Compassion in Practice: The Way of Jesus by Frank Rogers Jr.
Compassion may seem as though it is in short supply these days, but a compassionate sacred presence actually sustains this wounded world. Feeling sensitivity to the emotions and struggles of others brings our communities closer together. A positive compassionate focus can guide our relationships with ourselves and others. Frank Rogers is an expert at this exact practice.
Author of Cradled in the Arms of Compassion, Rogers gives us practical tools with which to employ compassion in our daily lives in his new book, Compassion in Practice: The Way of Jesus. An internationally-renowned compassion teacher, Rogers examines the spiritual path of radical compassion Jesus walked and taught, grounded in God's extravagant love for all people. This path transforms hardened hearts, and brings healing and wholeness to even the most challenging situations.
"I genuinely believe that compassion is the soul-force that heals and restores us personally, relationally and socially," says Rogers. "Compassionate care for our own souls can bring us back home to our highest self where we can live from a space of spiritual well-being; compassionate care is the bond that connects us to our loved ones; and compassionate engagement with others has the potential of finding common ground, repairing social wounds, and cultivating a community of equity, dignity, and common humanity."
In this inspiring and practical book, you'll discover a series of practices to ground and restore you through self-compassion as you cultivate an ethic of radical care that extends not only to loved ones, neighbors, and strangers, but also to enemies, opponents, and oppressors. Illuminated with extraordinary real-life stories of restorative love in action, these practices will equip you to step heart-first into a challenging world, ready to engage in a new way that beats with the pulse of compassion.
"Religions promote compassion. All else is commentary," says Rogers. "When true to their spiritual essence, religious traditions do no more than deepen people’s connection to the compassionate source of life, restore people to the fullness of loved and loving vitality, and send people forth with expanded capacities to be active embodiments of compassion in the world. This is the heartbeat of any religion that is truly spiritually alive."
Compassion in Practice is available now and you can order it here. For more on radical compassion and the roots of Roger’s Compassion Practice, you can find Cradled in the Arms of Compassion: A Spiritual Journey from Trauma to Recovery at www.lakedrivebooks.com.
Frank Rogers Jr., PhD, is the Muriel Bernice Roberts Professor of Spiritual Formation and Narrative Pedagogy at Claremont School of Theology. He’s a spiritual director, speaker, retreat leader, and the author of Practicing Compassion, Compassion in Practice: The Way of Jesus, and The God of Shattered Glass: A Novel. He focuses on spirituality that is contemplative, creative, and socially liberative. He is the cofounder of the Center for Engaged Compassion (centerforengagedcompassion.com) and lives in Southern California with his wife, Dr. Alane Daugherty, with whom he shares three sons.
