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…
No one ever says, “You do leadership really well.” People say, “You are a great leader.” Leadership is not something you do; it’s someone you are. Leadership is a Personal Practice A client and friend of mine reflected that a critical and life-changing realization for him was that “with care and practice, with awareness and attention, by doing the work…
The Garrison Institute’s recent symposium, Pathways to Planetary Health, brought together almost five dozen experts from around the world to discuss the climate change and biodiversity crisis. We explored the intersection of four emerging ideas–Half Earth, an Ecological Civilization, Regenerative Economics, and Pervasive Altruism–their convergence, and indications of the pathways towards planetary health. To keep the conversation going, we recently…
In Zen we say that everyone is already a buddha, an awakened one. But we don’t know we are until we are shaken out of our complacent habitual thoughts and see clearly that everything we encounter, including ourselves, has the same awakened nature.
The First Amendment is the most important of all amendments to the US Constitution — after all, it is first not the second or anything beyond amendment, enacted along with the additional nine amendments as the price of acceptance by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and other Founding Fathers who feared the power of the government they were creating, worried that…
We entered together, but I found the lushest dress in the store: crinoline flowers, bright blue, and floor length. We had gone to get my mom something. After medical school and a grueling residency, she was graduating. She didn’t find a dress and, in my memory, she wore a pink shirt-dress from her closet to the celebration. I, six years…