View recorded session Randy Woodley
Discussion: May 4
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.
Meet Rabbi Marcia Prager online: May 22 Discussion: June 1
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.
Meet Brian McLaren online: June 19, 2024
Discussion: June 22
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.”
Join the discussion!
Alignment hosts renowned authors 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 the authors 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 the books before meeting.
Recordings will be posted here.
Watch October’s session with J.P Newell.
Alignment can also arrange for a discussion session unique to your community. Contact us?
Author visits are Wednesdays at 7:00 pm ET
Discussions are Saturdays at 11:00 am PT/1:00 pm CT/ 7:00 pm GMT
View recorded session with Imam Jamal Rahman
Join the online discussion: March 23
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
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 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.
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.
