Book Club | "Let Your Heartbreak Be Your Guide: Lessons in Engaged Contemplation" discussed by author Father Adam Bucko and Mary Grace Puszka

 Father Adam Bucko in conversation with RLC’S Mary Grace Puszka to discuss “Let Your Heartbreak Be Your Guide: Lessons in Engaged Contemplation” (Orbis Books, 2022). Written against the backdrop of the pandemic and America’s reckoning with growing poverty, injustice and systemic racism, this book is uniquely positioned to accompany us through the disillusionment and violence of trying times. It offers reflections, stories, and insights from Adam Bucko’s years of prayer and activism, including in the streets with homeless and LGBTQ youth, in new monastic communities across the world, and as an Episcopal priest in an engaged contemplative community.

Indeed, Father Adam Bucko has been a committed voice in the movement for the renewal of Christian Contemplative Spirituality and the growing New Monastic movement. He has taught engaged contemplative spirituality in Europe and the United States and has authored “Let Your Heartbreak be Your Guide: Lessons in Engaged Contemplation” and co-authored “Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation” and “The New Monasticism: An Interspiritual Manifesto for Contemplative Living.”

Committed to an integration of contemplation and just practice, he cofounded an award-winning non-profit, the Reciprocity Foundation, where he spent 15 years working with homeless youth living on the streets of New York City, providing spiritual care, developing programs to end youth homelessness, and articulating a vision for spiritual mentoring in a post-religious world. He currently serves as a director of The Center for Spiritual Imagination at the Episcopal Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City, New York, and is a member of “The Community of the Incarnation,” a ‘new monastic’ community dedicated to democratizing the gifts of monastic spirituality and teaching contemplative spirituality, in the context of hearing and responding to the cry of the poor and the cry of the earth.

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