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“True spirituality, as I understand it, is always based on a deeply transformative mystical impulse.
But the same cannot be said of religion.”
In a world where many people are questioning inherited religious beliefs while still longing for authentic spiritual depth, Father Seán ÓLaoire offers a courageous and compassionate invitation to rethink our understanding of God, faith, and the human soul.
In this profound conversation centered on his book Setting God Free, Sean draws from science, philosophy, cosmology, psychology, mysticism, and personal experience to explore how traditional images of God—often rooted in fear, judgment, separation, and control—may obscure a deeper reality waiting to be rediscovered. Bringing together insights from contemporary science and ancient spiritual wisdom, he invites us beyond rigid belief systems into a living experience of the sacred grounded in love, unity, and awakening.
Rather than abandoning spirituality, Setting God Free asks what becomes possible when we release limiting concepts of the divine and open ourselves to a more expansive understanding of consciousness and reality itself. Join Seán ÓLaoire for an illuminating exploration of spirituality beyond dogma, and the liberating possibilities that emerge when God is no longer confined by the boundaries of human fear, theology, or scientism.
Other books by Father Seán ÓLaoire, Ph.D.
Fr. Seán ÓLaoire grew up in Cork, Ireland, in a family rooted in both the Catholic tradition and the older Celtic one. His druid grandfather and his mystic great-grandmother – who, in Seán’s telling, would have been equally at home in Sufi practice – gave him his first education in the relationship between the visible and the invisible.
He studied pure mathematics and mathematical physics before entering seminary. After ordination, he spent fourteen years as a missionary among the Kalenjin people of East Africa, an experience that permanently expanded his sense of how many valid cosmologies the universe contains. He came to California in 1987 and worked in Palo Alto in the diocese of San Jose. Then in 1997 he became a co-founder of Companions on the Journey (COJ) and their spiritual director until he retired from that position at the end of December in 2025.
He holds a PhD in transpersonal psychology. He has conducted rigorous empirical research on intercessory prayer – among the first peer-reviewed studies of its kind. His conclusion: prayer works, but not for the reasons most people assume.
He lives at Tír na nÓg, a small property near Healdsburg, California, where he has built 23 stations of the Eucharistic Prayer of the Cosmos – a pilgrimage he walks each morning, ringing a bell at each station. He is 79. He is still teaching.