Guest: Pádraig Ó Tuama

We’re wrapping up our Faith Shakers series this week, and we hope you’ve found it as eye-opening and enlightening as we have to see what people of faith in non-traditional spaces have been doing to make the world a better, more thoughtful place. This episode takes us to yet another unique space where faith and art are being combined to great effect–and it’s through poetry. In case you’re having flashbacks to Shakespearean sonnets you had to study in high school, fear not. We’re going beyond poetry to recognize the beauty in the lyrics we love from our favorite songs, to the way thoughts are constructed by deep thinkers like modern poet Maya Angelou. Language, words, and poetry have always been a tool deeply embedded inside any sort of faith search.  So this week, we welcome a poet who also happens to be a theologian, and he’s going to walk us through the powerful ways that poetry can bring healing, hope, and reconciliation, Pádraig Ó Tuama is a poet and theologian whose work centers around language, power, conflict, politics, and religion. For several years, he was the leader of Corrymeela Community—Ireland’s oldest organization focused on religious reconciliation. He’s also the in-house theologian for the NPR show On Being, with Krista Tippet. Pádraig focuses on conflict resolution who dedicates his life to creating safe spaces for all people within the religious realm. He  shows us all that communication, understanding, and landing in the gray space is the way forward and that we can all find our faith space, no matter who we are or where we come from.