Richard Rohr, (born 1943) is an American Franciscan priest and writer on spirituality based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was ordained to the priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church in 1970. In 2011, PBS called him "one of the most popular spirituality authors and speakers in the world". Life and ministry Rohr was born in Kansas in 1943. He received his Master of Theology degree in 1970 from the University of Dayton. He entered the Franciscans in 1961 and was ordained to the priesthood in 1970. Rohr founded the New Jerusalem Community in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1971 and the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1986, where he serves as founding director and academic dean of the Living School for Action and Contemplation. The curriculum of Rohr's school is founded on seven themes developed by Rohr and explored in his book Yes, And.... In his 2016 book The Divine Dance, Rohr suggests that the top-down hierarchy of western Christianity since Emperor Constantine has held ecumenical traditions back for centuries, and that the future of people of faith will have to involve a bottom-up approach. Rohr maintains what he would call prophetic positions, on the "edge of the inside" of a church that he sees as failing to transform people, and thus increasingly irrelevant. In a critique of Rohr published in the New Oxford Review, Reverend Bryce Sibley writes that Rohr asserts that God holds both the masculine and the feminine together rather than either or binary dualistic thinking and criticizes ecumenical religious rituals that focus on rules rather than the paramount centrality of relationship with God, and neighbor. In 2000, Rohr publicly endorsed Soulforce, an organization that challenges what it calls religion-based LGBTQ oppression through nonviolent protest. In a 1999 essay, and afterward, Rohr has welcomed and affirmed God's love for LGBTQ people, emphasizing that God asks the same of people in same-sex relationships as of those in heterosexual ones: "truth, faithfulness, and striving to enter into covenants of continuing forgiveness of one another". In his teaching on scripture, such as in his book Things Hidden, Rohr calls the biblical record a human account of humanity's evolving experience with God, "the word of God in the words of people". His book Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self suggests Jesus's death and resurrection is an archetypal pattern for the movement from "false self" to