Animate: Practices -- Meet the Voices

Now Featured at the Patheos Book Club
Animate: Practices
With Brian McLaren, Sara Miles, Mike Slaughter, Phyllis Tickle, Shane Claiborne, Enuma Okoro, and Doug Pagitt

The Voices of Animate

Brian McLaren
Prayer: Oriented toward God

Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, activist, and networker among innovative Christian leaders. His dozen-plus books include A New Kind of Christianity, A Generous Orthodoxy, Naked Spirituality, Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?, and We Make the Road by Walking.

Brian was brought up in the Plymouth Brethren, a fundamentalist group (think "literal six-day creation"), and the originators of dispensationalism (think "the Rapture" and "Left Behind"), and the heritage of Garrison Keillor (think "Sanctified Brethren" of Lake Wobegon), David Batstone, and Jim Wallis. He also spent several years as a charismatic and a neo-Calvinist, and he wrote his master's thesis on a Catholic novelist (Walker Percy). Unsurprisingly, he has written about "conflicted religious identity syndrome" (CRIS).

Sara Miles
Food: Eating, with Jesus

Sara Miles is a writer whose book Take This Bread tells the story of her "unexpected and inconvenient" conversion to Christianity, and how a mystical first experience of Holy Communion led her to organize hungry people to offer literally tons of free groceries at the altar each week, without conditions. She's the author of Jesus Freak: Feeding Healing Raising the Dead, about unorthodox Christian communities built around actually doing these works of Jesus, and City of God, which looks at public worship through one Ash Wednesday as it unfolds in the streets of her city.

Sara is Director of Ministry at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, and the founder and director of The Food Pantry. She preaches and speaks widely around the country.

Mike Slaughter
Worship: Seeking God's Presence

Rev. Mike Slaughter is in his fourth decade as the chief dreamer of Ginghamsburg Church in Tipp City, Ohio, and the spiritual entrepreneur of ministry marketplace innovations. His lifelong passion to reach the lost and set the oppressed free has made him a tireless and leading advocate for the children, women, and men of Darfur, Sudan. Mike's call to afflict the comfortable challenges Christians to wrestle with God and their God-destinies. He is the author of 14 books, including Change the World and Christmas is Not Your Birthday, which embody what it means to take the church into the world, rather than simply coaxing the world into the church.

Phyllis Tickle
Sacraments: A Tapestry of Traditions

Phyllis is the founding editor of the Religion Department of Publishers Weekly and the author of more than three dozen books, including the best-selling trio, The Great Emergence, Emergence Christianity, and The Age of the Spirit, and the classic The Divine Hours series of fixed-hour prayer manuals. A recognized authority on religion in America, she is a popular and much-sought-after lecturer. She is a lector and lay Eucharistic minister in the Episcopal Church.

Shane Claiborne
Money: The Joy of Sharing

Shane Claiborne is a best-selling author, renowned activist, sought-after speaker, and self-proclaimed "recovering sinner." Shane writes and speaks around the world about peacemaking, social justice, and Jesus, and is the author of numerous books, including The Irresistible Revolution and Jesus for President. He is the visionary leader of The Simple Way in Philadelphia, and his work has been featured in Fox News, Esquire, SPIN, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and CNN.