaning, and who are wondering how to live out that purpose in a way that addresses the brokenness of our world. At the heart of this thoughtful introduction to Ignatian spirituality are the Spiritual Exercises, developed by St. Ignatius of Loyola of Spain. Using ordinary language, these meditations point to the ways in which this spiritual path not only “grows our souls” but also inspires us to defend human rights, respect and listen to other cultures, find common ground between science and religion, struggle for justice, and honor a Divine Spirit who is actively at work in each aspect of our world. As twenty-first-century spiritual seekers, we do not need to be Jesuits, Catholics, or even Christians to make use of Ignatius’s methods; some of history’s most important thinkers–from René Descartes to Carl Jung–were influenced and inspired by the Spiritual Exercises. Let them guide you to transformation in the ordinary, everyday world. AbbeyoftheArts.com/lift-every-voice/the-spirituality-of-transformation/

  8. 02/27/2025

    Glory, Too: Poems by Nikki Grimes

    Christine Valters Paintner is joined by author Claudia Love Mair for a series of video conversations on a 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. This month we sat down with Winner of the Coretta Scott King Award, and New York Times bestselling author Nikki Grimes about her book Glory, Too: Poems, a soul-stirring collection of poetry that delves into the depths of faith, hope, and the human experience by one of America’s preeminent black poets. In a marriage of poetry, faith, and worship, Ms. Grimes’ poems illuminate the Scriptures that grace every Sunday of the year. Her inimitable voice and imagination offer glimpses of glory we might not otherwise see, throughout the seasons of the year. With lyrical precision and spiritual insight, she invites readers on a journey of reflection, weaving together themes of grace, redemption, and the enduring power of God’s love throughout the year. As the companion volume to her previous book Glory in the Margins: Sunday Poems, Glory, Too resonates with authenticity and depth, giving testimony to the transformative power of poetry and the enduring hope found in the embrace of God’s eternal grace. AbbeyoftheArts.com/lift-every-voice/glory-too-poems/

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Join Abbey of the Arts for a monthly conversation on how increasing our diversity of perspectives on contemplative practice can enrich our understanding and experience of the Christian mystical tradition.

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