Skip to Main Content

Congregational Life: Social Justice: Contemplative Activism

online and in-person connections for service and justice work

Books

Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days of Reconnecting with Sacred Earth     bell hooks' Spiritual Vision: Buddhist, Christian, and Feminist     Black Liturgies by Cole Arthur Riley     Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman          Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred     Come, Have Breakfast: Meditations on God and the Earth     Confronting Whiteness: A Spiritual Journey of Reflection, Conversation, and Transformation     Creating a Life with God, Revised Edition     Crisis Contemplation: Healing the Wounded Village     Do Better     Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee     Everyday Activism: Buck, J W: 9781540902610: Amazon.com: Books     Face to the Rising Sun     Faith, Class, and Labor     Feed the Wolf: Befriending Our Fears in the Way of Saint Francis     Fierce Love by Dr. Jacqui Lewis     Finding Refuge     Home Is the Road: Wandering the Land, Shaping the Spirit          How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy: Odell, Jenny:  9781612197494: Amazon.com: Books     How to Live in a Chaotic Climate by LaUra Schmidt, Aimee Lewis Reau and Chelsie Rivera     In a Land of Awe: Finding Reverence in the Search for Wild Horses     In Trembling Boldness: Wisdom for Today from Ancient Jesus People          Jesus Takes a Side     Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day:  Curtice, Kaitlin B.: 9781587435713: Amazon.com: Books          Meditations of the Heart     Micro Activism     BL_TNBBOCM_TheNewBigBookOfChristianMysticism_Cover_9781506486840c          On Love and Mercy     Picture of The Peace Project     Practicing     Image result for praying with our feet          Practice of the Presence: A Revolutionary Translation by Carmen Acevedo Butcher     Image result for praying with our feet     Purposeful Empathy: Tapping Our Hidden Superpower for Personal, Organizational, and Social Change          Queering Contemplation: Finding Queerness in the Roots and Future of Contemplative Spirituality     Rebels, Despots, and Saints: The Ancestors Who Free Us and The Ancestors We Need to Free     Refugia Faith: Seeking Hidden Shelters, Ordinary Wonders, and the Healing of the Earth     Rest is Resistance     Cover for Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul          The Seeker and the Monk: Everyday Conversations with Thomas Merton     Social Justice for the Sensitive Soul: How to Change the World in Quiet Ways     Collected Poems     Spirit Wheel: Meditations from an Indigenous Elder     The Spirituality of Dreaming: Unlocking the Wisdom of Our Sleeping Selves     The Spirituality of Transformation, Joy, and Justice: The Ignatian Way for Everyone     Staying Awake: The Gospel for Changemakers     This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley     Through the Eyes of Titans: Finding Courage to Redeem the Soul of a Nation     Today Everything Is Different: An Adventure in Prayer and Action          Walking the Way of Harriet Tubman: Public Mystic and Freedom Fighter     We Make the Road by Walking: A Year-Long Quest for Spiritual Formation, Reorientation, and Activation by [Brian D. McLaren]          What Makes You Come Alive: A Spiritual Walk with Howard Thurman     What Would Jesus See: Ways of Looking at a Disorienting World     Your Heart Was Made for This

Main_lend_a_hand_cover     This beautiful picture book teaches kids to connect with themselves, with others, and with nature

Oneing: The Cosmic Egg

Richard Rohr's biannual Oneing is available in hardcopy and as a downloadable pdf.

Local Resources

THIS LIVING THE KIN-DOM STUDY BY RIVA TABELISMA gives fresh eyes to the Lord's Prayer. Often learned by rote, the Lord's Prayer is a rich guide for how we can live out God's kin-dom in our lives. Tabelisma invites participants in this study to step away from our automatic recitation of the prayer and dive deep into the meaning of each line over the course of eight one-hour sessions. Each of the sessions examines a section of the Lord's Prayer from Matthew 6:9–13 as it is recorded in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. 

Minnesota Contemplative Outreach

Volunteers for Bringing Centering Prayer to Stillwater Prison): info@minnesotacontemplativeoutreach.org or www.minnesotacontemplativeoutreach.org.

For more information, please contact Mark Thiel.

First Things: Morning Centering Prayer for PeaceSustaining the intention of peace for the Twin Cities, we hold prayerful silence together, in unity, in love and support for all people in our communities:
Daily at 7:00 a.m., via Zoom

GatheringThe Minnesota Council of Churches Healing Minnesota Stories provide group Sacred Sites Tour to Explore Indigenous Experience in Minnesota. These tours are designed to "create understanding and healing between Native American and non-Native people, particularly those in various faith communities".

Tours are led by Rev. Jim Bear Jacobs (Mohican) and Bob Klanderud (Dakota). The tours offer an opportunity to learn about Minnesota history from a Native perspective through story-telling and experiencing the sites in silence / meditation / reflection.

Upcoming Tour Dates

174307387_129328355839169_5830505313759900857_nUnited Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities offers a list of Resources and Actions Amidst amidst the Chauvin Trialand the Death of Daunte Wright, including opportunities for Prayer/Meditation, Holding Memory, Changing Policies, Impacting Public Discourse, and Engaging Our Emotions.

Websites & Webinars

The Center for Mindful Self-Compassion offers 10 Self-Compassion Practices for the Crisis in Ukraine.

LIFT EVERY VOICE BOOK CLUB

Lift Every Voice: Contemplative Writers of Color Book Club offers monthly conversation on the Christian Mystical Tradition. 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.

This free series is a conversation between Christine Valters Paintner and author Claudia Love Mair. Read the book in advance and actively join this "journey of deepening, discovery, and transformation".

Learn more here.

Engaging Christianities and Socialisms — The Wendland-Cook Program in  Religion and Justice

Register for upcoming webinars here.

