Your Guide to Summer Art Club 2026

What we're doing here, last call for signups, and why Hildegard von Bingen is kind of awesome

PSA: Summer Art Club begins next week! This is year 2 of an experiment for everyone — part book club, part spiritual formation, part creative course. (With some fun and whimsy along the way)

Summer Art Club is:

• A 12 week read-along of The Artist’s Rule: Nurturing Your Creative Soul with Monastic Wisdom

• Weekly reflections and discussion questions

• Access to subscriber only chat threads on Substack

• Sunday night lectio divina on Zoom (join live or listen to the recording as you’re able)

If this sounds fun to you, hop on over to the intro post to learn a little more, or just upgrade to paid at the link below. Today’s intro post is free for all!

Scivias I.6: Humanity and Life, Hildegard von Bingen (1150, public domain)

About 10 years ago, while making peace with a big move and researching ideas around home and stability, I first came across Benedictine spirituality. I grew up on the Baptist side of Evangelical, so at the time, I had little context for the workings and orders of the Catholic Church. The monastic life seemed foreign to me, something hidden away, rigid, mysterious. Not at all like the sort of free spirited creativity I wanted in my life.

But in St. Benedict’s story I found something I didn’t expect: a sixth century Roman Christian who left a decaying empire to become a hermit, but ended up gathering like-minded community. In time, he founded a monastic order centered on stability, prayer, and hospitality. What might look like isolation and retreat on the surface actually became outposts of beauty, mercy, and welcome that still exist today.

This sort of rootedness isn’t for the sake of escapism. It’s about finding a groundedness so good things can grow, building quite rhythms that create space for beauty to flourish.

Which brings us to another famous Benedictine, Hildegard von Bingen, a 12^th century German abbess, mystic, theologian, naturalist, visual artist, and composer.¹

Writer and spiritual director Christine Valters Paintner highlights the ways that Hildegard connects the dots between the sacred and creative:

“As the abbess of a Benedictine community, she was, of course, deeply immersed in monastic life and practices… These ways of being in the world have been cultivated over hundreds of years of practice and offer us tremendous wisdom about what it means to live a meaningful, vital, and creative life.” (The Artist’s Rule, pg 2)

I suspect most of us feel a desire for this. I know I catch myself feeling like something’s missing when I spend a lot of time on screens and grow disconnected from prayer or creative practice. It happens to us all. It’s the reality of living in a complex, tech-driven world.

But here is what I really want: less algorithms, more connection. Less detachment, more grounding. Less consuming, more creating. Not all of us are meant to buy a dumb phone, delete our social media accounts, and join a monastic order. But perhaps we can all learn something from this ancient way of life and reorient ourselves toward a gentler way in the world.

This is what Summer Art Club is all about. If that sounds good to you too, welcome. There’s plenty of space here.

For the next three months, we are going to tend to our souls with contemplative practices and intentional rhythms of prayer. Then from that space, we’ll use simple, playful creative practices to nurture our inner artist. My hope is that making room in our lives for a few small changes might open us up to even deeper prayer, play, and creativity.

If you are joining us for Summer Art Club, you won’t need much for the journey. You will, of course, want a copy of Christine Valters Paintner’s book The Artist’s Rule. I am grateful for the contemplative wisdom and deep love she puts into her books and courses, and am excited to dig into this with some friends! (You can find lots of links to order from your favorite bookseller here.)

Other than that, I encourage you to set aside some supplies for writing and art-making. A notebook or journal for writing down insights and some simple art supplies will get us through. (Think paper, paint, collage scraps, glue, scissors, heck even crayons. Nothing fancy!)

Every week there will be a little bit of reading, a lectio divina practice, and a few creative exercises to choose from. I’ll share a weekly reflection and some discussion/journaling prompts on Mondays. You can share your insights, questions, encouragements, etc on the post comments or on the Substack subscriber chat.

And! Once a week I’ll be on Zoom to kick off the new week with a guided lectio divina session!

May we all be surprised this summer by our creativity and, in the words of last year’s guide Julia Cameron, our “capacity for delight.” Hope to see you there.

1. Seriously, you can find her art in the public domain (including the image on this post) and recordings of her music on Spotify. Hildegard is rad.