Richard Rohr

On Tuesday evening, FI hosted internationally renowned contemplative, speaker, and Franciscan Friar Richard Rohr for a talk on “Spirituality and Politics.” As you may remember, I had the chance to visit Richard’s Center For Action and Contemplation back in November, though Richard wasn’t there at the time. It was nice to finally have the chance to meet him. Richard’s main thing (to put it incredibly simply) is to return to the mystic traditions of early Christianity (and other spirituality) which have been lost in rational Western thought. He seeks to connect people with their inner ‘contemplative’ selves as a means of connecting to God. Pretty heady and incredible stuff.

During the day he met with the staff and gave us a nice introduction to the 6 “Stages of Consciousness” before his public talk that night. I was surprised and pleased to hear him ‘rep’ the Emerging Church which he thinks favorably of due to its open nature (the contemplative mind rejects rational black-or-white dualism). (Of course, I don’t mean to imply that other religious movements are anything less, because that would be dualistic itself.)

Anyway, as I am a designer, I did the posters and flyers for the event — my not-so subtle play on the title:




The event was very nice and I was able to take everything in despite being on photography duty.



Lammert blogged about it over at Shema and Melissa posted a nice article on our website (all photos also by me) so I won’t go into a major recap. It was just nice to be involved in the festivities and have a chance to chat with friends afterwords (here, Richard talks with Julia and Lammert).