Remembering James O'Keefe: A Life Built on Contemplation and Cross-Cultural Bridge-Building

James O'Keefe, an organizer whose CONTACT workshops convened spiritual practitioners from across the world in structured encounters around themes of the sacred and the transcendent, died on 20 May 2026 at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was 78.

O'Keefe launched the CONTACT program in 1988 after a decade working with interfaith dialogue initiatives in the American Southwest. The workshops, which he described as "structured encounters with the unknown," drew participants from Christian contemplative traditions, Sufi orders, Hindu ashram communities, and secular humanist circles. Over nearly four decades, the program operated in 34 countries, reaching an estimated 12,000 participants through residential intensives and regional gatherings, according to the program's archived records.

His own spiritual formation was unusually wide-ranging. Born in Chicago in 1948 to Irish-American Catholic parents, O'Keefe studied comparative religion at the University of Chicago before spending five years in residence at a Benedictine monastery in Pecos, New Mexico. He later traveled extensively in South Asia, sitting with teachers in the Sikh tradition and studying vipassana meditation under teachers who had trained in Burma and Thailand. The synthesis of these influences shaped the CONTACT methodology, which combined silent contemplation periods, structured dialogue sessions, and shared meals as tools for what O'Keefe called "mutual illumination rather than mutual absorption."

The workshops attracted a diverse constituency. Scientists, priests, activists, and artists participated alongside professional contemplatives. O'Keefe was explicit that the program was not trying to produce a new syncretic religion, but rather to make participants more fluent in articulating what they themselves believed and why they believed it. "I'm not interested in everyone agreeing," he said in a 2015 interview with Interfaith Voices, a public radio program. "I'm interested in everyone being able to say clearly what they don't agree with." That epistemological discipline — the insistence on clarity about difference — was the workshop's signature pedagogical move.

Critics within some conservative religious communities argued that the CONTACT format implied an equivalency between traditions that participants had not consciously chosen to explore. O'Keefe acknowledged the concern but maintained that the program's structure allowed participants to remain rooted in their own practices rather than being asked to perform others. "We are not asking anyone to pretend," he wrote in a 2019 reflection published by the Center for Contemplary Mind in Society. "We are asking them to be curious about what the ground feels like when someone else is standing on it."

O'Keefe's administrative style was deliberately low-profile. He resisted institutional formalization of the program, preferring to work through a loose network of regional coordinators rather than establishing a centralized nonprofit. When funders offered large grants contingent on formal governance structures, he routinely declined them, a decision that limited the program's scale but, he argued, preserved its improvisational character. The program's archives, maintained by a collective of former participants, show that it operated on an annual budget of roughly $180,000 in recent years — modest by the standards of American spiritual-movement organizations, but sufficient to sustain three to five residential intensives per year.

His survivors include his partner of 22 years, Carmen Restrepo, two children from an earlier marriage, and four grandchildren. A memorial gathering is planned for late June in Santa Fe, with a second event to follow in September at the Pecos monastery where he spent his early adult years. Those who knew him describe a man who was genuinely interested in other people's spiritual experience without being evangelical about his own. He asked questions rather than making arguments, and he seemed comfortable sitting with uncertainty — a disposition, colleagues note, that he worked deliberately to cultivate rather than inherit.

The CONTACT program will continue under the direction of a collective of long-term facilitators. O'Keefe had spent his final years transferring operational responsibility to a generation of younger practitioners who had come through the workshops themselves. Whether the program can sustain its character without his personal presence remains an open question among those who have studied his methods.

What is not in question is the scope of the network he built. Participants and coordinators in West Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central Europe have documented in separate accounts how the CONTACT framework shaped local interfaith initiatives that had no direct connection to the American program — suggesting that the methodology, once introduced, took on a life O'Keefe neither designed nor controlled. Whether that represents the deepest measure of his influence is something his former collaborators are still working out.

This publication covered O'Keefe's work through archived program records and interviews with former coordinators; no obituary was filed with any wire service prior to this account.