PODCAST · society
Contemplify
by Paul Swanson | Contemplative Shoveler
The Contemplify podcast kindles the examined life through artful musings with scholars, creatives and master teachers. Each episode delivers a subtly intoxicating* exchange on the contemplative lifestyle with practical takeaways to emulate in daily life. Ring the bell. Rob the moment. Contemplify. Host, Paul Swanson, is a husband, father and contemplative educator at the Center for Action and Contemplation's Living School**. *Contemplify is best served with a pint in hand. Please listen responsibly. ** All shenanigans, tom foolery and bally-hoo posted on Contemplify are my own. Contemplify is not representative of the Center for Action and Contemplation or Richard Rohr on any matter.
Episodes
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Thomas Gardner on Poverty Creek Journal
“The achievement of ‘Poverty Creek Journal’ is precisely that it does retrace that kind of wandering–and, in so doing, makes something lovely and meaningful of a difficult year. Gardner does not go in for pat analogies; he does not claim, as Camus once did about soccer, that running taught him...
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Noah Davis on The Last Beast We Revel In
“Noah Davis is a poet whose capacious imagination runs on river sounds and open air.” — Adrian Matejka, Pulitzer Prize Finalist and editor of Poetry. Noah Davis is an award-winning poet, whose collection The Last Beast We Revel In was my first read on my sabbatical. The poetry of Noah Davis is...
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Todd Goddard on Jim Harrison (author of Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, A Writer’s Life)
“Todd Goddard tells the story of this bon vivant, outdoorsman, hellion, and great poet from his ancestors to his end with grace, momentum, generosity, and insight…and what a great American life it was, wreckage, glory, gifts, and ALL.” — REBECCA SOLNIT, author of Orwell’s Roses Todd Goddard is an...
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Sasha Waters on Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World
“”I got saved by poetry, and I got saved by the beauty of the world.” — Mary Oliver Sasha Waters, an American documentary and experimental filmmaker, feminist and educator. She has produced and directed over twenty films and we are here today to talk about her latest, Mary Oliver: Saved by the...
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Beverly Lanzetta on Birthing a New Mysticism
“With poetic clarity and theological depth, Beverly Lanzetta names the sacred within the human, the Divine Feminine within tradition, and the transforming power of contemplation for our wounded world.” — Fr. Adam Bucko Beverly Lanzetta, Ph.D., is a theologian, contemplative scholar and teacher…
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Dr. Liza J. Rankow on Soul Medicine for a Fractured World
“In the ashes of all we have lost, a world of liberation is waiting to be born, if we are brave enough to labor for it. Like the wisest midwife, Liza Rankow takes our hand and offers practical tools to unlock a courage we did not know we had. The result: a journey into healing, spirituality, and...
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Philip Connors on The Mountain Knows the Mountain: A Fire Watch Diary
“Find in these pages profound beauty, deep comfort, and vexing disquiet. Ask yourself some of the questions Connors keeps asking. Then walk out of the house to some perfect, inscrutable run of nature and fall in love.” — Gary Ferguson Philip Connors is a fire lookout, essayist, and author of four...
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Anna Tivel on Animal Poem, Short Stories, and Checking Your Shoes
“Through her graceful poetry and pristine instrumentation, the folk singer delivers indictments of modern indignities alongside moments of hope.” — Pitchfork Anna Tivel is an award-winning songwriter and musician from Portland, Oregon. In our conversation we traverse many topics; short stories,...
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Dr. Martin Shaw on Liturgies of the Wild
“Here is a rosary of soaring myth, gripping narrative, and deep wisdom, all told with breathtaking verve that enchants and sweeps us along, from first word to last. A superb, inspiring read.” — Gabor Maté, author of The Myth of Normal Dr. Martin Shaw a writer, mythographer, wilderness guide, and...
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Vision for a New Cabinet by Teddy Macker (Season 7 Trailer)
“As Christians…we are Ceremony people, story people, poetic people.” — Martin Shaw Season 7 is hatching. A series of conversations has come together, mighty and beautiful folks offering feathered insight and story from their unique perch in the world (I am going to shift things up a bit and share…
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The Famous One
“Always keep death before you.” — Rule of St. Benedict Musing on obituaries with your name on it. Photo by Contemplify
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Remembering Lerita Coleman Brown on Waiting for a Word in the Heart [Repost from 2023]
“I highly recommend What Makes You Come Alive to churches, religious and educational institutions, and spiritual seekers everywhere who are looking for an inward journey that finds its home in the world of nature, people, and things.” — Walter Earl Fluker – Editor and Director of the Howard…
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Stay Outside (or Non-Liturgical Liturgical Calendar Musing)
“Some people need to stay outside.” — Jim Harrison Musing on my personal non-liturgical liturgical calendar that runs from December 11 – December 10 each calendar year. Photo by Contemplify
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Gail Straub on Embracing Our Human Family
“In radiant, lyrical prose, Gail Straub takes us on a voyage like no other, both into little-known places across the globe and, most memorably, the inner realms of the soul. …..this is a journey that no reader will forget and, I believe, all readers will, in their own way, hope to emulate.” —...
