Boundless Compassion

“Living compassionately is rarely convenient and often downright challenging,” writes Joyce Rupp, bestselling and award-winning author and retreat leader. The definitive Christian guide to compassion, Boundless Compassion is the culmination of Rupp’s research and work as codirector of the Servite Center of Compassionate Presence. Through this six-week personal transformation process for developing and deepening compassion, Rupp nudges, encourages, and inspires you to grow in the kind of love that motivated Jesus’ life and mission for his disciples.

With master teacher Joyce Rupp, you will learn to develop compassion as never before. You will discover compassion from science, medicine, theology, spirituality, sociology, and psychology.  You will be encouraged to explore personal and professional expressions of compassion, and to re-energize your ability to offer loving kindness to those around you. 

Rupp has felt the call to walk with others in their suffering since she was a young member of the Servants of Mary, whose charism is compassion. She eventually cofounded the Boundless Compassion program with Sr. Margaret Stratman, O.S.M.

Based on the format and theme of Rupp’s bestselling books like Open the Door and her popular workshops conducted by the Center of Compassionate Presence, Boundless Compassion has the power to transform your life, giving you wisdom, confidence, understanding, and inspiration to be a more caring presence. It will help you build on relational skills, learn self-care, gain wisdom for incorporating loss and suffering into your active life, and find ways to show compassion at work.

By the book’s end, you will feel prepared to live with a renewed commitment to a compassionate presence for yourself and those who are in the midst of pain, struggle, and transition.

Features & Benefits

“If it can be said that Praying Your Goodbyes is Joyce Rupp’s most memorable book, then I believe that Boundless Compassion will turn out to be her signature generative work. In it she begins by sharing a simple, life-changing event for her. Then, as we read further, we are given the chance to transform as well. We learn how with true compassion realism meets hope; we are invited to sit with other wisdom figures whose words she includes in her text; and we are given the rare opportunity to personally experience a retreat—which this book really is—with one of today’s leading spiritual midwives. Boundless Compassion calls us to be compassionate to others and to ourselves in the richest way possible, with Jesus Christ as our ultimate model. Why not respond to this call by slowly enjoying the companionship of this extraordinary book? It may turn out to be the most significant prayer experience you have this year or for years to come.”
Robert J. Wicks
Author of Riding the Dragon 

“Joyce Rupp’s Boundless Compassion is a subversive book promoting a subversive practice. Compassion shatters the twin idols of nihilism and narcissism in which we take refuge from both the awesome and the awful that is our everyday reality. This book shows you how to live lovingly with both without making a god of either.”
Rabbi Rami Shapiro
Author of Perennial Wisdom for the Spiritually Independent 

“Transformative.Joyce Rupp presents us with a practical, no-nonsense invitation and challenge to change ourselves and our world by becoming, and living out, compassion. This book will both inspire us and deepen us into God.”
Edwina Gateley
Poet, author, and speaker

“The Gospels are insistent: be compassionate. But they do not tell us how to get there. We need Joyce Rupp for that. She gives us a program and a process on how to develop a compassionate consciousness and find the behaviors that embody it. My guess is that if you engage these reflections and exercises, a new courage will rise in you and the path of compassion will open before you. But the proof is in this very excellent pudding. Taste it.”
John Shea 
Author of Seeing Haloes

“Joyce Rupp is one of the best Christian spiritual guides writing today.”
Rev. James Martin, S.J.

“Beautifully written, Joyce Rupp’s moving and powerful work speaks of compassion as ‘full immersion in the condition of being human.’ Then she shows the way. Her exploration of how the heart might open to ourselves, to one another, to all living beings, and to the earth becomes a master class in love.”
Paula D'Arcy
Author of Winter of the Heart 

“Joyce Rupp shares her experience of the incremental deepening of compassion amid an encouraging and inspiring assembly of scholars and sages of various traditions. As I read, I felt my heart relax into sweetness.”
Sylvia Boorstein
Author of It’s Easier Than You Think