News From New Mexico
The Mendicant
A Home for My Loving Action
July 18th, 2025
For most of my adult life, I’ve struggled to find a political home where my faith is welcome and a faith community where my politics are welcome. In recent years, however, I’ve found a home for my loving action in the faith-based anti-war movement, specifically the Palestinian solidarity organization Jewish Voice
The Storm
July 18th, 2025
And he arose, and rebuked the wind and said unto the sea, ‘Peace, be still.’ And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.” —Mark 4:39
As I was giving a talk earlier this year on my book Chasing Peace, I was asked what advice it offered for coping with a political crisis.
The question was
Allowing the Work to Be Done
July 18th, 2025
These days, loving action looks like scribbling phrases and images on receipts and colored index cards. It looks like wearing pink earplugs while mining old journals, writing in multiple notebooks, and studying the flow chart on my bulletin board. It looks like dancing to upbeat songs to shift my energy to writing
Following Divine Guidance
July 18th, 2025
In August 2020, I received an email from a close friend and mentor asking me why I was retiring in the midst of the COVID lockdown. A good mentor always knows how and when to poke you. I called him and listened as he shared a suggestion for me—to apply to become the executive director of a soup kitchen. A
The Compassion Tree
July 18th, 2025
“The canyon is burning. Evacuating now. Please send prayers,” wrote a friend over text during the start of the LA fires.
Los Angeles is my home, and the LA fires destroyed over 10,000 of them. They also burned up almost 100,000 acres of land, ruining the homes of the coastal live oak and palm, raccoon and
Spring 2025 Mendicant Introduction
April 1st, 2025
Since Fr. Richard published The Universal Christ in 2019, many of us on the CAC team heard him say, “If I ever wrote another book, which I assuredly don’t have the energy to do, it would be on the way of the prophet, and what the prophetic lineage has to teach us.”
I must have heard Richard say that a dozen
“The Tears of Things”
April 1st, 2025
In the first book of Virgil’s Aeneid (line 462), the hero Aeneas gazes at a mural that depicts a battle of the Trojan War and the deaths of his friends and countrymen. He is so moved with sorrow at the tragedy of it all that he speaks of “the tears of things” (lacrimae rerum). As Seamus Heaney translates it
Dancing with the Divine Fire
April 1st, 2025
Beloved CAC faculty member Dr. Barbara Holmes, known to her students affectionately as “Dr. B.,” passed away in late 2024. A giant in our contemplative community, she embodied a rare wisdom and impacted countless people. In a video recorded for Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations shortly before her death, Dr. B.
Inconsolable: The Path of the Prophet-Mystic
April 1st, 2025
Our religious conditioning has carved a gulf between the prophet and the mystic, just as we have between action and contemplation and between transcendence and immanence. It’s easy to buy into the illusion that these two spiritual orientations are fundamentally and mutually exclusive. But you can, of course, be both
A Parenting Approach
November 22nd, 2024
The irony for me is that despite years of sincere seeking and a commitment to CAC teachings, grace was forced on me by my strong-willed, verbally advanced child. She broke me in early, triumphantly proclaiming, “Mommy, I will always win against you because I have more energy to fight until the end!” She was