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Mark Longhurst on The Holy Ordinary
“A truly beautiful book that can take you to the very heart of who you are meant to be in God.” — Fr. Adam Bucko Mark Longhurst is an author and contemplative guide who has spent years exploring the sacred dimensions of everyday life. In our conversation we talk about his book The Holy Ordinary…
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Haleh Liza Gafori Brings Water to the Thirsty
“Water is immediate and timeless. These poems imprint on the heart. To read these verses is to enter mystery and paradox, to be burnished by the sacred fire and broken open by the holiest dance.” — Suleika Jaouad Haleh Liza Gafori is a translator, performance artist, vocalist, and educator whose...
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Contemplative Parenting with Aizaiah G. Yong and Nereyda Yong
“This book is just what the world needs right now. At a time when tensions are hot, divisions are growing, and uncertainty is the order of the day, Sacred Parenting is a call to reconnect with what matters most: our children, our families, ourselves, and our God. The authors offer gentle wisdom…
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[Rebroadcast] Dr. Larry Ward on America’s Racial Karma, the Fragrance of Wisdom, and Learning How To Suffer Less
“In this taut, fearless, and well-argued manifesto, Larry Ward offers us a deeply insightful analysis of America’s racial karma—of how it operates individually and collectively—and how it can be worked with and transformed. Drawing on Buddhist psychology, trauma theory, neuroscience, and years of...
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Amy Frykholm on Journey to the Wild Heart
“You can trust Amy Frykholm as a modern-day amma who knows the terrain of the soul. Reading Journey to the Wild Heart is like going out to the desert for a word. It helps us slow down, let go, unknow in Silence, and embody Love.― — Carmen Acevedo Butcher, author of Practice of the Presence Amy...
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Todd Davis on Ditch Memory
“To read a new and selected collection is to experience the evolution of a voice, in this case an essential voice in American poetry. To sit with the whole of these transportive, immersive poems is to awaken like a wild riparian corridor in spring. Wildflowers on the banks. Birdsong in the...
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Sr. Laura Swan, OSB on the Radical Wisdom of the Beguines
“…Swan’s book provides an accessible overview of beguine spirituality in the context of their own times…[it] does a good job of explaining both the beguines’ spiritual practices and their continuing legacy.” — Commonweal Sr. Laura Swan is a Benedictine sister, spiritual director, author, teacher,...
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Patrick Boland on Contemplative Leadership
“Such a generous and skillful offering! If you want to use your power and influence for good in this world, here is your practice manual. May you have the discipline and commitment to use it well.” — Margaret J. Wheatley Patrick Boland is an author, teacher, coach, and consultant. In our...
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Cynthia Bourgeault on Thomas Keating, Christian Nonduality, and Mystical Maps
“As a close student and friend of Thomas Keating’s for thirty-five years, I was exhilarated reading this lively and profound exploration of his journey into unity consciousness, and grateful the world has the opportunity to glimpse the inner life, struggles, and spiritual evolution of this...
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Intensification of Life (Season 6 Trailer)
“Practice simply is one intensification of what is natural and around us all the time. Practice is to life as poetry is to spoken language. So as poetry is the practice of language, “practice” is the practice of life.” — Gary Snyder As an entryway to Season 6, I have two things to share; a quote...
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Peter Traben Haas on Prayer as a Practice of Centering, Abiding, & Radiating
“These prayers act as both a holy pause – a space to rest into when our own words seem to fail us – and a spark – a way of igniting our recommitment to be a loving presence in the world. Full of gratitude, humility, and devotion, Haas calls us back into communion with ourselves, with creation…
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Backporch Advent Outpost with Hadewijch and the Mother of Love
“We must, without sparing, lose all for all.” — Hadejwich of Antwerp This morning I want to muse on Mary, mother of Jesus, through the eyes of 13th Century mystic Hadewijch during this second week of Advent. Drink Recommended Black Coffee (with an eggnog if on hand) Photo by Contemplify Links to...
