Join us for the first conversation in our Unlocking Possibility speaker series:
CONVERSATION 1:
Imagine A New Future
This Monday, October 19, 2020
2:00 - 3:15 pm (Eastern)
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What does it look like to go from "What is" to "What if?" To shift from constantly reacting to what we don't want, to imagining what we do? Each of us is capable of cultivating our innate capacities for envisioning new futures, and moreover, the future of our planet might depend on our ability to do so as individuals and as societies.
Join us for an aspirational and highly practical conversation with noted author and community activist Rob Hopkins and award-winning poet Dominique Christina to learn the art and practice of imagining new futures together.
Meet our conversation partners:
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In 2012, Hopkins was voted one of the Independent’s top 100 environmentalists and was on Nesta and the Observer’s list of Britain’s 50 New Radicals. Hopkins has also appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Four Thought and A Good Read, in the French film phenomenon Demain and its sequel Apres Demain, and has spoken at TEDGlobal and three TEDx events.
An Ashoka Fellow, Hopkins also holds a doctorate degree from the University of Plymouth and has received two honorary doctorates from the University of the West of England and the University of Namur. He is a keen gardener, a founder of New Lion Brewery in Totnes, and a director of Totnes Community Development Society, the group behind Atmos Totnes, an ambitious, community-led development project. He blogs at transitionnetwork.org and robhopkins.net and tweets at @robintransition.
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Dominique Christina is an award-winning poet, author, educator, and activist. She holds five national poetry slam titles in four years, including the 2014 & 2012 Women of the World Slam Champion and 2011 National Poetry Slam Champion. Her work is greatly influenced by her family’s legacy in the Civil Rights Movement and by the idea that words make worlds. She is the author of four books. Her third book, This Is Woman’s Work, published by SoundsTrue Publishing, is the radical exploration of 20 archetypal incarnations of womanness and the creative process. Her fourth book, Anarcha Speaks: A History In Poems, won the National Poetry Series award in 2017. She is a writer and actor for the HBO series "High Maintenance" and does branding and marketing for Under Armour.
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Suggested donation: $10 per event
Register once and select any or all of the four events.
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About the series:
"If stress, trauma and anxiety are eroding our imaginations precisely
at the time when we need to be our most vitally imaginative, then where do
we find the clues for how to reverse this process?... What if we created the
optimal conditions — where we live, where we work, where we study,
where we pray, where you walk every day — for the imagination to flourish?
What would you do? What would you change?"
— Rob Hopkins, one of our conversation partners on October 19,
from his book From What Is to What If
Every crisis can be an invitation to dream. Even in uncertain moments, we are called to imagine better futures together: for ourselves, for our communities, and for our planet. In this series, we’ll be talking with leading thinker-practitioners about the art and practice of imagination: both how to create wide-open spaces for possibilities that others find impossible and what it looks like when our dreams become reality.
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Suggested donation: $10 per event
Register once and select any or all of the four events.
Unlocking Possibility Co-Learning Community
Note: In conjunction with this "Unlocking Imagination" speaker series, we are also offering a Co-Learning Community which will gather in the alternating weeks between each event, for deeper reflection and for integration and application. If you register for the Co-Learning Community, you are automatically registered for all four of these speaker series events, so you do not need to register for these four events separately.
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CONVERSATION 2:
Imagine A New Democracy
Thursday, November 5, 2020
7:00 - 8:15 pm (Eastern)
What does it look like to imagine a new way to be community in light of our failing political systems? Our current moment invites us to envision the future we want for our life as a people, not just the one that we fear. It also calls us to craft new hopeful stories for how we can relate to one another in ways that transcend and transform the painful limitations of our current systems.
Two days after Election Day, take a deep breath and join us to envision new possibilities for democracy in local, national, and global contexts, with acclaimed authors Casper ter Kuile, co-founder of Sacred Design Lab, and co-host of the award-winning podcast, “Harry Potter And the Sacred Text,” and Erica Williams Simon, educator, entrepreneur, and author of You Deserve the Truth, which puts the power of story back into the hands of the people.
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CONVERSATION 3:
Imagine a New Church
Wednesday, November 18, 2020
4:30 - 5:45 pm (Eastern)
What does it look like to follow Jesus in a post-religious age? In this moment when American Christianity’s institutional decline is accelerating rapidly, we have the opportunity to envision new shapes for spiritual community growing up out of the shadow of the old.
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CONVERSATION 4:
Imagine A New Planet
Monday, November 30, 2020
2:00 - 3:15 pm (Eastern)
What does it look like to imagine a new planet, for good or for ill? If COVID-19 was simply a warmup for the catastrophic effects of a warming planet, what does it look like to urgently imagine an earth-nurturing way for us to live on this, our common home?
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Allen Ewing-Merrill
Executive Director
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Nicole Diroff
Program Director
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Our mission is to catalyze spiritual imagination with enduring wisdom for transformative faith leadership.
We equip and support faith leaders for theologically grounded and effective 21st-century ministries.
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