The Forum with BJ Miller
The Forum at Grace Cathedral
At the end of our lives, what do we most wish for? For many, it’s simply comfort, respect, love. On November 10, as we celebrate All Souls’ Day at our Choral Eucharist service, please don’t miss the opportunity to hear also from renowned hospice and palliative care specialist, public speaker, and connector BJ Miller. On this day of prayer and remembrance for those we love and see no longer, who better to hear from than this deep thinker about how to create a dignified, graceful end of life. Miller is the co-author with Shoshana Berger of the book A Beginner’s Guide to the End:...
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The Forum with Bishop William Swing
The Forum at Grace Cathedral
What does God have to do with nuclear weapons? Nothing and everything. In his new book God and Nuclear Weapons: Meditations at the End of the Atomic Age, the Rt. Rev. William E. Swing, 7th Bishop of the Diocese of California and founder and President Emeritus of the United Religions Initiative, offers an original meditation on the threat of annihilation and how faith offers a way to encounter the end of everything. If humanity stays on its present trajectory, he proposes, a nuclear war is inevitable. While life teeters on the edge of extinction, this book offers the full biblical...
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The Forum with Stephanie Sellers
The Forum at Grace Cathedral
The Rev. Canon Dr. Stephanie Spellers is one of the Episcopal Church’s leading thinkers around 21st-century ministry and mission. She is a priest, author, speaker, and friend who currently serves as the Canon to the Presiding Bishop for Evangelism, Reconciliation, and Creation Care. She is the author of Radical Welcome: Embracing God, The Other, and the Spirit of Transformation as well as The Episcopal Way; Church’s Teaching for a Changing World and Ancient Faith, Future Mission: Fresh Expressions in the Sacramental Tradition. She has worked for many years at the intersection...
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The Forum with Michael Mechanic
The Forum at Grace Cathedral
What is it like to be blessed with riches in an era of stark political divisions and near-Dickensian economic differences? How mind-boggling are the opportunities and access, how problematic the downsides? Does one’s experience differ depending on whether the money is made or inherited, whether you are male or female, white or black? Does being a have among have-nots make someone a bad person? Finally, how does our collective thirst for financial “security,” and our stubborn belief in our opportunities for social mobility, explain how we got to the point where nearly half of Americans...
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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...
info_outlineJoin us for an exclusive sneak peek of “Sign My Name to Freedom,” a feature documentary about iconic National Park Ranger Betty Reid Soskin, her hidden life as a singer-songwriter, and her family’s experiences confronting Jim Crow-style segregation on the West Coast. Betty gained fame as the oldest Park Ranger in the country after starting that job at the age of 85, and she continued working at the Rosie the Riveter National Historic Site as an interpretive oral historian until she retired at 100. Through her experience as a WWII file clerk for an all-black union auxiliary in Richmond, she helped to reshape the national narrative about home front segregation in the workplace, labor unions, and in the armed forces. The documentary takes Betty’s work for the Park Service as its jumping off point, and then it explores lesser-known aspects of her personal story, focusing in large part on her family’s role as the first African Americans to cross the color line into Walnut Creek, and her hidden life as a singer/songwriter in the years that followed. The film also looks at Betty’s journey in her 90s to reexplore the music she left behind fifty years earlier and her collaborations with younger musicians to give her songs life again. Join Malcolm Clemens Young for a conversation with Director and Producer Bryan Gibel and Betty’s daughter Di’ara Reid about the making of the film, and about Betty Reid Soskin, an icon in the Bay Area and beyond. The film team is currently raising funds through a crowdfunding campaign to complete the documentary while Betty is still with us to experience it, which she very much hopes can happen. Their goal is to finish the project by the end of this year. Although Betty is doing well at 102, the clock is ticking given her advanced age. The campaign will run through mid-March, but if the team doesn’t hit their fundraising goal by then, none of the donation pledges they have secured will be processed. https://seedandspark.com/fund/sign-my-name-to-freedom#story Become a GraceArts Member Love engaging dialogue? We offer a special cultural membership program, GraceArts, focused exclusively on the arts and well-being. GraceArts allows a wider community to belong to and support Grace, with discounts and benefits on a robust schedule of events. Learn more and join! gracecathedral.org/gracearts Give to Grace You can help us bring the arts to life at Grace with a gift today to The Forum. gracecathedral.org/give. About the Guests Bryan Gibel is a director, producer, and cinematographer in Oakland, CA. He shoots, directs, and often edits his own projects, which range from investigations into the criminal justice system to visual experiments capturing movement and dance. His half-hour film of the Zaccho Dance Theatre project at Grace Cathedral, Love, A State of Grace, premiered at the San Francisco Dance Film Festival in October 2023. Originally from New Mexico, he worked as a bilingual reporter in Albuquerque before earning a master’s degree from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism documentary film program in 2012, where he was awarded the Mark Felt Fellowship for Investigative Reporting. Di’ara Melite Kitty Reid is Betty Reid Soskin’s eldest daughter, and proud parent of four children. She was Betty’s successor to Reid’s Records, California’s first black-owned record store established in 1945, for 30 years till doors closed October of 2019. Since then, Di’ara served on the board of the San Francisco PRIDE Parade from 2022-2023, and is currently a Youth Counselor to trans and non-binary youth at The Pacific Center of Human Growth, the oldest LGBTQIA+ center in the Bay Area, the third oldest in the nation. She is one of the main characters of Sign My Name to Freedom and has been involved with the film from the very beginning About the Moderator The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young is the dean of Grace Cathedral. He is the author of The Spiritual Journal of Henry David Thoreau and The Invisible Hand in Wilderness: Economics, Ecology, and God, and is a regular contributor on religion to the Huffington Post and San Francisco Examiner. About The Forum The Forum is a series of stimulating conversations about faith and ethics in relation to the important issues of our day. We invite inspiring and illustrious people to sit down for a real conversation with the Forum’s host and with you. Our guests range from artists, inventors and philosophers to pop culturists and elected officials, but the point of The Forum is singular: civil, sophisticated discourse that engages minds and hearts to think in new ways about the world. More about Grace Forum Online: gracecathedral.org/the-forum.