What is Richard Rohr?
Richard Rohr (b. 1943) is an American Franciscan friar, founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, and the most widely read contemporary Christian contemplative writer in English. His work draws on the apophatic and mystical strands of the Christian tradition and reads them alongside Sufi, Hindu, and Buddhist parallels, placing all within what he calls the perennial tradition.
From Kansas to the Franciscans
Born in Kansas in 1943 to a Catholic family of German descent, Rohr entered the Franciscan Province of St John the Baptist and was ordained a priest in 1970. His formation drew on the Franciscan tradition as renewed after the Second Vatican Council: poverty, fraternity, and the union of contemplative and active life read in light of the Council's openness to other religious traditions. The 1970s proved formative. He emerged as a preacher in the charismatic renewal, founded the New Jerusalem Community in Cincinnati in 1971, and became an unlikely media figure at a time when the dominant Catholic voice in America was still largely conservative.
The Center for Action and Contemplation
In 1987 Rohr founded the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The name was chosen deliberately. His central argument, repeated across four decades of teaching, is that contemplation and action belong together: action without contemplation becomes mere politics, and contemplation without action becomes private piety. The CAC's flagship programme, the Living School, trains lay practitioners in two-year cohorts in what its faculty call the Christian wisdom tradition: the apophatic and mystical Christian inheritance read alongside its Hindu, Buddhist, and Sufi parallels. Faculty have included Rohr, James Finley (a student of Thomas Merton), Cynthia Bourgeault (an Episcopalian priest in the Centering Prayer lineage), and Brian McLaren. The CAC's Daily Meditations email series reaches several hundred thousand subscribers.
The books and the comparative-religion register
Rohr has published more than thirty books. *The Naked Now* (2009) is his most-cited work. It places Christian contemplation alongside the Sufi *fanāʾ* of Ibn ʿArabī, the Advaita neti neti of Ramana Maharshi, and the Mahāyāna śūnyatā, reading them all as expressions of one underlying recognition. Falling Upward (2011) draws on Carl Jung's idea of the two halves of life and applies it to spiritual development; it is the book through which many readers in the Krista Tippett On Being audience first found him. The Universal Christ (2019) is the doctrinal centrepiece. It rearticulates the cosmic Christ tradition, citing Paul's letter to the Colossians, Maximus the Confessor, John Duns Scotus, and Teilhard de Chardin, as the foundation of his entire reading of Christianity. Breathing Under Water (2011) applies the same contemplative lens to the Twelve-Step recovery tradition. The books are unsystematic by design. Rohr is a preacher, not a systematic theologian, and the writing reads like the notes of a teacher returning to the same recognition in different registers over four decades.
The criticisms and the lineage
Rohr has critics within Catholicism. Traditionalist writers have long objected that his comparative-religion approach flattens Christological claims into a perennialist substrate that the Christian tradition itself rejects. The Universal Christ doctrine has drawn the most sustained version of this objection. The CAC's response is to ground the project in the cosmic Christ line running from Colossians through the Greek Fathers, Maximus the Confessor, and Duns Scotus to Teilhard de Chardin, a lineage older and more orthodox than the objection allows. The institutional context is the same Catholic contemplative renewal that Thomas Keating and the Cistercian Centering Prayer movement built. Keating's *Open Mind, Open Heart*, Thomas Merton's *New Seeds of Contemplation*, and *Thoughts in Solitude* are the reading most Rohr readers have also encountered. The wider contemplative prayer entry maps the surrounding field.
Rohr, Merton, and Keating
Thomas Merton (1915–1968) was the defining contemplative voice for Rohr's generation, writing from inside a Cistercian monastery. Thomas Keating (1923–2018) built Centering Prayer as a structured sitting practice for lay practitioners. Rohr belongs to the same Catholic renewal as both but differs from each. He is not a monk but an itinerant Franciscan friar who builds institutions for lay formation. He is not primarily a method-teacher but a preacher and author. He is also more explicit than either in placing the Christian contemplative inheritance within a comparative-religion frame that includes Sufism, Advaita Vedanta, and Buddhism.
Why he matters
Rohr's significance is both institutional and stylistic. He took a Catholic contemplative inheritance that was fading from English-speaking parishes after Vatican II, rebuilt it as a teachable curriculum for lay practitioners outside the monastery, and gave it a comparative-religion vocabulary that let practitioners shaped by Buddhism or non-dual teaching recognise it as their own inheritance. The work sits in the same lineage as Keating's Open Mind, Open Heart, Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation, and the desert fathers literature the contemplative prayer renewal recovered. What Rohr added was a popular voice and an institutional platform built to outlive its founder. He turned eighty in 2023 and has stepped back from public ministry. The CAC has been transitioning to a post-Rohr leadership model.
