This year’s Spiritual Directors’ Book Circle is an invitation into the 3 C’s: conversation, contemplation, and companionship. Together we will read across poetry, prophecy, contemplation, activism, Indigenous wisdom, creativity, queer theology, and spiritual resilience. Some books may feel like balm. Some may unsettle us. Some may give language to experiences we have carried wordlessly for years.
As spiritual directors, we spend much of our lives listening deeply to the lives and questions of others. This circle is an opportunity to tend our own inner lives and vocational imagination. To notice what stirs. What resists. What nourishes. What calls us further toward courage, compassion, liberation, and wonder.
Our hope is that this year forms not only a reading group, but a circle of practice and a network of practitioners.
Give Me a Word: The Promise of an Ancient Practice to Guide Your Year
by Christine Valters Paintner (2025)
We begin the year with the ancient practice of receiving a “word” for the year ahead. Paintner invites readers into contemplative listening, discernment, and spiritual attentiveness. This book offers a spacious beginning to our year together and encourages us to notice what wants to guide us in this season of life and ministry.
Walking in Wonder
by John O’Donohue (2018)
As autumn deepens, we turn toward beauty, imagination, and the sacredness woven through ordinary life. O’Donohue’s reflections and blessings invite us into a spirituality of presence and wonder. This is a book to savor slowly and perhaps read aloud.
Writing Creativity and Soul
by Sue Monk Kidd (2025)
In a season when many caregivers and spiritual leaders are carrying exhaustion, this book offers creativity as soul care rather than performance. Sue Monk Kidd explores writing, imagination, memory, and the inner life as spiritual practice. No one needs to be a “writer” to enter this conversation. This is a book about voice and tending the self beneath the roles we carry.
How the Stars Get in Your Bones
by Jan Richardson (2025)
December invites tenderness, blessing, grief, and light. Jan Richardson’s work holds all of these with extraordinary care. Through poetry, image, and reflection, she companions readers through threshold seasons and reminds us how beauty and sorrow often travel together.
Embracing Hope: On Freedom, Responsibility & the Meaning of Life
by Viktor E. Frankl (2024)
At the turn of the calendar year, we engage profound questions of meaning, freedom, responsibility, and hope. Frankl’s reflections emerge from both suffering and deep spiritual insight. Rather than offering easy optimism, this book asks what it means to live purposefully and humanely in difficult times.
Queering Contemplation: Finding Queerness in the Roots and Future of Contemplative Spirituality
by Cassidy Hall (2024)
This month we explore contemplation through the lenses of queerness, embodiment, liberation, and expansive spirituality. Cassidy Hall invites readers to question binaries and reimagine contemplative traditions with greater honesty, hospitality, and freedom. This conversation may stretch many of us in fruitful ways.
Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth
by Four Arrows and Darla Narvaez with multiple voices (2022)
As spring begins, we widen our lens beyond individual spirituality toward relationship, community, ecology, and interdependence. This collection invites readers to examine the assumptions of dominant Western culture and consider Indigenous wisdom traditions that emphasize reciprocity, kinship, and balance.
Sage Warrior: Wake to Oneness, Practice Pleasure, Choose Courage, Become Victory
by Valarie Kaur (2026)
Valarie Kaur weaves activism, spirituality, embodiment, grief, joy, and collective liberation into a compelling call toward courageous living. This book asks how we remain awake and loving in difficult times without abandoning ourselves or one another.
The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage
by Richard Rohr (2025)
We close the year with a book wrestling honestly with prophecy, lament, anger, contemplation, and public life. Rohr explores what spiritual wisdom asks of us in an era marked by polarization and exhaustion. This feels like an appropriate concluding conversation for spiritual directors living and serving in complex times.
