It is a beautiful, sunny day not long before the summer solstice and I am hiking once again in the mountains near my home in western North Carolina. For weeks before this, the late spring sky has been overcast, or it has rained – seemingly non-stop in dismal and uncharacteristic bouts of oppressively tropical humidity followed by sudden and torrential…
In your journey to understanding what it means to be human on this planet at this time, it can become quite overwhelming to think of the many ways of comprehending the nature of reality. What is life all about? How do we create well-being in our individual and collective lives? How do we stay aware of what is happening in…
In a small, cinder-block room lit by shards of afternoon sun sneaking in through windows in the ceiling, thirteen jail guards in dark blue uniforms sit quietly on gray plastic chairs. The only sound comes from the blowing fan and the occasional squawk of their handheld walkie-talkie radios. The room is labeled “chapel,” though the only sign of that purpose is…
Digital Culture, Digital Media What are we doing with our digits? We count and calculate using our fingers. We paint, draw, and access all manner of tools through our fine motor articulation. Musical keyboards require all fingers to produce something of resonance, as does a violin or a guitar. All of our creative activity produces some form of digital media…
The racial ignorance and distress we see in the world today is a reflection of the mind playing itself out in grand scale on the big screen, projecting our collective conscious and unconscious conditioning. Every one of our lives represents a mosaic, with many shades, shadows, and shapes of experiences. In our relational world of vast diversity, kinship, and division,…
The ability to adapt to climate change and minimize its effects rests on humankind’s ability to follow several pathways – the Pathways to Planetary Change that were the subject of the Garrison Institute’s symposium on April 17-19, 2018. They are Half-Earth, Ecological Civilization, Pervasive Altruism, and the topic of the second of our follow-up conversations, Regenerative Economics. We spoke about…
Darnell Moore is the author of No Ashes in the Fire, a coming of age memoir of spiritual and LGBT activism. At the core of Moore’s story is a devotion to truth, excellence, and community-building. We learn about Moore’s coming out as gay after being immersed in black Christian churches and how he took his spiritual values with him to…
At the end of January, one of my close spiritual friends died. A queer Black man, a Sufi imam “scholartivist” (scholar–artist–activist) and professor of ministry students, Baba Ibrahim Farajajé died of a massive heart attack. He was sixty-three, and I’m guessing he had been carrying too much. It was only six months earlier that Baba and I had sat together…