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Joan Chittister

Joan Chittister is one of the most influential religious and social leaders of our time. For over 40 years she has advocated on behalf of peace, human rights, women’s issues, and church renewal. A sought-after speaker and counselor, she is also the bestselling author of more than 50 books, hundreds of articles, and an online column for the National Catholic Reporter. She has received numerous writing awards and honors for her work, and is a noted international lecturer as well as a former elected fellow at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge University, England.
 
Sister Joan was the featured guest of Oprah Winfrey on Super Soul Sunday in both 2015 and 2019. She has appeared on Meet the Press, 60 Minutes, CBS News, NOW with Bill Moyers, and numerous BBC and NPR programs.

Author photo © Ed Bernik

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Spirituality

Sister Joan Chittister: Presence and Perpetual Goodnes...

Joan Chittister — January 20, 2026

What does enlightenment look like in Christian tradition? How do we cultivate the kind of presence that transforms ordinary moments into sacred encounters?

This week on Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon shares a rebroadcast of one of her most cherished interviews—a conversation recorded at Mount St. Benedict’s Monastery in Erie, Pennsylvania with Sister Joan Chittister, just before her 83rd birthday. Sister Joan is an American Benedictine nun, theologian, and author of more than 50 books who has spent over 40 years advocating for peace, human rights, women’s issues, and church renewal.

Join Tami and Sister Joan to explore:

  • The Christian path from contemplation to unity and “seeing the world through God’s eyes”
  • Sister Joan’s mystical experience of light as a teenager and how it shaped her entire spiritual life
  • The sacrament of the present moment and what true presence actually requires
  • Why opening your heart sometimes means closing it to certain things
  • How spiritual traditions are evolving and what religion offers in an increasingly secular age
  • The prayer Sister Joan repeats before every talk: accepting “whatsoever deaths thou shall choose to send me”
  • Why consciousness—not mindfulness techniques—is the foundation of contemplative living

This is a conversation about what a lifetime of monastic practice reveals, the electricity of divine presence, and how struggle itself becomes the crucible for transformation.

Want to go deeper? Listen to the complete seven-hour conversation in the audio series Catching Fire at soundstrue.com

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Post Views: 27,599
Mindfulness Spirituality

Joan Chittister: Presence and Perpetual Goodness

Joan Chittister — May 5, 2020

Sister Joan Chittister is an American theologian, Benedictine nun, and the author of more than 50 books. For over 40 years, she has passionately advocated on behalf of peace, human rights, women’s issues, and church renewal. This week’s podcast shares with you an excerpt from Sister Joan’s audio program, Catching Fire: Being Transformed, Becoming Transforming, a seven-hour conversation with Tami Simon intended to spark the fire of the divine within each one of us.

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Post Views: 2,721
Mindfulness Spirituality

Sister Joan Chittister: Lighting a Fire with Faith

Joan Chittister — December 8, 2017

Sister Joan Chittister is a member of Benedictine Sisters of Erie, Pennsylvania; the bestselling author of more than 50 books and hundreds of articles; and one of the most influential contemporary leaders and activists for human rights, women’s issues, and church renewal. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Sister Joan about the endless interplay between doubt and faith. They discuss the ways in which God sees all of creation, and what this perspective then asks of us. Tami and Sister Joan talk about the necessity of embracing humility, as well as what it means to know the right questions to ask on one’s spiritual journey. Finally, Sister Joan comments on the maturation of faith as one grows older and the “last great adventure” offered by death. (66 minutes)

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Spirituality

Michelle Cassandra Johnson: “Invocations and Spe...

— October 13, 2026

What are we actually being protected from—and how do we call in the support we need to stay grounded, whole, and connected to ourselves?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Michelle Cassandra Johnson—author, mystic, activist, spiritual director, and racial equity educator—about her new book, You Are Protected: Invoking Spiritual Support to Sustain Your Energy. Drawing on ancestral wisdom, archetypes, elemental energies, and spell work, Michelle offers a grounded, practical vision of protection—not as armor against the world, but as a way of staying rooted in our own center.