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Katherine May on Enchantment, Building Community, Tasting Words, and a Drink of Lake Water
“I love Katherine May’s new book, Enchantment.… It’s a beautiful offering of light, truth and charm in these strange, dark times.” — Anne Lamott Katherine May is an internationally bestselling author and podcaster living in Whitstable, UK. Her most recent book, Enchantment became an instant New...
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Andrew Krivak on the Inheritance of Loss, Death as a Character, and Like the Appearance of Horses
“Krivak is a novelist, poet, and memoirist whose work has been compared to William Faulkner’s in its rich sense of place, to Wendell Berry’s in its attentiveness to natural beauty, and to Cormac McCarthy’s in its deep investigation of violence and myth. Yet all of Krivak’s writing, and especially...
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Remembering Dr. Barbara Holmes (Replay of 2016 Conversation)
“Dr. B was passionate about expanding our understanding of the Christian contemplative tradition, reminding us that contemplation isn’t the sole domain of those who can retreat to quiet places. She understood, from her own life and from the traditions she carried forward, that contemplative...
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Amy Leach on Becoming Salt of the Universe
“I was recently giving a sermon and found myself spontaneously quoting from Amy Leach’s singular and surprising new book. I expect many readers will find their own lives troubled (in the Biblical sense) and enlightened by her fresh perceptions. She has lived into a hard-earned and entirely…
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Ben Katt on Getting Quiet, Midlife, and the Power of Ritual (also, we chat about David Hasselhoff)
“A fantastically written, powerfully wise offering from Ben Katt…a gift to our world of pain and promise.” — Krista Tippett Ben Katt has worked with On Being, as an ordained minister, an advanced meditation teacher, and author. His first book, The Way Home: Discovering the Hero’s Journey to...
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Jeffrey Martin on Thank God We Left the Garden, Letters, and Literature
“Songs that are stark in their simplicity, yet emotionally rich in a way that can catch your breath in your throat or leave your eyes suddenly damp.” — Paste Jeffrey Martin is a musician with a number of albums under his belt. His latest, Thank God We Left the Garden, has been playing on repeat…
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Susan Murphy on Zen Koans for Facing the Climate Crisis, the vast meaning of Country, and Cooling Fires
“A powerful and important plunge into the reality of the mind and climate.” — Joan Halifax, author of Being with Dying and Standing at the Edge Susan Murphy is an Australian Zen teacher whose passionate feeling of kinship with the natural world began during her early childhood years living near…
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Drew Jackson on Touch the Earth, Poetry as a Lifesaver, and the Importance of Lucille Clifton
“In Touch the Earth, Drew Jackson’s poetry offers a word-weary world a new language of engagement, disruption, and insight. As with all great poetry, the words are spare, but the literary images loom large, creating indelible impressions on the reader. Like echoes that reverberate long after the...
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Tracy Cochran on the Art of Presence, Mistakes as Practice, & the Grief of Awakening
“This is a wonderful, wise, and tender book. Its elegant and gifted storytelling will change you.” — Jack Kornfield Tracy Cochran is a writer, meditation teacher, and editorial director of Parabola, an acclaimed quarterly magazine that draws on the world’s cultural and wisdom traditions to…
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Brian McLaren on Life After Doom, Patient Urgency, & Complexifying Hope
“As rich and thoughtful as all of Brian McLaren’s work, but with a particular urgency!” — Bill McKibben Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, activist, and public theologian. A former college English teacher and pastor, he is a passionate advocate for “a new kind of Christianity” – just,...
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Cassidy Hall on Queering Contemplation, Letting Go of Thomas Merton, and Expanding Foundations
“Hall retrains our imaginations for a spirituality that is more strange, more beautiful, and more honest than the doctrines we’ve often been cornered into.” — Cole Arthur Riley Cassidy Hall is an author, award-winning filmmaker, podcaster, ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, and...
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Dr. Larry Ward on America’s Racial Karma, the Fragrance of Wisdom, and Learning How To Suffer Less
“In this taut, fearless, and well-argued manifesto, Larry Ward offers us a deeply insightful analysis of America’s racial karma—of how it operates individually and collectively—and how it can be worked with and transformed. Drawing on Buddhist psychology, trauma theory, neuroscience, and years of...
