Reflections
June 20, 2026
July 18, 2026
Aug. 14, 2026
Cloister and World: The Legacy of Thomas Merton
I first discovered Thomas Merton while shelving books in the large bookstore where I worked. The title was not one that would have leapt into the hands of most browsers. But to one seeking a simpler path through the tangle of a major life transition, The Silent Life had its appeal. It is less apparent why it continued to beckon after a survey of chapter titles revealed its subject as monastic life, and honestly, that still puzzles me. But in its pages I would discover a new spiritual home.
Wisdom Lit: A Short Course in Reading Scripture
I have known a few people who decided, for various reasons, to read the Bible straight through. None of them finished – or even got very far. The stories in Genesis cook right along, about half of Exodus too. But the next three and a half books inevitably drag them to a halt. There is simply no payoff in slogging through the interminable lists of laws and rituals defining Israel’s obligations in their covenant with God. Thus these hapless readers never get far enough to encounter the frustrating inconsistencies and fantastical tales that might prompt the real reckoning: that is, that reading sacred texts is unlike reading anything else.
Keep It Together: The Imaginary Science/Spirit Split
It began in a creeping misunderstanding. The pioneering work of Francis Bacon and Galileo was never intended to dispense with religion, but rather to sort the proper methodologies with which to know God and the natural world. What was meant as a distinction became a crack, wedged further open with Darwin’s work on evolution. Both sides dug in – theologians closing ranks, scientists claiming ground that was never theirs to take. Conversation around science and faith became a zero sum game. Who would have imagined that the re-enchantment of the spiritual would come from the side of science?
Meet Kaira
From a solid foundation in both Master of Divinity and Master of Arts in Theology degrees, Kaira has pursued her own curriculum into and through the wealth of the world’s spiritual wisdom. Indigenous and institutional, philosophical and anecdotal, from the West and from the East, Kaira has cast a wide net in her search for truth. With the soul of a monastic, she brings a singleness of mind and heart into dialogue with the world’s challenges.
In these pages and in her book-in-progress, The Grand Adventure: Bearing the Imago, Kaira offers the distillation of her decades-long journey to discover what we are all looking for – meaning, purpose and greater life – and to bring our nature as imago dei to the transformation of the world.
Kaira's Book - Coming in September 2026!
The Grand Adventure rescues the spiritual life from a sense of settled reality and calls readers into the adventure it is meant to be. Drawing on philosophy, theology and the biblical narrative, Kaira builds an original cosmology seated in the imago dei, applies it to reenvision the Christian tradition and to bring Christianity into conversation with Asian spiritual traditions, then employs all to engender a renewed path into the world and into God, individually and collectively.