Join Abbey of the Arts for a bi-monthly conversation on how increasing our diversity of perspectives on contemplative practice can enrich our understanding and experience of the Christian mystical tradition.
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.
Bi-monthly we will post our newest video recording and invite you to watch, ponder, and share your insights with us during the month that follows. Lift Every Voice is now available as a podcast in your favorite apps like Apple, Google, Spotify, Amazon, and Pandora. We then invite conversation and reflection in our dedicated Facebook group (click the link to request to join us).
This is a free series, the only cost for you is buying the books and we encourage you to support your local bookseller. We have provided links to Bookshop.org who sources from independent stores.
When you use our Bookshop.org or Amazon.com links we do earn a small commission on each sale that comes at no extra charge to you but helps to support this work. Click here for our Bookshop page with all the titles. You can also request that your local library make these books available for borrowing.
Connect Your Creativity with the Creator
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 forhow 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 can emulate 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.
Key Features:
Though this book, you’ll see how no matter the creative discipline you use, you can offer your creativity back to God, discovering new ways to reflect the Creator’s handiwork in your life.
If you yearn to create with intention and purpose, this book will help you view creativity through a new lens: aligning your creativity with divine purpose. Learn how you can honor God with every word, stroke, or melody you create with In the Beginning We Create.
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?
Starting in the fourth century, half a million Christians fled the villages and cities of the Roman Empire. Leaving behind comforts, they battled what Evagrius called “afflicting thoughts,” which still unsettle us today. Yet they discovered a spirituality durable enough to endure harsh conditions and self-denial, sturdy enough to flourish in abandoned places.
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. We meet the abba who’d been a crime boss, the amma who once traded sexual favors for a chance to travel, and the archbishop who fled his post because of a scandalous love affair. We learn about the stylite hermits, who lived atop pillars and drew tourists, and about the weaver who prayed so intensely while he worked that he wove a basket larger than himself. DeLay brings the timeless sagacity of these spiritual companions to bear on our own barren times, offering reflection questions, prayers, and suggestions for crafting a rule of life.
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.
“A thought-provoking look at the intertwining of religion and social control.”–Publishers Weekly
● Explains what “empire” is in our modern day
● Gives practical spiritual guidance for resisting empire’s daily influence
● Explores how early Christians navigated imperial pressures
● Unpacks how empire influences how we see ourselves and others
Everyone wants to belong.
What does true belonging look like when the society you live in is not something you want to “belong” to?
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.
Discover a spiritual way of life that you actually want to belong to–one liturgy at a time.
A contemplative guide to finding satisfaction right where you are, by understanding what it is within us that leads to dissatisfaction and creating long-lasting fulfillment—inspired by the ancient Christian tradition of Benedictine stability.
“A challenging spiritual invitation—one that we definitely need.”—Shannon K. Evans, author of The Mystics Would Like a Word
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.
“Interweaving his personal story with commentary on the Bible, music, and contemporary events, Lamar brings our attention to the ancestors who journey with us.” —Sojourners
We must speak the word ancestor. We must call their names. We must see them at work.
The hand of ancestors in our affairs is undeniable. They exist all around us, motivating individuals and cultures. And yet, the United States is a nation that does not often use the word ancestor. But ancestors are as active here as they are in cultures that center ancestral presence–maybe more so. By failing to name the ancestors who bless us–as well as the ones that dehumanize us–we harm ourselves, our communities, our country.
As the pastor of one of the oldest Black churches in Washington, DC, William H. Lamar IV has a deep connection to his own ancestors and the ancestral legacy of his church in a city built of ancestral political voices and their ideologies. Drawing on this experience, he offers readers a new perspective on the role that our ancestors play in shaping our lives and communities, for without acknowledging their importance, we cannot move forward morally, ethically, spiritually, or politically.
Lamar examines family ancestors, political leaders, and voices of Scripture, and draws from African and African American historical ancestors to show how they shape our identities and moral compasses. By choosing our ancestors, we choose the stories we tell about ourselves and choose the kind of humans we want to be. This is more than a feel-good notion; Lamar writes, “This is a matter of life. This is a matter of death.”
Challenging the dominant, white-led theology that cloaks its own ancestor veneration, while seeking to keep others from the liberation that could come from their own, Lamar deconstructs the religious myths that restrict wise voices of life-giving influence. For when we integrate the voices we call on for ethics, strength, moral courage, justice, and community, we transform our personal and national narratives.