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David James Duncan on the Unintentional Menagerie of Sun House, Friendship, and the Beguines
“Sun House is not a mere book, but a singular world in which to reside, and to feel more alive. Laced with humor and high-lonesome lyricism, this sweeping tale locates the grand in the smallest particulars, reaches its heights by flooding us with light and loss, and arrives, ultimately, in…
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Harmonizing In The Empty Fullness
We are at the dawn of Season Five, it is just peeking over the horizon, a collection of conversations with contemplatives breaking through the noise of the day, to hallow the fields, seas, and trees of life with presence. This infilling of presence reaches out like the chirpings from the old…
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Turn the Morning into Forever
5th century Chinese poet T’ao Ch’ien said, “a thousand years may be beyond me / but I can turn this morning into forever.” I find that to be really lovely. And true. Yesterday my daughter turned 9, and It has me musing on time. The swiftness and dawdling of time. When a year is marked or a height...
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Reduced to the Scale of Our Competence
I am going to begin with a definition. Imposter Syndrome: the persistent inability to believe that one’s success is deserved or has been legitimately achieved as a result of one’s own efforts or skills. How many of you have experienced “imposter syndrome” in some area of life? show of hands.…
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Eat the Wild Thing
Maurice Sendak who wrote Where the Wild Things Are used to receive truckloads of letters from kids about that book, but he said his favorite was from a mother. It went like this….Dear Mr. Sendak, my 6-year old son, wrote you a letter and you wrote back with a drawing of one of your wild things....
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Lo-Fi & Hushed / 2023 Winter Solstice Session / To Know the Dark
“To know the dark, go dark.” — Wendell Berry Each solstice and equinox Contemplify offers a public Lo-Fi & Hushed contemplative practice session for both free and supporting subscribers of the Non-Required Reading List. For those interested, go tell it on the mountain… The third week of Advent...
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Listen to the Rice, the Rice Will Teach You Everything with Lucien Miller
“Oshida’s life and legacy is an experience of the spiritual senses knowing the mystical voice. Biblical in sources and Buddhist in form, reading this book took me as a reader to the great pause of silence.” — Sister Meg Funk, OSB Lucien Miller received his PhD in comparative literature from…
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In Hard Times, In All Times, Eat Sacred Words
“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” — ‘Wild Geese‘ by Mary Oliver Listen to Carmen’s first conversation with Contemplify on her revolutionary...
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Kim Haines-Eitzen on Practicing the Cello in the Dark and Sonorous Deserts
“A meditative blend of history and travelogue . . . brings the soundscape of the desert to life.” ― New Yorker Dr. Kim Haines-Eitzen is a Professor of Religious Studies with specialties in Early Christianity, Early Judaism, and other ancient Mediterranean Religions at Cornell University. Her book...
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Lerita Coleman Brown on Waiting for a Word in the Heart
“I highly recommend What Makes You Come Alive to churches, religious and educational institutions, and spiritual seekers everywhere who are looking for an inward journey that finds its home in the world of nature, people, and things.” — Walter Earl Fluker – Editor and Director of the Howard…
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Lo-Fi & Hushed Contemplative Practice Session (September 2023 / Autumn Equinox)
Good morning, good people. Welcome to the grand experiment of Lo-Fi & Hushed, this very first one marks the passage of the Autumn Equinox. And since it is the very first one, I am going to use this space before Lectio to offer a brief introduction on Lectio Divina for those whom this is new for…
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Douglas E. Christie on Depth Without Resolution
“I have been pursuing the love ‘born of and nurtured by darkness’ all of my life. In The Insurmountable Darkness of Love, Douglas Christie invites readers to embark on a journey of ‘silent attention’ awakening, shedding, and finally the embrace of what cannot be known. So, how do you write about...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
The Contemplify podcast kindles the examined life through artful musings with scholars, creatives and master teachers. Each episode delivers a subtly intoxicating* exchange on the contemplative lifestyle with practical takeaways to emulate in daily life.
Ring the bell. Rob the moment. Contemplify.
Host, Paul Swanson, is a husband, father and contemplative educator at the Center for Action and Contemplation's Living School**.
*Contemplify is best served with a pint in hand. Please listen responsibly.
** All shenanigans, tom foolery and bally-hoo posted on Contemplify are my own. Contemplify is not representative of the Center for Action and Contemplation or Richard Rohr on any matter.
HOSTED BY
Paul Swanson | Contemplative Shoveler
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Contemplify have?
Contemplify currently has 50 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Contemplify about?
The Contemplify podcast kindles the examined life through artful musings with scholars, creatives and master teachers. Each episode delivers a subtly intoxicating* exchange on the contemplative lifestyle with practical takeaways to emulate in daily life. Ring the bell. Rob the moment. Contemplify....
How often does Contemplify release new episodes?
Contemplify has 50 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Contemplify?
You can listen to Contemplify on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Contemplify?
Contemplify is created and hosted by Paul Swanson | Contemplative Shoveler.
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