Write Papers and Recommend Books!
The Institute for the Urban Monk provides a wide-range of spiritual practices that help urban monks and others select the kind of practices to include in a Rule of Life in order to advance integration into action. Creating an integrative Rule of Life with personally selected spiritual practices will result in a life-long transformative relationship with God and others.
Integration Papers
What is Integration?
Integration occurs best when your spiritual practices and daily actions become interactive. It is a transformative experience that affects you, others that you interact with, and the social settings in which you interrelate. Opportunities for integration do not just occur during challenging times in our lives, but also during every day routine occasions. There will likely be many formative moments and experiences that will bring about life-long changes for yourself and others if practiced continually. Such transformation will act as a powerful reason to shape or reshape your values, principles, and opinions. Your integrative experiences will also act as a forceful reason to help others take positive actions to overcome problems and related issues that negatively affect the quality of their life, including their spirituality.
What Should be Included in my Paper?
Your paper should focus on how you use(d) one or more spiritual practices to integrate an experience of community service into your spiritual life. These experiences may involve an individual such as a homeless person or a neighbor in need, or engage an entire neighborhood or larger community in which you live, work, worship, socialize, or serve. Your paper should also focus on how the integrative experience became a challenging and changing force that transformed you, others, and your relationship with God.
Recommendations for Reading
Your recommendation for reading should focus on a book, article, or other printed work that would help others integrate their daily encounters with the spiritual experiences and practices highlighted in your recommendation. Your recommendation for reading is not meant to be a traditional book review. Your recommendation should simply provide a summary of how you feel someone could benefit and perhaps engage in a transformative experience of integration by reading the same printed work that you did.
NOTE: The intent is to list integration papers and recommendations for reading on the Urban Monk web site. However, they will only be posted with your permission.
If you would like additional information or would like to submit an integration paper or recommendation for reading please contact Joe Colletti, PhD at [email protected] or Sofia Herrera, PhD at [email protected]
If you are interested in learning more about the Institute for the Urban Monk and about the Society of Urban Monks click here.