Join Tami and Michelle to explore:

  • What we’re really protected from, and why protection isn’t about building walls
  • Naming malevolent energies—from collective distraction to war and disconnection
  • How to call on ancestors, archetypes, and elemental energies (mountains, trees, water) for support
  • The practice of “spiritual hygiene,” and why it matters as much as physical or mental hygiene
  • How to cast a simple protection spell using salt—no cauldron required
  • Creating a sigil: turning an intention into a symbol you can charge and work with
  • Michelle’s own birth story, and why she calls a traumatic beginning “auspicious”
  • Calling in collective protection for our human family during a precarious time

Whether you keep a cauldron of your own or have never cast a spell in your life, this conversation offers real tools—and real permission—to protect your energy, tend your spirit, and stay open-hearted even in difficult times.

Listen now, and find your own way toward protection. →

This conversation offers genuine transmission, not just concepts about awakening, but the palpable presence of realized teachers exploring the growing edge of spiritual understanding together, and it originally aired on Sounds True One.

Get a FREE month of membership at https://bit.ly/STOne-Free-Month.

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Personal Growth Spirituality

Just One Question | Adyashanti: Is It an Awakening If ...

Adyashanti — October 1, 2026

Is a spiritual awakening only real if it completely rearranges your life? That’s the question Tami Simon puts to Adyashanti in this episode, and his answer digs into something a lot of seekers wrestle with: the gap between a powerful glimpse of clarity and the ongoing work of actually living from it.

Adya, the American-born teacher behind books like The End of Your World and Falling into Grace, walks through why those temporary tastes of awakening are real, even when they fade, and offers a surprisingly practical way to hold onto what they revealed without grasping at them. Then he does something rare: he tells the story of his own first major awakening, a moment he describes as feeling like a nuclear explosion going off inside him.

Here’s what we cover:

  • Why a fleeting shift still counts as a real awakening, even if it doesn’t stick
  • The two (seemingly contradictory) pieces of advice Adya gives people chasing a past peak experience
  • How the first awakening can feel like a “freebie,” while everything after asks you to participate consciously
  • Adya’s own account of the night everything fell away and the still, small voice that told him, “This isn’t all of it. Keep going.”

And there’s so much more. Listen to the entire conversation from this Insights At the Edge episode, “Waking Up: What Does It Really Mean?” 

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Meditation Spirituality

Tracee Stanley: What We Need in These Threshold Times

— September 22, 2026

What if the antidote to a world coming apart isn’t a bigger plan, but a smaller, daily act of devotion?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Tracee Stanley—teacher of yoga nidra, meditation, and self-inquiry, founder of Empowered Life Circle, and author of the new Sounds True book Living Ritual: Infuse Each Day with Purpose and Spirit—about why ritual may be the most important practice we have during what she calls threshold times.

Join Tami and Tracee to explore:

  • The threshold question at the heart of ritual: what within me is dying, and what is waiting to be born?
  • Why devotion, not discipline, is the doorway—and how to weave practice through an ordinary householder’s day without shame
  • Tracee’s shard of light in Cape Town, and the years it took to find language for it
  • The body as shrine: the origins of yoga nidra in nyasa, the ancient practice of anointing the body as a divine temple
  • Earth dreaming—lying on the land and letting the land dream through you
  • Her reframe of the four Purusharthas, turning prosperity into support and pleasure into relationship
  • Sankalpa as a vow that leads to dharma, not a manifestation wish list
  • The analog cocoon and the night school: reclaiming sleep and dream time from the phone
  • Why enlightenment may be less a permanent state than a moment available in the space between two breaths

Tracee also speaks candidly about walking away from a successful film career, and what a surgery taught her about the ego that refuses to let the body rest.

Tracee opens and closes this interview with a short guided ritual you can practice along with.

Listen now, and let something be reshaped. →

This conversation offers genuine transmission, not just concepts about awakening, but the palpable presence of realized teachers exploring the growing edge of spiritual understanding together, and it originally aired on Sounds True One.

Get a FREE month of membership at https://bit.ly/STOne-Free-Month.

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Sounds True is a multimedia publishing company founded in 1985 by Tami Simon, with the mission of disseminating spiritual wisdom. The company is based in Lafayette, Colorado.

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