The Pocket Contemplative

Hartmut Rosa is a German sociologist whom many Christians have been looking to as a guide to how our lives seem to be accelerating. Do we somehow need to opt out of this acceleration if we want a happy life, much less a life with God? Rosa says no, opting out isn’t possible. But he does have a contemplative answer: “resonance,” a kind of paying attention that can sit alongsid

Dave Schmelzer is in touch with many people who are, to a greater or lesser degree, deconstructing their earlier faith experience, a common process for midlife people of faith. HIstoric Christian spirituality tells us there's a unique second-half-of-life flowering of faith. Dave lets us in on a series of conversations he's been having about how we might explore that in our era. Men

Howard Thurman was the great behind-the-scenes spiritual leader of America’s civil rights movement. Martin Luther King was said to carry a copy of Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited with him for inspiration on each march. But Thurman starts by being among the great nature mystics in the Christian tradition. Why do you (like everyone) love nature so much? For Thurman, that’s

I want to be happy. You want to be happy. But maybe our best pathway there comes by focusing instead on "living well.". MIT philosopher Kieran Setiya's book Life Is Hard helps Dave Schmelzer navigate those choices, with a particular look at how it applies when we feel like a failure or when we're hunting for meaning.Mentioned on this podcast:Kieran Setiya's book Life is Hard: How P

Here at The Pocket Contemplative, we do deep dives into some of the richest Christian wisdom one can find about getting close to God. But one revolutionary thinker suggested that, while that's all wonderful and we should learn all we can from such people, these great saints did live in a very different world with very different spiritual dynamics than we live in. Many were cloister

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 Christian Mys

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 her pit

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