Fellowship Forum: Dr. Michael Eric Dyson on Critical Thought & Contemplative Wisdom for Our Times
On April 14, we invited Dr. Michael Eric Dyson to join us for the next installment of the Garrison Institute Fellowship Forum. Dr. Dyson spoke with Dr. Angel Acosta, Director of the Garrison Institute Fellowship, about critical social thought, prophetic witness, contemplative wisdom and Dr. Dyson’s latest book, Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America. We invite you to revisit this energizing conversation below.
The Garrison Institute Fellowship Forum is a series of conversations with extraordinary leaders with expertise and experience in awareness-based contemplative wisdom, the science of interconnection, generative action, and collective healing. Each conversation will be co-facilitated by the Garrison Institute Fellows and Fellowship Director Dr. Angel Acosta.
Dr. Michael Eric Dyson is one of the nation’s most renowned professors, gifted writers, inspiring preachers, knowledgeable lecturers and riveting media personalities. As a professor who earned a PhD in Religion from Princeton University, Dyson has taught at some of the nation’s most distinguished universities, including Brown, UNC Chapel Hill, Columbia, DePaul, the University of Pennsylvania, and Georgetown University.
As a writer of more than 20 books, New York Times bestsellers The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America; and, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America, that was called by the New York Times,” one of the most frank and searing discussions on race…a deeply serious, urgent book, which should take its place in the tradition of Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and King’s Why We Can’t Wait.” His latest book, “Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America” published December 1,was heralded as Amazon’s Bestselling Book for 2020.
Dyson has lectured across the country, and around the world, in many of the best colleges and universities, and in public theaters and auditoriums, and for many corporations and unions. He has also served for the last 30 years as a media commentator and host, on every major radio and television show, from NPR’s Morning Edition, The Takeaway, and Fresh Air with Terry Gross, to television’s Meet the Press, Face the Nation, Today Show, Good Morning America, and Real Time with Bill Maher, and as a political analyst on MSNBC, CNN and Fox News. While feminist author Naomi Wolf calls Dyson “the ideal public intellectual of our times,” writer Nathan McCall captures it best when he says that Dyson “is a street fighter in suit and tie.”