The Pocket Contemplative

Christian Contemplative Spirituality--alternately called Christian Mysticism--has gone in and out of favor over the millennia, but has rich roots from the Hebrew Bible forward. With help from the work of Carl McColman, Dave Schmelzer will help orient you as you look to navigate this vital, essential stream.Mentioned on this podcast: Carl McColman's The New Big Book of Christia

Is there a secret of life? Contemplatives of many stripes suggest it surround cultivating a kind of trust and openness that endures through the hardest of times. Dave Schmelzer dives into wisdom on this from the most optimistic of contemplatives, Julian of Norwich (C.S. Lewis and Thomas Merton both said she was their go-to contemplative teacher). Julian lived through the bubonic pl

Christianity's most potent and lasting advice on aging well comes from one of its most remarkable contemplatives: Hildegard of Bingen from the 12th century. She was an explosion of creativity: she wrote the first known opera (by hundreds of years). She was an architect, a physician, a poet, a painter, a composer, a theologian and a leader of women. This podcast will look at he

Maybe the most-influential Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart, had profound thoughts about how our spiritual practice is meant to--even must!--empower our creativity. Dave Schmelzer dives into Eckhart's deep, generative waters here.Mentioned on this podcast: Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior for Our Times, by Matthew Fox

Kieran Setiya--a philosopher at MIT who wrote the terrific book Midlife: A Philosophical Guide that Dave Schmelzer talked about on the last episode--joins Dave for a lively conversation about how philosophy can help with our deepest questions and about how it interacts with the spirituality we talk about here. Mentioned on this podcast:Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, by Kieran Seti

Philosophers and theologians offer different answers to how we should feel about the losses we confront in midlife. Kieran Setiya, a philosopher teaching at MIT, wrote a terrific recent book on midlife crisis. Dave Schmelzer highlights some of Setiya's best stuff, including Setiya's takes on missed opportunities, why we can simultaneously regret and not regret where our l

When Dave Schmelzer first started exploring contemplative spirituality, he had a hard time finding teachers who would get pragmatic in the "just do this, and then do this, and then do this, and here's what you should discover" sense. Mo Gawdat has written a bestselling guide along those lines called Solve for Happy. Dave walks us through Gawdat's pathway to get

As Dave Schmelzer and Vince Brackett talked about in a recent episode, faith looks very different than it did a few hundred years back--and even than it did sixty years back. Professor Andrew Root--who was Vince's enthusiastic teacher on the subject--walks us into some of the ins and outs of what this looks and feels like.Faith Formation in a Secular Age: Responding to the Chu

Dave Schmelzer's new favorite book on forgiveness (and maybe one of his favorite books period) is by Desmond Tutu and his daughter Mpho Tutu van Furth. Mpho joins Dave from Amsterdam to talk about what she's taken from the book in years since, her reflections on it being forged out of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and much more.Mentioned on this

You'd think that apart from affirming that, of course, forgiving people who've hurt us is crucial to our happiness, there wouldn't be much more to say. But Desmond and Mpho Tutu wrote what seems like the final word on the subject in their wonderful The Book of Forgiving, which includes many stories from Desmond's leading of South Africa's Truth and Reconcil