View recorded session with Danté Stewart
Discussion: Dec 21, 2024
Danté Stewart is the author of debut memoir Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle, a stirring meditation on being Black and learning to love in a loveless, anti-Black world.
Throughout the memoir, Stewart uses his personal experiences as a vehicle to reclaim and reimagine spiritual virtues like rage, resilience, and remembrance—and explores how these virtues might function as a work of love against an unjust, unloving world. This sharply observed journey is an intimate meditation on coming of age in a time of terror. Stewart reveals the profound faith he discovered even after experiencing the violence of the American church: a faith that loves Blackness; speaks truth to pain and trauma; and pursues a truer, realer kind of love than the kind we’re taught, a love that sets us free.
The book won Stewart the Georgia Author of the Year award from the Georgia Writer’s Association in 2022, by The Center for American Progress as one of “22 Faith Leaders to Watch in 2022,” and by Religion News Service as one of “Ten Up-And-Coming Faith Influencers.
Author Visits:
The program features visits by authors who have written books on interfaith topics or related themes. These visits provide a platform for authors to share their insights, experiences, and perspectives with audiences from various religious and cultural backgrounds.
Book Discussions:
Following the author visits, the program facilitates book discussions that allow participants to engage deeply with the text and its themes. These discussions aim to promote a deeper understanding of different faith traditions and encourage respectful dialogue.
Interfaith Engagement:
The program emphasizes the importance of interfaith engagement and understanding. By bringing together individuals from diverse religious backgrounds, Alignment Reads seeks to create spaces for open conversation and mutual learning.
Educational Opportunities:
Alignment Reads offers educational opportunities through its events, helping participants to expand their knowledge and appreciation of different religious and spiritual traditions.
Community Building:
The program is designed to build community among participants, fostering relationships and connections across faith boundaries. It aims to create a sense of shared purpose and understanding among diverse groups.
View upcoming sessions and recordings of past sessions below.
Alignment Reads
Alignment Reads is an initiative designed to foster interfaith dialogue and understanding through author visits and book discussions. This program encourages the exploration of diverse spiritual perspectives and promotes mutual respect among people of different faiths.
Alignment Reads is a valuable resource for anyone interested in deepening their understanding of interfaith issues and engaging in meaningful dialogue with people from different religious backgrounds.
Join the discussion!
Note your time zone
Alignment hosts renowned authors and activists each month who share their latest work,
expanding our understanding,
engaging our connections,
prompting our deep thoughts on issues of spirituality,
embracing our vision of interfaith engagement.
Meet them live online or watch the recorded sessions.
Then join a Saturday discussion to engage the conversation with others seeking a community of interfaith conversation.
Register here for any or all of the sessions or conversations.
There is no expectation to attend all sessions or to have read any materials before meeting.
Alignment can also arrange for a discussion session unique to your community. Contact us?
We have a deep commitment to making this programming accessible for all. Registration is always free and open to all. Any gifts enable us to support our presenters.
Author visits are Wednesdays at 7:00 pm Eastern Time check your time zone
Discussions are Saturdays at 11:00 am PT/1:00 pm CT/ 2:00 pm ET / 7:00 pm BST
check your time zone
Hila Ratzabi will discuss the intersection of writing poetry on the environment and spirituality, with writing prompts, based on her book There Are Still Woods.
View recorded session with Hila Ratzabi
Hila Ratzabi is a poet and workshop leader with a special interest in the environment and spirituality. She is the author of the poetry collection There Are Still Woods (June Road Press, 2022), which won a gold Nautilus Book Award and was a finalist for a National Indie Excellence Award. The book is described as “a radiant appraisal of life at the precipice of climate crisis and a haunting elegy for all we stand to lose.”
Her poetry has been published widely in literary journals and in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, a BA in English/Creative Writing from Barnard College, and a BA in Jewish Philosophy from the Jewish Theological Seminary. Ratzabi regularly offers workshops and talks on environmental poetry, Jewish poetry, and on the wisdom of the Jewish spiritual writer Etty Hillesum, and presents panels and readings at writing conferences and other venues. From 2015–2023, she ran Ritualwell.org, publishing innovative Jewish rituals, poetry, and liturgy and curating online learning experiences. She currently works as a director of communications and lives in Oak Park, Illinois, outside Chicago.
