Omid Safi sits down with Mike Petrow and Drew Jackson from The Center for Action and Contemplation, founded by Franciscan friar Richard Rohr, to explore how a unified approach to spirituality can deepen our faith.

This podcast was originally published on the Everything Belongs Podcast, produced by The Center for Action and Contemplation (CFAC).

The Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) is an educational nonprofit introducing seekers to the contemplative Christian path of transformation. Franciscan Richard Rohr founded the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) in 1987 because he saw a deep need for the integration of both action and contemplation—the two are inseparable. As Father Richard likes to say, the most important word in our Center’s name is neither Action nor Contemplation, but the word and. This podcast episode explores elements of a chapter in Richard Rohr’s book: “Entering the World of Another: Francis and the Sultan of Egypt.”

Hosts of the Everything Belongs podcast, Mike and Drew, enjoy a conversation with Omid Safi about:

• Love as a representation of God in action
• The heart of the Islamic tradition
• Seeing the soul of the divine in all humans
• Coming from love and returning to love
• Considering how we want to spend our lives
• The genocide and pain happening in our world
• Remembering the core roots of religion as kindness and love
• Traversing across many different traditions and seeing the beauty in it all
• The importance of language and art in our experience of life and religion
• Saint Francis and the Sultan as a model for compassion
• Combining the mandates of contemplation and action

“What if we come to see the human heart as the highest shrine of God? How would it change the way we live together? How would it change the way we treat one another? How would it change the way we walk on the earth? The more our ethics and contemplative life feed into each other, the more luminous all of it becomes.” – Omid Safi

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Getting down to the basics of Sufism, James Cooke and Omid Safi discuss the mystery of love and our enmeshment with God.

This time on the Sufi Heart podcast, Omid Safi and James Cooke discuss:

• Sufism and mystical Islam
• Getting closer to a divine reality
• Types of love within Sufism
• Recognizing that we are interwoven with all things
• Pure love as the antidote of ego
• How we are enmeshed with God
• Making our daily life our practice
• The diversity within traditions of Islam
• Misrepresentations of Islam in mainstream media
• Extending love to absolutely everyone
• Self-love and growing in our practice of loving

About James Cooke, PhD:

James Cooke started the Inner Space Institute with the aim of helping greater numbers of people to access spiritual growth, without any of the unscientific beliefs that are common in spiritual circles. James trained as a neuroscientist after an awakening as a teenager that showed him the reality of spiritual states of consciousness. He holds three degrees from Oxford University (a PhD and Masters in Neuroscience & a BA in Experimental Psychology). He has conducted scientific research for over a decade at institutions such as Oxford University, University of California, Berkeley, University College London, Trinity College Dublin, and Riken Brain Sciences Institute in Tokyo. James is the author of The Dawn of Mind: How Matter Became Conscious and Alive (coming December 2024), which synthesizes science and spiritual insight to offer a radical solution to the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

“I feel like for some people, this emphasis on love can be quite healing to hear, because I grew up in a time where there was a kind of grotesque, simplified caricature of Islam…it’s healing to have contact with the reality of these traditions.” – James Cooke, PhD

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Exploring what it means to practice Islam in a world filled with evil, Omid Safi explains how strangeness can bring us back home to God.

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In this episode, Omid Safi holds a talk on:

• Sacred sounds and the movement of the heavenly spheres
• Heavy hearts from global suffering and genocide
• The counterculture of Islam when it began
• Looking into our own communities to consider what seems strange
• Not being afraid to veer from tradition
• Ways that we can become strangers to our own religion
• Standing with those who are vulnerable
• Returning home to the loving presence of God
• Remembering what it means to be a Sufi
• Taking care of the poor, the needy, the strangers, the lonely

“We want to become re-acquainted and return to our original home which is the very loving presence of God. That’s where and when we’re going to be at home.” – Omid Safi

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