Video coming in November 2026
Meet Black Madonna—Mother of Abundance, Holy Insurrectionist, Our Lady of F Around and Find Out
This bold reclamation of the divine feminine offers a new vision of Black Madonna as a unifying figure of refuge, resistance, and renewal. When we are exhausted and burned out, Black Madonna invites us to surrender to her protective embrace and be revitalized by her subversive life force. When disillusionment takes hold, Black Madonna offers radical belonging—urging us to reclaim our own sacred power.
Christena Cleveland expertly blends personal experiences, global stories, and historical records to reveal the cunning colonial forces that poison our social and spiritual landscape, while illuminating our Divine Ancestor as an endless source of spiritual nourishment, liberation, and protection. Intimate invocations and empowering rituals within each chapter help you to nurture your own authentic connection with Black Madonna and feel her loving guidance through the twists and turns of life. This book is a call to mystic-activism—for all of us who are alert to injustice and fervently devoted to co-creating a world of love.
Video coming in January 2027
“Wise and beautiful, an offering of great depth.” ―Alice Walker
“This is a book for our time, a treasure trove of good medicine for the soul.” ―Parker Palmer
Each day brings news of worsening ecological, political, and social upheaval. None of us individually can solve the intersecting crises we face; we are not meant to. Yet each of us carries a vital gift for these times. As we navigate the collapse of a world built on domination and division, we can engage in the birthing of new possibilities, finding strength in our belonging to a wholeness that is ancient, infinite, and eternal.
Combining the insightful analysis of a longtime grassroots activist with the compassion of a seasoned spiritual guide, Liza J. Rankow shows readers how to live with purpose and meaning, not just in spite of the rising tide of calamities around us, but as our response to them.
With an approach to liberation inspired by “mystic activists” from various faith and cultural traditions, Soul Medicine for a Fractured World offers an integrative path toward healing and social transformation, rooted in our kinship with one another, the Earth, and all of life.
Rich with practical application, the book includes questions for reflection as well as an array of spiritual and healing practices to help readers put the ideas shared into embodied action.
Video coming in March 2027
Just as a seed is released into the soil, takes root, transforms underground, and bears fruit, racial healing is a deeply spiritual journey that mirrors the growth of creation.
Sowing Shalom invites readers into a transformative journey of racial healing as spiritual formation, guided by the seasonal rhythms of letting go, nourishing, growing, and yielding. Through Scripture and contemplative practice, spiritual director and pastor Afrika Afeni Mills calls readers into vulnerability, humility, repair, and joy, and offers a pathway to cultivate the inner and communal conditions for beloved community.
This book invites all people into the healing journey, regardless of how they have been racialized. While fully honoring the disproportionate wounds carried by people of color through generations, it recognizes that racialization has wounded the entire human family–and wholeness requires a path forward for all of us, together.
What you’ll find in Sowing Shalom:
Sowing Shalom equips readers to engage the work of justice not just outwardly but as sacred work within the soul. Ideal for personal reading, contemplative retreats, and spiritual directors, this book is for anyone who longs for justice and healing, laments what has been lost, and believes that beloved community is still possible.
Available for pre-order. Publication date May 18, 2027.
Video coming in May 2027
Claudia Love Mair, MFA is a writer, artist, and Ringmistress of the Beautiful Soul Circus, a private Facebook group for creatives, queers, and tender souls. She’s an Inspirationalista who, when she’s not creating something herself, helps other creatives tap into their deepest intuition and longings through writing and painting. Claudia is the author of the God Alone is Enough, the critically acclaimed novel, Zora and Nicky, and her memoir, Don’t You Fall Now. She is a Certified Intuitive Painting and Expressive Arts Facilitator and the Coordinator for the Kentucky Black Writers Collaborative. Claudia lives in Lexington, with two of her adult children, and three cats, including one who thinks he’s a dog.
Christine Valters Paintner is a Benedictine oblate and the online Abbess of Abbey of the Arts, a virtual monastery and global community integrating contemplative practice and creative expression. Christine earned her PhD in Christian spirituality and is a Registered Expressive Arts Consultant and Educator. She is a retreat facilitator and spiritual director, as well as the author of 15 books on contemplative practice and creative expression including two collections of poetry, Dreaming of Stones and The Wisdom of Wild Grace. Christine has lived in Galway, Ireland since 2012 with her husband John, where together they lead online and live retreats to the wild edges.