Watch the recordings of previous sessions below
View recorded session with Kashmir Maryam
Kashmir Maryam is an acclaimed author and poet who is making waves in the literary world with her unique insights on mindfulness, spirituality, and personal growth. Born in England and of Kashmiri heritage, she offers a fresh perspective on the intersection of spirituality and modern life. Her books have resonated deeply with readers, providing guidance on self-care, inner peace, and finding purpose and meaning through an Islamic framework.
Kashmir Maryam is a dedicated marriage and family therapist who has helped numerous individuals and families navigate their relationships and personal challenges. With a compassionate and empathetic approach, she combines psychological expertise with a deep understanding of human behavior to guide her clients towards healing and growth. Her work as a therapist focuses on fostering healthy communication, emotional resilience, and personal development, enabling her clients to build stronger, more fulfilling relationships.
Kashmir will explore how, especially in this climate of conflict and uncertainty, interfaith work has never been more essential. The connections we build across traditions remind us of our shared humanity, offering people a sense of balance and understanding in challenging times. It’s about opening hearts to different perspectives while recognizing what we all have in common.
There are four books in her collection:
The Muslim Woman’s Islamic Book Collection.
View recorded session with Sunita Viswanath
Sunita Viswanath and has worked for over 30 years in women’s rights and human rights organizations, co-founding the following organizations:
Hindus for Human Rights (2019); Sadhana (2011) in order to mobilize Hindu Americans to connect their faith to social justice and human rights; Women for Afghan Women (WAW, 2001), the international women’s human rights organization; and Abaad: Afghan Women Forward (2022).
For her work with WAW, Sunita was awarded the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Global Women’s Rights Award in 2011. She was honored by President Obama at the White House in 2015 as a “Champion of Change” for her work with Sadhana. In 2021, Sunita was recognized by the Center for American Progress as one of 21 “faith leaders to watch.” Sunita is one of five Hindus appointed to NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ Faith Transition Team; and the only Hindu in the December 2021 Marquis Who’s Who list of faith-based influencers.
Sunita worked with The Sister Fund and the Funders Concerned About AIDS. She was the Board Chair of WAW until 2022 and is a board member of Amnesty International-USA. She has also served on the advisory boards of Unfreeze Afghanistan, Dalit Solidarity Forum, and Population Media Center, which uses entertainment-education and mass media to promote social and cultural change. Sunita edited Women for Afghan Women: Shattering Myths and Claiming the Future (Palgrave McMillan, 2003), a book of essays.
Sunita discusses the tenets of a radically inclusive Hinduism which stands opposed to caste and all forms of hate and bigotry, what her guru and mentor Anantanand Rambachan calls, "A Hindu Theology of Liberation." She will discuss the urgent need for such a liberatory Hindu faith and practice at a time when Hindu supremacy (Hindutva) is entrenching the Hindu community in India and worldwide.
View recorded session with Brian McLaren
Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, activist, and public theologian. A former college English teacher and pastor, he is a passionate advocate for “a new kind of Christianity” – just, generous, and working with people of all faiths for the common good. He is a core faculty member and Dean of Faculty for the Center for Action and Contemplation. and a podcaster with Learning How to See. He is also an Auburn Senior Fellow and is a co-host of Southern Lights. His newest books are Faith After Doubt (January 2021), and Do I Stay Christian? (May 2022). His next release, Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart, is available for pre-order now and will release in May 2024.
In “A New Kind of Christianity” (HarperOne, 2010), Brian articulated ten questions that are central to the emergence of a postmodern, post-colonial Christian faith. His 2011 HarperOne release, “Naked Spirituality,” offers “simple, doable, and durable” practices to help people deepen their life with God. These are only of few of his books that have had a huge impact in what is increasingly called “Emerging Christianity.”