Watch previous webinars here.

Practices via Video

     

Barbara A. Holmes' film series with The Work of the People: A Transcendent Leap (on our cosmic identities), Womanist Theology, Release the Fire (on Pentecost and the Spirit), Be the Mystery, Emerging Wholeness (on God's call to love our neighbor), A Contemplative Moment (on how contemplative prayer births prophetic proclamation and action).

Additional Practices

Election Season Spiritual Care Package – Join The MovementThe UCC's Join the Movement created an Election Season Spiritual Care Package: Soul Nourishment in a Time of Life-Denying Rhetoric - free and downloadable - full of video, audio, and written prayers created and facilitated by diverse voices from around the nation.

Land Acknowledgments

Unsettling WorshipAs we are embraced by God's reconciling love in worship, we are equipped to carry that reconciling love into our relationships beyond the worship space. Worship equips us for the work of conciliation, but the liturgy itself needs to be decolonized if it is to truly honor Christian commitments to God and neighbor. This book explores the reformed liturgy in its pattern of Gathering, Word, Table, and Sending, searching it both for colonial vestiges, and spaces of new possibility. Unsettling Worship invites the reader into a conversation about reformed worship in a setting of ongoing colonization. Worship should both unsettle us, and equip us for the essential work of making things right with Indigenous neighbors. 

 

Doing the Deeply Spiritual Work of Land Acknowledgment

Tracy Kugler, a member of St. Paul's UCC in St. Paul, MN

~includes a strong list of resources for congregational or personal learning

 

~~~

Go to Beyond Land Acknowledgment SeriesA Guide to Indigenous Land Acknowledgment was compiled in conversation with a group of Minnesota Indigenous leaders.

 

 

~~~

Green road sign with cows in background. Sign reads Welcome To The Cheyene River Sioux Tribe Indian Reservation.

How To Write A Land Acknowledgement For Your Parish

 

 

 

~~~

CICSC logoThe California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center offers this Toolkit.

 

 

 

 

 

~~~

Blogs, Podcasts, & Articles

Center for Action and Contemplation Podcasts:

     Cover art for new CAC Podcast: Everything Belongs     

man with sneakers and cuffed pants walks along the road lined with graffiti covered wallsTake a walk with God

Prayer walking can be a great way to get outside and connect with God and your community. Here’s some advice for turning a regular stroll into a means of discipleship.

Try prayer walking.

 

Maps, Prayers, and Action by Vernita Kennen, Incarnation Lutheran Church (ELCA), Shoreview

Walking Humbly with God for Justice

Featured News Image

Contemplation and action can open doors to changing systems of domination and oppression.

What are the actions that take you beyond belief and into action? Franciscan Action Network (FAN) Executive Director Michele Dunne shares her experience at the June 18 Poor People’s Campaign March on Washington and to the Polls.

\Barbara Holmes, Untitled 2 (detail), 2021, photograph, United States.

Richard Rohr spent a week Contemplating Creation - short, daily devotionals to help us see and develop awareness of our oneness with creation.

FOUR PRAYERS FOR JUSTICE

Four prayers for social justice, change, and working for the common good.

Richard Rohr lifts up numerous contemplative artists reflecting on arts, contemplation, and justice work, in Finding God in the Arts, which ran August 15-20, 2021.

Barbara Holmes reflects on Crisis Contemplation, in When Crisis Comes and Crisis Contemplation; trauma researcher Joy DeGruy adds Healing Generational Wounds - all worth a read for those concerned about the extent of body trauma experienced generationally by our siblings of color and diversity; and being absorbed by all of us in these times of upheaval.

enfleshed's Contemplating Now podcast is great all the time.

This interview with Cassidy Hall on her work on the intersection of contemplation and Social justice is particularly good.

Richard Rohr asks leaders to become - or make room for - Becoming Wise Fools.

His Earth Day reflection, One Life, One Breath, features Native American attorney and sacred activist, Sherri Mitchell.

Sharing Felicia Murrell's Silence in Trauma and Healing week.

The theme of "Oneness", (May 23-28, 2021), culminated in Action Based on Oneness, citing contemporary mystic and activist-inspirer, Howard Thurman.

In Our Library

     The Antiracist Heart     Be Still!     Black Liturgies by Cole Arthur Riley     Compassion by Henri J. M. Nouwen, Donald P. Mcneill and Douglas A. Morrison          Crafting the Resistance: 35 Projects for Craftivists, Protestors, and Women  Who Persist: 9781510731387: Neel, Lara, Marano, Heather: Books - Amazon.com          Book Cover                         Food for Life: The Spirituality and Ethics of Eating                    Hope for the Future: Answering God’s…     How to Have Antiracist Conversations by Roxy Manning     Hardcover How to Know God: The Soul's Journey Into the Mystery of Mysteries Book               Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church (Second Edition)          Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day:  Curtice, Kaitlin B.: 9781587435713: Amazon.com: Books     9780787982690: Lord, Have Mercy: Praying for Justice With Conviction and Humility     Mercy in the City: How to Feed the Hungry,... by Weber, Kerry          The Mud and the Masterpiece: Seeing Yourself and Others through the Eyes of Jesus Audiobook  [Download] -     Narrated By: John Burke    By: John Burke     The Phoenix Affirmations: A New Vision for the Future of Christianity  -     By: Eric Elnes                         Sabbath_as_Resistance     Smart Compassion: A Handbook for Making a Difference When You Don't Know Where to Start  -     By: Wesley Furlong               Staying Awake: The Gospel for Changemakers          Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion  -     By: Gregory Boyle     Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life by Karen Armstrong          Hardcover We Need Each Other: Responding to God's Call to Live Together Book     WheeWeWee.jpg