About the Presenters
Brian McLaren is an author, speaker, pastor, and networker among innovative Christian leaders, thinkers, and activists. He graduated from University of Maryland with degrees in English (BA and MA). In 2004, he was awarded a Doctor of Divinity Degree (honoris causa) from Carey Theological Seminary in Vancouver, BC, Canada. In 1982, he left a career in higher education to help form Cedar Ridge Community Church (crcc.org).
He has written for or contributed interviews to many periodicals, including Leadership, Sojourners, Worship Leader, and Conversations, and his books include: The Secret Message of Jesus, Everything Must Change, Finding Our Way Again, A New Kind of Christian, Adventures in Missing the Point (with Dr. Anthony Campolo), and Church in the Emerging Culture, among many others.
He is actively involved in a growing generative friendship among missional Christian leaders (www.emergentvillage.com); serves as a board chair for Sojourners (sojo.net), and is a founding member of Red Letter Christians. Brian is married to Grace, and they have four young adult children. Brian travels extensively, and his personal interests include ecology, fishing, hiking, music, art, and literature. Links to online articles and songs are available at www.brianmclaren.net.
Phyllis Tickle is the founding editor of the Religion Department of Publishers Weekly, the international journal of the book industry and is an authority and lecturer on religion in America. Ms. Tickle is the author of over two dozen books in religion and spirituality, most notably the Divine Hours series of manuals for observing fixed-hour prayer. She was with Publishers Weekly until her retirement in 2004, before which she had a career in academia. In September 1996, she received the Mays Award, one of the book industry's most prestigious awards for lifetime achievement in writing and publishing, and specifically in recognition of her work in gaining mainstream media coverage of religion publishing. In 2004, she received the honorary degreee of Doctor of Humane Letters from the Berkeley School of Divinity at Yale University. In 2007, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from The Christy Awards. She is currently a Senior Fellow of Cathedral College of the Washington National Cathedral. A founding member of The Canterbury Roundtable, she serves on a number of advisory and corporate boards. A lay eucharistic minister and lector in the Episcopal Church, she is the mother of seven children and, with her physician-husband, makes her home on a small farm in Lucy, Tennessee.
Fr. Richard Rohr internationally noted author and spiritual teacher, is a Franciscan of the New Mexico province and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation. Fr. Richard’s gift is articulating to our minds what we already know in our hearts. He considers the proclamation of the Gospel to be his primary call and uses many different platforms to communicate that message. Themes he addresses in service of the Gospel include Eco-Spirituality, Scripture as liberation, the integration of action and contemplation, community building, peace and justice issues, male spirituality, and the Enneagram.
Richard is probably best known for his numerous recorded teachings, and through the Center’s quarterly publication, Radical Grace. He is a regular contributing writer for Sojourners and Tikkun magazines.
Some of his best known books include: Everything Belongs; Radical Grace: Daily Meditations; Adam’s Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation; Hope Against Darkness ;The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective; From Wild Men to Wise Men: Reflections on Male Spirituality; and his latest book Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality was published in November 2007.
Richard has also been a featured essayist on NPR’s “This I Believe” and a guest of Dr. Mehmet Oz on the “Oprah and Friends” radio show; he also appears in the 2006 documentary, ONE, featuring spiritual teachers from around the world. Check the Mustard Seed Resource Center for all Fr. Richard's works.
Alexie Torres-Fleming is the founder of Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice (www.ympj.org) in the South Bronx. In addition, she is the co-founder of the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance, a coalition of local groups that is “confronting the legacy of Robert Moses” by campaigning to replace the Sheridan Expressway with affordable housing and green spaces.
Ms. Torres-Fleming’s work generates creative use of the urban environment and provides neighborhood leadership to solve common problems. Her leadership in her community dates back to 1992, when she helped lead a march to protest the drug-dealing and violence plaguing the South Bronx neighborhood where she grew up. The drug dealers retaliated by burning down her parish church, a building that she and the protestors had been using as their headquarters. This attack emboldened her to become even more involved in her old neighborhood. She moved back to the South Bronx from Manhattan and founded YMPJ, a faith-based, community development organization that aims to empower local youth. Using education and community development, YMPJ has helped a generation of Bronx children discover that through advocacy, community organizing, journalism, environmentalism, and the arts, they can play an active role in shaping and improving their neighborhood. This fall, the group will open “Concrete Plant Park” on the site of an abandoned concrete plant on the Bronx River.
Alexie lives in the South Bronx with her husband and two children, a few blocks from the housing project where she grew up.
Shane Claiborne is a founding partner of The Simple Way, a faith community in inner city Philadelphia that has helped to birth and connect radical faith communities around the world. These 'new monastic' communities seek to follow Jesus, to rediscover the spirit of the early Church, and to incarnate the “Kingdom of God” -- standing in stark contrast to the world of militarism and materialism. At the Simple Way, their little revolution is lived out locally, as days are spent feeding hungry folks, doing collaborative arts with children, running a community store, hanging out with neighbors, and reclaiming trash-strewn lots by planting gardens. Shane and The Simple Way do much work to expose the fundamental structures that create poverty and to imagine alternatives to them. Shane graduated from Eastern University, and did graduate work at Princeton Seminary. His ministry experience is varied, from a 10-week stint working alongside Mother Teresa in Calcutta, to a year spent serving a wealthy mega-congregation at Willow Creek Community Church outside Chicago. Shane serves on the Board of Directors for The Christian Community Development Association (www.ccda.org/). Shane writes and travels extensively speaking about peacemaking, social justice, and Jesus. He is featured in the DVD series “Another World Is Possible” and is the author of the several books including The Irresistible Revolution and Jesus for President.
About the Conference Hosts
The Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC), located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was founded in 1987 by Franciscan Father Richard Rohr who saw the need for a training/formation center that would allow spiritually seeking people to balance social action with contemplation, and contemplation with social action. Committed to offering a constructive message of the Gospel that crosses boundaries of religion, ethnicity, social class and gender, the CAC provides numerous programs and resources aimed at offering hope, inspiration and spiritual challenge.