Introducing the reading for our Fall Series
September through November, 2026
“Rohr explores the gift of contemplative prayer, highlighting the beauty of simply being and allowing room for dichotomies. For example, whereas the western church in particular prefers to button things up or present difficult topics like death, pain and loss in the cheeriest perspective (if acknowledged at all), the gift of contemplative prayer allows us to sit with the grief and all the while experience the nurturing peace of God. So God is not separate from these things, but present in them.” from review by Brian Michael Steck
Richard Rohr, Franciscan friar and ecumenical teacher, bears witness to the deep wisdom of Christian mysticism and traditions of action and contemplation. Founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation, Father Richard teaches how God’s grace guides us to our birthright as beings made of Divine Love. He is the author of numerous books, including The Universal Christ, The Wisdom Pattern, Just This, and Falling Upward.Please order your book early so that you will have it before the series begins.
Click here to order from Chaucer’s Books in SB
We invite you to register today for this inspiring program.
Dates of Program: September 17 thru November 5, 2026
Each Thursday morning – 10:00am – 11:30
How: Zoom Platform
Fee: $80.00 The Thomas Heck Memorial Fund is available to those needing scholarship aid, and we encourage donations to the fund from those who are interested supporting our operating costs and each other.
Our work continues by virtue of many contributions.
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Word and Life
c/o Joe Schneider
533 Tallant Road
Santa Barbara, CA 93105
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Schedule of Presentations
Reflections on the spiritual journey of our lives,
inspired by Fr. Richard Rohr’s book, Everything Belongs.
September 17, 2026: Alice McDonald
Alice MacDonald has been a member and long-time Coordinator (retiring in 2008) of the Word and Life Community for 48 years. With a Master’s degree in Theology from Loyola Marymount University in LA, she was a founding member for the Institute for Adult Spirituality at the Franciscan Renewal Center at Mission Santa Barbara.
Her interest lies in the Contemplative practice of Silence as an experiential path bridging the traditional gap between God and the World, Spirit and Matter. Her formation and teaching have been shaped by the evolutionary spirituality of Teilhard de Chardin, Richard Rohr, Thomas Berry, and Cynthia Bourgeault among others.
September 24, 2026: Dr. David Richo
David Richo, PhD, MFT, is a psychotherapist, theologian, teacher, workshop leader, and writer who works in Santa Barbara and San Francisco California. He combines Jungian, poetic, and mythic perspectives in his work with the intention of integrating the psychological and the spiritual. His books and workshops include attention to Buddhist and Christian spiritual practices. To explore Dave Richo’s list of books in print and his library of free spiritual encouragement resources, please visit davericho.com.
October 1, 2026: Rev. Steve Jacobsen
Steve Jacobsen earned a BA in European History from UCSB, a Masters of Divinity from Princeton Seminary and a Doctorate in Educational Leadership from Seattle University. He served as a Presbyterian pastor for 30 years, with the last 16 in Goleta.
From 2008-2014 he was Executive Director at Hospice of Santa Barbara; from 2014 to May, 2018 he was Director at La Casa de Maria. He has published a book and 11 articles on the relationship of spirituality to various aspects of daily life, including secular work, leadership and digital technology.
He has been active in interfaith projects with Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist communities. Since “being “released into the wild” and retiring in 2018, he has served as an Interim Pastor, first at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian and now at Summerland Presbyterian. He writes a weekly blog, “Pocket Epiphanies” at www.drjsb.com
October 8, 2026: Judith Valente
Judith is an award-winning author and journalist. Her most recent book is How to Be: A Monk and a Journalist Reflect on Living & Dying, Purpose & Prayer, Forgiveness & Friendship (co-authored with Brother Paul Quenon, OCSO.)
She is a sought-after speaker and retreat leader on such subjects as living a more contemplative life, discovering inner wisdom through poetry, and finding meaning in your work. She is a lay associate of the Benedictine monastery Mount St. Scholastica in Atchison, Kansas, which is the subject of her 2013 memoir, Atchison Blue: A Search for Silence, a Spiritual Home and a Living Faith.
Ms. Valente worked as an on-air correspondent for the national PBS-TV news show Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly and is a former staff writer for The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. She was the senior correspondent and investigative reporter for the NPR affiliate GLT Radio in central Illinois, as well as a contributing correspondent for Chicago Public Radio. She contributes articles to US Catholic magazine and National Catholic Reporter and writes regular reflections for the monthly prayer booklet, Give Us This Day. Judith is the newly elected president of the International Thomas Merton Society which aims to keep alive Thomas Merton’s great contemplative and social justice legacy. She enjoys hiking, traveling in Italy and spending time in contemplative silence on the Illinois prairie where she lives.
October 15, 2026: Dennis Rivers
Dennis Rivers is a writer and teacher in his eighth decade, living in Eugene, Oregon, who prefers to describe himself in the first person when he himself is the one writing the description.
My wide range of interests include Liberation Theology, ecology, systems theory, graphic arts and communication studies. The most significant teachers in my life have been the philosopher Ramon Panikkar, the anti-nuclear activist Joanna Macy, the communication skills trainer Marshall Rosenberg, and the communication theorist Barnett Pearce.
Books I’ve written inclde Prayer Evolving: Five Personal Explorations into the Future of Prayer and The Seven Challenges Communication Skills Workbook. You can see my explorations of fractal geometry at DreamGeometry.Art. and review my approach to Liberation Theology at LiberationTheology.org.
