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 Cynthia Bourgeault
The Rev. Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault is the founder and principal teacher for the Aspen Wisdom School as well as a founding director and the principal teacher for the Contemplative Society. She also serves on the core faculty of the spiritual paths Institute in Aspen, Colorado. An Episcopal priest and international retreat and conference leader, Cynthia is passionately committed to recovering the Christian contemplative path and has worked closely with Fr. Thomas Keating, Fr. Bruno Barnhart, and other Christian contemplative masters, as well as in Sufism and the Christian inner traditions.
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There are few figures in Christian literature as provocative, as controversial, and as mysterious as Mary Magdalene: the "apostle of apostles" who, according to some apocryphal texts, was Jesus' most beloved disciple. For millennia she has challenged Christian ideas of sexuality, gender, and spiritual embodiment—especially in light of the so-called Gospel of Mary, discovered in the late 19th century somewhere in northern Egypt.
In this latest installation of our Exploring the Future of Christianity series, Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault talks to Ken Wilber about her latest book The Meaning of Mary Magdalene, exploring the life and lessons of one of Christianity's most important women. Listen as Cynthia and Ken reveal a startling new understanding of the radical intimacy shared by Jesus and Mary, as well as a largely-unacknowledged path of conscious love that might be called a type of "Christian Tantra"—a path of devotion and mutuality that is full of ecstatic bliss, and free from inhibition or repression of any kind.
About The Mystery of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity
 Mary Magdalene is one of the most influential symbols in the history of Christianity— yet, if you look in the Bible, you'll find only a handful of verses that speak of her. How did she become such a compelling saint in the face of such paltry evidence? In her effort to answer that question, Cynthia Bourgeault examines the Bible, church tradition, art, legend, and newly discovered texts to see what's there. She then applies her own reasoning and intuition, informed by the wisdom of the ages-old Christian contemplative tradition. What emerges is a radical view of Mary Magdalene as Jesus's most important disciple, the one he considered to understand his teaching best. That teaching was characterized by a nondualistic approach to the world and by a deep understanding of the value of the feminine. Cynthia shows how an understanding of Mary Magdalene can revitalize contemporary Christianity, how Christians and others can, through her, find their way to Jesus's original teachings and apply them to their modern lives.
Ken Wilber is the most widely translated academic writer in America, with 25 books translated into some 30 foreign languages, and is the first philosopher-psychologist to have his Collected Works published while still alive. Wilber is an internationally acknowledged leader and the preeminent scholar of the Integral stage of human development, which continues to gather momentum around the world. His many books, all of which are still in print, can be found at Amazon.com. Some of his more popular books include Integral Spirituality; No Boundary; Grace and Grit; Sex, Ecology, Spirituality; and the "everything" books: A Brief History of Everything (one of his largest selling books) and A Theory of Everything (probably the shortest introduction to his work). Ken Wilber is the founder of Integral Institute, Inc., the co-founder of Integral Life, Inc., and the Senior Fellow of Integral Life Spiritual Center.
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