What If Contemplation Is Easier and More Human Than We Realize?
Award-winning translator, author, poet, teacher, and workshop leader, Carmen Acevedo Butcher, PhD, is core faculty and Dean at the Center for Action and Contemplation, founded by Father Richard Rohr. Her translation for Shambhala Publications of the fourteenth-century contemplative classic The Cloud of Unknowing received a 46th Georgia Author of the Year Award. Martin Laird calls her translation of Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence “the new standard,” and it was named by Spirituality & Practice to its Best Books List. At the University of Georgia Carmen earned an MA and a PhD in Medieval Studies, and as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of London, she worked with monastic manuscripts in London and Oxbridge libraries and translated homilies by the tenth-century Benedictine abbot, Ælfric of Eynsham, published as God of Mercy: Ælfric’s Sermons and Theology (Mercer University Press). Carmen has been interviewed on the BBC World Service The Compass, NPR Morning Edition, Center for Action and Contemplation’s Everything Belongs, Turning to the Mystics, and Learning How To See, and many other podcasts. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, in the College Writing Programs, and she is often found in the marsh chanting Psalm 46:10 in Old English.
Website: carmenbutcher.com
Books:
- Practice of the Presence: A Revolutionary Translation by Carmen Acevedo Butcher with Study Guide, 12-page digital resource for book clubs; Best Books of 2022 List by Spirituality & Practice
- The Cloud of Unknowing With the Book of Privy Counsel: A New Translation
- St. Hildegard of Bingen, Doctor of the Church: A Spiritual Reader
- Man of Blessing: A Life of Saint Benedict
Discussion of this interview in the BatGap Community Facebook Group
Interview recorded September 19, 2026.






