Lama Rod Owens is a Black Buddhist Southern Queen who is an authorized lama in the Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism with a master of divinity degree from Harvard. He is the coauthor of Radical Dharma and author of Love and Rage. He is the cofounder of Bhumisparsha, a Buddhist spiritual community, and has a gift for reaching diverse audiences with transformative wisdom. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia. For more, see lamarod.com.
"""The New Saints will challenge your current understanding and offer fresh inspiration about ways, together, we can bring healing to our beautiful and broken world. This is a bold and powerful offering--one that attunes to our times with great lucidity, wisdom, and heart."" --Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance and Radical Compassion ""The New Saints is Lama Rod Owens's literary embodiment of his compassionately brave, authentic, loving, and fierce essence. Opening our broken hearts is not easy, but disrupting the reigning terror is necessary without becoming the entities we seek to eradicate. Lama Rod's compelling storytelling and sacred teachings remind and teach us that it is through acknowledging and facing our pain, our trauma, and, yes, the often-complex contradictions in our lives that we will create opportunities to cultivate compassion for ourselves and all beings everywhere without exception."" --Aishah Shahidah Simmons, editor of Love WITH Accountability, producer and director of NO! The Rape Documentary ""Step-by-step, Lama Rod Owens prods us to be bold and outrageous, to give up on the idea of justice and instead commit to the wild and arduous task of embodied liberation. In this, we find freedom and power. In this, our hearts begin to heal. In this work, we discover that in all our messy, inspired humanity, we are, indeed, the New Saints."" --Swami Jaya Devi, author of Embodied ""In The New Saints, Lama Rod Owens offers revelation. The loving support demonstrated in this important book provides a model of liberated spiritual practice that helps us through the accidental feedback loops of confirmation bias and spiritual bypassing so that we can step into becoming a deeply embodied New Saint. The New Saints, like Lama Rod himself, exists for these times--and the world, and all of us, are so much better off because of this."" --Lama Justin von Bujdoss, author of Modern Tantric Buddhism ""With finesse and honesty, Lama Rod Owens keeps the dharma radical by transforming the vocabulary of Buddhism into contemporary American terms steeped in social justice--incarceration and freedom, systemic oppression and suffering, abolition and liberation, work and fierceness, joy and love. What an accomplishment The New Saints is, opening the doors of the dharma to new generations!"" --Sarah Jacoby, author of Love and Liberation ""In a world where performative goodness often masquerades as spirituality, The New Saints offers a refreshing and inspiring guide to living a life grounded in truth, compassion, and authentic service."" --Sah D'Simone, author of Spiritually Sassy"