View recorded session with Rabbi Marcia Prager
Rabbi Marcia Prager, MFA, MHL, D.Min.h.c., is the Emerita founding Director and Dean of the ALEPH Ordination Program, a rigorous innovative liberal Jewish seminary with 90 students in three clergy tracks (rabbinic, cantorial and rabbinic pastor) and a coordinate program in hashpa’ah, Jewish Spiritual Direction. She co-directs and teaches in the prize-winning Davvenen’ Leadership Training Institute, a residential retreat-based training program in the high art of Jewish prayer leadership and spiritual growth. She serves as rabbi of the P’nai Or Jewish Renewal Congregation of Philadelphia, PA. and is the author of The Path of Blessing, a contemporary hasidic text exploring the Jewish practice of blessing, and has created the P’nai Or Siddurim (prayer books) for Shabbat, holidays, and other innovative compilations of prayer and liturgy. In 2010, she was selected by the Jewish Daily Forward as one of the Top Fifty American Female Rabbis.
View recorded session Randy Woodley
Randy Woodley, PhD is an activist/farmer, distinguished speaker, public intellectual and wisdom keeper who addresses avariety of issues concerning American culture, faith/spirituality, justice, race/diversity, climate crisis, regenerative farming, our relationship with the earth and Indigenous realities. He has been interviewed and quoted in venues such as The New York Times, Politifact, Time Magazine, The Huffington Post and Christianity Today.Randy recently retired with tenure as Distinguished Professor of Faith and Culture Emeritus and Dir. Intercultural and Indigenous Studies at George Fox University/Portland Seminary. He was raised near Detroit, Michigan and is a Cherokee Indian descendant recognized by the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma.
Edith Woodley, (Eastern Shoshone tribal member) and Randy are co-sustainers at Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice and Eloheh Farm & Seeds, a regenerative farm, school, community, and ceremonial grounds. His own books include:
• Mission and the Cultural Other: A Closer Look
• Indigenous Theology and the Western Worldview: A Decolonial Approach to Christian Doctrine
• Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days of Reconnecting with Sacred Earth|• Decolonizing Evangelicalism: An 11:59PM Conversation
• The Harmony Tree: A Story of Healing and Community
• The Harmony Tree 2: Spared by Fire
• Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision
• Living in Color: Embracing God’s Passion for Ethnic Diversity.
View recorded session with Imam Jamal Rahman
Imam Jamal Rahman is a popular speaker on Islam, Sufi spirituality, and interfaith relations. Along with his Interfaith Amigos, he has been featured in the New York Times, CBS News, BBC, and various NPR programs. Jamal is co-founder and Muslim Sufi minister at Interfaith Community Sanctuary and adjunct faculty at Seattle University and Pacific Lutheran University. He is a former co-host of Interfaith Talk Radio and travels nationally and internationally, presenting at retreats and workshops.
Jamal is the author and co-author of many books, including the following: Sacred Laughter of the Sufis: Awakening the Soul with the Mullah's Comic Teaching Stories and Other Islamic Wisdom; Spiritual Gems of Islam: Insights & Practices from the Qur'an, Hadith, Rumi & Muslim Teaching Stories to Enlighten the Heart & Mind; and Religion Gone Astray: What We Found at the Heart of Interfaith. More information: www.jamalrahman.com and www.interfaithcommunitysanctuary.org
View recorded session with Heidi Barr
Heidi Barr is a writer and wellness coach whose work is founded on a commitment to cultivating ways of being that are life-giving and sustainable for people, communities, and the planet. She is the author of several books of creative nonfiction, including Collisions of Earth and Sky and 12 Tiny Things, two poetry collections, and one cookbook, as well as editor of "The Mindful Kitchen," a wellness column in The Wayfarer Magazine. One of the inaugural Poets of Place for the lower St. Croix Valley, her poetry has been featured in numerous publications, including the St. Paul Almanac and South Dakota in Poems. She lives with her family in rural Minnesota, where they tend a large vegetable garden, explore nature, and do their best to live simply. Learn more at heidibarr.com or subscribe to her newsletter Ordinary Collisions at heidibarr.substack.com.
Meet Bronwen Henry online: February 25 and 28, 2024
Bronwen Mayer Henry is a self-taught painter specializing in trees and flowers on large scale canvases with acrylic paints. Her work is filled with movement, light, color, and a sense of freedom.
