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.
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.
Winner of the Coretta Scott King Award, and New York Times bestselling author Nikki Grimes introduces Glory, Too, 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.
While others often respond to the cares and concerns of our day through anger, And: The Restorative Power of Love in an Either/Or World attempts to offer a response steeped in the heartbeat of Love.
This book is an invitation to encounter the lived experience and philosophical musings of another as a human, not as a project or agenda to conquer. Without apology, it embraces humanity and all the emotions, back stories, and history that come along with who we are and who Love is inviting us to be. This book is for those who want to think more deeply, those who are asking questions of how, what, and perhaps even why, and those who want to engage in deep listening and empathy.
And: The Restorative Power of Love in an Either/Or World is an invitation to move beyond binaries, beyond hierarchy and comparison to embrace the concept of “AND,” with inclusion and generativity that allow for more than one perspective and/or way of being.
Touching on issues of race, body, motherhood, church, and wonder, these writings are from the stirrings of the author’s own soul, extending an invitation to sit with Spirit in the process of mindful meditation, to humbly sit with compassion and curiosity in ways that evoke honesty and healing so that one might move beyond either/or and discover how the restorative power and uniting thread of Love might be stitching each of us to the world and to each other.
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.
Rev. Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza is a public theologian, pastor, and Professor nurturing other possible worlds. Believing that public theology is a kind of social healing, Roberto transformed the Activist Theology Project into Our Collective Becoming, a social healing project dedicated to the work of repair. He writes on Substack on Our Collective Becoming—translating theory to action. Cultural analysis with a spirit of hope!
Video coming in September 2025
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.
Video coming in November 2025
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.