October 29, 2026: Cynthia Bourgeault and Mary Ann Evans
Cynthia Bourgeault
Cynthia Bourgeault is a modern day mystic, Episcopal priest, writer, and internationally acclaimed retreat leader. She divides her time between solitude in her seaside hermitage in Maine and a demanding schedule traveling globally to spread the recovery of the Christian contemplative and Wisdom paths. She is a faculty member emeritus of the Center for Action and Contemplation and the founding director of an international network of Wisdom schools, uniting classic Christian mystical and monastic teaching with contemporary practices of mindfulness and embodied presence. She has been honored as one of the 100 most spiritually influential living people in 2021.Mary Ann Evans, PhD
“Mary Ann Evans is one of the wisest and most fully grounded and accomplished psychotherapeutic/wisdom counsellors in our network…” Cynthia Bourgeault
Mary Ann Evans, Ph.D, neuro-psychologist, has a rich and varied career in the psychological and educational arenas spanning over 50 years and specializing in work with individuals who experience emotional, social, medical and learn-ing challenges. She has presented her innovative work on brain plasticity and transformation extensively at conferences around the world and in the United States.She has been a neuropsychologist in Santa Barbara since 1989, working at the Rehabilitation Institute and Behavioral Wellness, as well as in private practice. Her work in personal healing and transformation is embodied through her dedication to partnering with horses in her program “Horse Wisdom for the Soul”.
Her spiritual journey has encompassed the exploration of many contemplative traditions, and she was most recently a student in Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation’s Living School. She has spent 20 years as a dedicated student in the Christian Wisdom Tradition, and her deepest spiritual awakening has come through resonance with Cynthia Bourgeault’s teachings about the heart of Christianity.
Rev. Dr. Tim Burnette
Tim writes and teaches in philosophy, theology, cosmology, and decolonial mysticism. He earned his doctorate from Claremont School of Theology, where he studied process metaphysics and compassion. He has hosted the Theopoetics Podcast and currently curates the Way Collective, which is a contemplative community for love and liberation in Santa Barbara, CA. He is a partner, father, musician, athlete, and avid reader. He agrees with Kurt Vonnegut that you can see all kinds of things from the edge that you can’t see from the center. Although…sometimes it helps to be centered out on the edge as well.Series Backstory
As we celebrate 50 years with Word and Life, one of Margaret Meade’s observations comes to mind. She urged us never to doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. It is within this context that we embark on our final season of Word and Life (a generative small group –if there ever was one). The first 20 years saw us as a deeply, committed Catholic Bible Study group –laying down a foundation of orthodox learning including the Gospels, Acts, Letters from Paul, Genesis, Exodus, plus a few prophets, the women of the bible and an overview of the Bible.
By the year 2000, we changed our modus operandi. Our Steering Committee took on the practice of Quaker-like listening for we should be about …. seeking the source book and speakers that could unfold the spiritual implications and practices that we need to live into our changing reality. We followed Havel Vaclav’s teaching that “The power for authentic leadership is found not in external arrangements but in the human heart” Not surprisingly, a few years along, that practice led to a 10-week season of training about the power of the heart’s intelligence and its role in new levels of consciousness, that has continued as a practice in W & L ever since (The Spiritual Heart – evolutionary Partnership of Heart/Mind Intelligence 2018)
In 2000, the first book we chose to explore and apply was The Apocalypse and the Third Millennium by George Montague. Twenty years later Richard Rohr’s The Universal Christ dealt with many of Montague’s themes, as part of the continuing conversation. A similar synchronicity shows up when we note that in the following winter season (2001) The God of Evolution by Fr. Denis Richards introduced concepts that have continued to appear over the years and that Cynthia Bourgeault will be touching on again in her session with us this Fall.
Links and synchronicities like this have been characteristic of the ‘living’ curriculum that we’ve been guided to create by the Spirit. Our planning process has often felt like ‘flying under the radar”. As example: Just as our national problems were ratcheting up in 2016, we felt guided to read Stephen Dinan’s Sacred America / Sacred World: Fulfilling our Mission in Service to All . The next season saw us tackling Parker Palmer’s Healing the Heart of America – while the following year we spent 10 weeks Confronting Racism … all planned and delivered just as we needed those models and examples to navigate our cultural dysfunction.
In the last 12 years, we’ve been drawn to know and befriend our evolving planet. In ten separate seasons during this period, we’ve studied and discovered new ways of seeing and participating within the fields of Celtic Spirituality and Spiritual Ecology, renewing our understanding of the Ancient wisdom traditions and recognizing the Wisdom of the indigenous mind, The New Story, Cosmogenesis, and The Church of The Wild. ….over a decade of discovering how spiritual practice and understanding can change our state of being and build an interactive relationship with our intelligent planet.
One of our greatest wisdom sources has been the writings of Richard Rohr. It turns out that, over the years, we’ve chosen 8 of his seminal books to study – each one a ‘change agent’ in its own right. We’ve chosen Rohr’s Everything Belongs as the source book for our final season . It’s a book about prayer that’s more for the heart than for the head – teaching us how to “do” wisdom and “see with new eyes” the life we are given. Its guidance will help us tune into the next steps we might find to keep the small group-legacy of Word and Life alive in our world.