Christine Valters Paintner Books in Order

Paintner expands sacred reading beyond Scripture to include visual art, music, dreams, landscapes, and personal stories. She explains lectio divina as a heart-centered practice for noticing divine presence throughout the whole of life.

Co-written with Betsey Beckman, this resource helps spiritual directors and caregivers use expressive arts with care. Exercises, examples, and practical guidance explore how image, story, movement, music, and imagination can deepen spiritual direction.

Organized around St. Francis’s Canticle of the Creatures, this guide explores Christian prayer through water, wind, earth, and fire. Scripture, poetry, and contemplative exercises invite readers to encounter creation as a sacred teacher.

Co-written with Lucy Wynkoop, this guide grounds readers in lectio divina through listening, reading, savoring, response, and contemplation. It also shows how sacred reading can meet poetry, icons, film, Scripture, and everyday experience.

Inspired by the Rule of St. Benedict, this twelve-week guide connects creative work with contemplative practice. Walking, lectio divina, and journaling support artists exploring solitude, community, sacred space, and attention to nature.

Paintner introduces the early Christian monastics of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria through their brief sayings and stories. Her commentary supplies historical context and helps readers bring desert wisdom about prayer, patience, and love into modern life.

This guide treats photography as a Christian contemplative practice rather than a technical lesson. Through sacred seeing and six themed photo journeys, readers learn to receive images and notice the holy in everyday life.

Paintner frames pilgrimage as an inner journey through eight practices, from hearing the call to coming home. Scripture, writing, photography, and prayer accompany readers as they meet uncertainty, discomfort, and their own wild edges.

Twelve Christian monks and mystics, from Miriam to Thomas Merton, become companions for exploring inner strengths and struggles. Reflections, prayers, art, and meditations help readers consider the spiritual identity taking shape within.

Written for women, this ten-part guide invites a kinder relationship with the body through contemplation, writing, art, and movement. Christian tradition and women spiritual figures support a journey toward self-acceptance and wholeness.

Paintner presents twelve Celtic practices for discernment, including thresholds, dreams, wandering, soul friendship, and blessing. Irish saints and creative exercises help readers listen patiently for a path that fits their own season.

A contemplative collection of poems shaped by Ireland, changing seasons, wild places, love, and mystics. Paintner considers what endures, using landscape and silence to open deeper attention to the world.

A guide to finding wonder, gratitude, and divine presence in the natural world. Paintner draws on monks, mystics, and saints while inviting readers to let daily encounters with creation deepen contemplative life.

This poetry collection explores stories of kinship between saints and animals, especially in Celtic and desert traditions. The poems invite readers toward the natural world, inner wilderness, and a less controlled way of seeing.

A guide to short prayers spoken silently with the rhythm of breath. Paintner offers forty poem-prayers for work, rest, chores, silence, and community, along with reflections and help creating a personal breath prayer practice.

Paintner reflects on thirty-one titles for Mary, drawing on art, theology, and spiritual tradition. Each meditation invites readers to tend creativity, renewal, and the new life they sense beginning within them.

A contemplative poetry collection that invites readers to linger with love, faith, loss, and the natural world. Paintner’s poems make space for quiet reflection and for noticing what can sustain us in uncertain times.

This Lenten guide asks readers to fast from habits such as control, busyness, and grasping rather than food alone. Desert wisdom and creative contemplative practices help uncover the deeper hungers that need care.

Drawing on an ancient desert practice, Paintner helps readers listen for a word to guide a year. Thirty contemplative and creative exercises make room to receive, test, and live with that word over time.

In this modern fairy tale, Sophia has lost her joy and sets out to reclaim it. Guided by the four seasons and elements, she searches for her song, power, wholeness, and ancestral wisdom.

A collection of one hundred prayers and blessings for ordinary days, changing seasons, illness, grief, rest, pilgrimage, and joy. Paintner also offers simple practices for receiving blessings and writing blessings of your own.

A guide for living through Easter’s fifty-day season with greater attention and hope. Weekly reflections on resurrection stories pair with breath prayer, sacred reading, movement, and creative practices for renewal in ordinary life.