It was an unexpected path through Thyroid Cancer (in 2018) that led Bronwen to commit time to painting. This beginning continues to be reflected in her large scale work and playful approach to color. Her art is an expression of prayer, meditation, hope and joy. She describes herself as “a person facing her fears with a brush, and choosing joy over perfection.” She leads workshops and retreats helping others to break through creative barriers. She has published a book exploring how this cancer treatment lit up her creative practice, “Radioactive Painting” published by Shanti Arts LLC.
Like many artists, Bronwen has dual-occupations, spending some of her professional time at the canvas and leading workshops and retreats and the other half immersed in a career in nonprofit work, serving as Interfaith Philadelphia’s Director of Curricular Innovation, supporting offerings that help people build skills to create a more compassionate and understanding world. Bronwen is currently enrolled in the two year Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training with Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach.
View recorded session with Belden Lane
Belden C. Lane is a storyteller and wilderness backpacker who (as a Presbyterian minister) taught theology with the Jesuits at Saint Louis University for 35 years.
His teaching and writing have focused largely on the importance of place in the spiritual life. What draws Catholics to a sacred site for healing at Chimayo in New Mexico? Why were early Celtic Christians fascinated by sacred trees and the wild landscape of Iona off the coast of Scotland? How did the Baal Shem Tov, a Hassidic Rebbe, experience God in the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine? Belden’s particular love of desert terrain and his studies in the history of spirituality have taken him to the deserts of Egypt, the Australian Outback, and the American Southwest.
His books include The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality, Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice, and The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul.
View recorded session with Kaitlin Curtice
Kaitlin Curtice is an award-winning author, poet-storyteller, and public speaker. As an enrolled citizen of the Potawatomi nation, Kaitlin writes on the intersections of spirituality and identity and how that shifts throughout our lives. She also speaks on these topics to diverse audiences who are interested in truth-telling and healing.
As an inter-spiritual advocate, Kaitlin participates in conversations on topics such as colonialism in faith communities, and she has spoken at many conferences on the importance of inter-faith relationships.
Besides her books, Kaitlin has written online for Sojourners, Religion News Service, Apartment Therapy, On Being, SELF Magazine, and more. Her work has been featured on CBS and in USA Today. She also writes at The Liminality Journal. Kaitlin lives in Philadelphia with her family.
View recorded session with John Philip Newell
John Philip Newell is a Celtic teacher and author of spirituality who calls the modern world to reawaken to the sacredness of Earth and every human being. In his latest award-winning publication, Sacred Earth Sacred Soul, he combines the poetic and the intellectual, the head as well as the heart, and spiritual awareness as well as political and ecological concern.
View recorded session with Haleh Liza Gafori
Helah Liza Gafori is a translator, vocalist, poet, and educator born in New York City of Iranian/Persian descent. She grew up hearing recitations of Persian poetry and has maintained and deepened her connection through singing and translating the poetry of various Persian poets. Her book, GOLD, is the beautiful translation of poems by Rumi, the 13th century sage and mystic.
View recorded session with Juliet Patterson
Writing Through Grief: Finding Creativity and Healing in Loss
Poet Juliet Patterson will lead us in a session that combines creative process and discovery centered on her memoir, “Sinkhole: A Legacy of Suicide,” a creative project that was written in, around and through grief.
In 2009, Juliet Patterson was recovering from a serious car accident when she learned her father had died by suicide. His death was part of a disturbing pattern in her family. Her father’s father had taken his own life; so had her mother’s. Over the weeks and months that followed, grieving and in physical pain, Patterson kept returning to one question: Why? Why had her family lost so many men, so many fathers, and what lay beneath the silence that had taken hold?
Juliet Patterson is the author of Sinkhole: A Legacy of Suicide (Milkweed Editions, September 2022) and two full-length poetry collections, Threnody, (Nightboat Books 2016), a finalist for the 2017 Audre Lorde Poetry Award, and The Truant Lover, (Nightboat Books, 2006), winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and a finalist for the 2006 Lambda Literary Award. A recipient of the Arts & Letters Susan Atefat Prize in non-fiction, and a Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, she has also been awarded fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Minneapolis-based Creative Community Leadership Institute. She teaches creative writing and literature at St. Olaf College and is also a faculty member and director of the college’s Environmental Conversations program. She lives in Minneapolis on the west bank of the Mississippi near the Great River Road with her partner, the writer Rachel Moritz, and their son.
