The Forum with The Rt. Rev. Austin Rios
The Forum at Grace Cathedral
Note: The music stops at 0:50. September 29, 2024 at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco Join Grace Cathedral Dean Malcolm Clemens Young for an engaging conversation with the Ninth Bishop of California, The Rt. Rev. Austin Keith Rios, who was installed as Bishop in August. As the chief pastor of the diocese, Bishop Rios is entrusted with leading, supervising, and uniting our congregations, ministries, and diocesan institutions. Notably, he is the first Latino bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California. Discover more about his journey from his birthplace in Texas to the other places he has...
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The Forum with Debie Thomas
The Forum at Grace Cathedral
When your faith begins to feel too small, too confining, you could choose to leave it. But what if the faith we inhabit is roomier than we'd thought? What if our collapsing faith is just a closet in a much larger dwelling? Disillusioned by narrow theologies, church dysfunction, and constricted readings of Scripture, people are leaving Christianity in droves. But Jesus describes the reign of God as a house with many rooms, writes author Debie Thomas, one of the most auspicious voices in religious writing today. In this work of sprawling spiritual and literary imagination, Thomas claims that...
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The Forum with Debie Thomas
The Forum at Grace Cathedral
When your faith begins to feel too small, too confining, you could choose to leave it. But what if the faith we inhabit is roomier than we'd thought? What if our collapsing faith is just a closet in a much larger dwelling? Disillusioned by narrow theologies, church dysfunction, and constricted readings of Scripture, people are leaving Christianity in droves. But Jesus describes the reign of God as a house with many rooms, writes author Debie Thomas, one of the most auspicious voices in religious writing today. In this work of sprawling spiritual and literary imagination, Thomas claims that...
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The Forum with Michael Goldberg on Jukebox
The Forum at Grace Cathedral
In this special summer Forum, meet Addicted To Noise founder and former Rolling Stone senior writer Michael Goldberg and get a firsthand account of the first-ever collection of his photographs in the new book JUKEBOX: 1967-2023 Photographs.
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The Forum with Scott D. Sampson, Ph.D. - June 9, 2024
The Forum at Grace Cathedral
In all the many conversations about climate change, sometimes the story of what nature’s value is to us can get a bit lost. We have a lot to learn from the kinds of traditions that see nature as relatives, not resources; as communities, not commodities. We need a narrative that places us back within the natural world as actors in this multi-million-year drama. If we're able to do that — if we can put ourselves into that drama — then we can see that we have a role to play in a thriving future, not just for people, but for the entire biosphere, for all life on Earth. And there's perhaps...
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The Forum with Michele Benedetto Neitz
The Forum at Grace Cathedral
The internet of today is a far cry from its early promise of a decentralized, democratic network of innovation, connection, and freedom. In the past decade, it has fallen under the control of a small group of powerful companies. But the dream of an open network for fostering creativity and entrepreneurship doesn’t have to die. And it just might be saved by blockchain networks, which create a radical new way to design fair and freely accessible internet services that put users in charge. There is more to this technology's story than crypto scams! Michele Benedetto Neitz is a...
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The Forum with Malcolm Harris
The Forum at Grace Cathedral
The history of Silicon Valley, from railroads to microchips, is an “extraordinary” story of disruption and destruction, told for the first time in this comprehensive, jaw-dropping narrative (Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of the Myth). Palo Alto’s weather is temperate, its people are educated and enterprising, its corporations are spiritually and materially ambitious and demonstrably world-changing. Palo Alto is also a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian burial grounds, and an integral part of the capitalist world system. In , the first...
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The Forum with Sarah Ogilvie
The Forum at Grace Cathedral
The Oxford English Dictionary is one of mankind’s greatest achievements, and yet, curiously, its creators are almost never considered. Who were the people behind this unprecedented book? As Dr. Sarah Ogilvie reveals, they include three murderers, a collector of pornography, the daughter of Karl Marx, a president of Yale, a radical suffragette, a vicar who was later found dead in the cupboard of his chapel, an inventor of the first American subway, a female anti-slavery activist in Philadelphia . . . and thousands of others. is a history and celebration of the many far-flung...
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The Forum at Grace Cathedral with Tonya M. Foster
The Forum at Grace Cathedral
Prayer is a convergence of absence and will. A poem is a kind of prayer. — Dr. Tonya M. Foster Dr. Tonya M. Foster is a poet, essayist, editor, and Black feminist scholar. Her writing and research focus on poetry, poetics, ideas of place and emplacement, and on intersections between the visual and the written. She uses all types of words in her poetry: big and small, beautiful, and vulgar. It is a key tactic of her ongoing study of language. Every year we choose a theme to inspire us and to create new ways to grow as a community. Last year was our Year of Poetry. In 2024 we celebrate the...
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The Forum with David Ackerly
The Forum at Grace Cathedral
History and ecology teach us the inevitability of change. And in this century, the climate is changing faster than ever. Warmer temperatures and record low precipitation in the recent California drought left 100 million trees dead in the mountains, and California cities and agriculture vulnerable. David Ackerly, climate change biologist and professor at UC Berkeley, has been studying how fast plants and animals may need to migrate uphill or northward as the planet warms. These velocities could be as high as five miles per year — exceeding the ability of most species to find new homes and...
info_outlineIn the famous photograph of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony of Memphis’s Lorraine Motel, one man kneeled down beside King, trying to staunch the blood from his fatal head wound with a borrowed towel.
This kneeling man was a member of the Invaders, an activist group that was in talks with King in the days leading up to the murder. But he also had another identity: an undercover Memphis police officer reporting on the activities of this group, which was thought to be possibly dangerous and potentially violent. This kneeling man is Leta McCollough Seletzky’s father.
Marrell McCollough was a Black man working secretly with the white power structure, a spy. This was so far from her understanding of what it meant to be Black in America, of everything she eventually devoted her life and career to, that she set out to learn what she could about his life, his actions, and his motivations. But with that decision came risk. What would she uncover about her father, who went on to a career at the CIA, and did she want to bear the weight of knowing?
Join Malcolm Clemens Young for a conversation with Seletzky about her book, The Kneeling Man: My Father’s Life as a Black Spy Who Witnessed the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and her quest for the truth about her father.
“Get comfortable, because once you start reading you will not be able to put this book down. The Kneeling Man is a spellbinding account of a daughter piecing together her father’s mysterious role witnessing the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. With gorgeous prose and emotional honesty, Leta McCollough Seletzky brings us on her journey to uncover deeply hidden family secrets and better understand our own.” —Jennifer Taub, author of Big Dirty Money and Other People’s Houses