Focus on Abortion: Americans Share Their Stories - A Conversation with Roslyn Banish
Release Date: 07/22/2025
Anne Lamott and Neal Allen Forum: Good Writing
The Forum at Grace Cathedral
Anne Lamott and Neal Allen Forum: Good Writing Grace Cathedral, San Francisco Join bestselling author Anne Lamott and writer and spiritual coach Neal Allen for an inspiring and entertaining conversation that will change the way you think about language. Drawing on their new book Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences, they offer powerful techniques for transforming worthy sentences into unforgettable ones. With humor, candor, and a touch of creative tension, Lamott and Allen explore how writing and language shape not only our creativity, but also our...
info_outline
Bill Fontana: Resonance
The Forum at Grace Cathedral
Forum with Bill Fontana: Resonance Grace Cathedral, San Francisco San Francisco artist Bill Fontana is internationally recognized for his pioneering experiments in sound. Since the late 1960s, he has consistently used sound as a sculptural medium to interact with and transform our perceptions of visual and architectural spaces. Applying his knowledge of composition, he draws out patterns of sound from natural and constructed worlds to create sound works that have the potential to conjure up visual imagery in the mind of the listener. Many of Fontana’s works create live...
info_outline
Dave Evans: How to Live a Meaningful Life
The Forum at Grace Cathedral
Dave Evans Forum: How to Live a Meaningful Life Grace Cathedral, San Francisco In a world grappling with major societal shifts and increasing isolation, it’s easy to feel like nothing we do matters. So many of us feel like something is missing, disconnected, and stuck. There must be more to life than simply surviving each day—but how do we uncover it? Bestselling author Dave Evans, with Bill Burnett, the “empowering” (Publishers Weekly) visionaries behind Stanford’s renowned Life Design Lab, have already inspired millions of readers to use design thinking principles to...
info_outline
Ana Raquel Minian: In the Shadow of Liberty
The Forum at Grace Cathedral
Ana Raquel Minian Forum: In the Shadow of Liberty Grace Cathedral, San Francisco Many Americans have watched in horror as children are torn from their parents and American citizens have been killed under the current administration’s immigration policy. But as historian Ana Raquel Minian reveals in In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention, this is only the latest chapter in a saga tracing back to the 1800s—one in which immigrants to the United States have been held without recourse to their constitutional rights. Braiding together the vivid stories of four...
info_outline
Rebecca Solnit Forum: Notes on a World of Change
The Forum at Grace Cathedral
Rebecca Solnit Forum: Notes on a World of Change Grace Cathedral, San Francisco As white nationalist and authoritarian movements push toward isolation and individualism, other currents continue to gather strength. Antiracism, feminism, expansive understandings of gender, environmental thinking, scientific discovery, and Indigenous and non-Western ways of knowing resonate across borders and generations, pointing toward a more relational and interconnected world. Few writers trace these converging currents with the clarity and moral imagination of Rebecca Solnit. A writer, historian, and...
info_outline
SF Symphony Performs Mozart’s Requiem: Inside Music Talk with Dean Malcolm Clemens Young
The Forum at Grace Cathedral
The San Francisco Symphony performed Mozart’s Requiem with guest conductor Manfred Honeck, in a special version that reimagines the piece in the context of an 18th-century funeral service. In collaboration with the Symphony, Dean Malcolm Clemens Young gives a preconcert talk before the performance.
info_outline
Adam Hochschild Forum: American Midnight
The Forum at Grace Cathedral
Adam Hochschild Forum: American Midnight Grace Cathedral, San Francisco Between World War I and the Roaring Twenties lies a largely forgotten chapter of American history—one whose tensions still echo a hundred years later. In these turbulent years, democracy was tested by war, pandemic, and violence driven by conflicts over race, immigration, and labor rights. In American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis, legendary historian Adam Hochschild brings this moment vividly to life, revealing both the repression that darkened the era and the...
info_outline
Eugene Kirpichov: Regenerative Economics
The Forum at Grace Cathedral
The Forum with Eugene Kirpichov Grace Cathedral, San Francisco Many believe today's economic model is failing. There is a science-based, hopeful alternative: a regenerative model that works like a living system, helping leaders, communities, and citizens navigate climate chaos, inequality, and ecological breakdown with clarity and purpose. Instead of reacting to crisis after crisis, a regenerative economy creates the conditions for systems to thrive, adapt, and evolve. Eugene Kirpichov left a rewarding and fulfilling career as a machine learning engineer at Google because he could no...
info_outline
Randall Balmer Forum: America's Best Idea
The Forum at Grace Cathedral
The Forum with Randall Balmer Grace Cathedral, San Francisco The 1st Amendment to the US Constitution codified the principle that government should play no role in favoring or supporting any religion, while allowing free exercise of all religions (including unbelief). More than 200 years later, the results from this experiment are overwhelming: The separation of church and state has shielded the government from religious factionalism, and the United States boasts a diverse religious culture unmatched in the world. But changes have been taking place at an accelerating pace in recent years....
info_outline
Maggi Dawn: Beginnings and Endings & Giving It Up
The Forum at Grace Cathedral
The Forum with Maggi Dawn Grace Cathedral, San Francisco Author, professor, and priest Maggi Dawn has written two guides to the church year: Beginnings and Endings (and what happens in between): Daily Bible readings from Advent to Epiphany and Giving It Up: Daily Bible Readings from Ash Wednesday to Easter Day. Our everyday lives are full of small-scale beginnings and endings – births, deaths, marriages, careers, house moves and so on. How do the grand-scale beginnings and endings of Advent help to guide us as...
info_outlineFocus on Abortion: Americans Share Their Stories is a book and a traveling exhibit by author and photographer Roslyn Banish.
Join Malcolm Clemens Young, Dean of Grace Cathedral, for a conversation with Banish about what she has learned through the creation of this work, and giving voice to the often-missing and most important voices in the abortion conversation: the voices of those who have experienced abortion.
The exhibit is on view in the cathedral during regular opening hours, Monday through Saturday, 10 am to 5 pm and Sunday 1 to 5 pm. There is an admission fee. Plan your visit.
About the Artist
Roslyn Banish is an author and photographer. She found her passion when she enrolled in a photography course at the Institute of Design in Chicago, where she received a Master’s degree in Photography. From the beginning, she was drawn to photographing people. Over time she realized that she wanted to include what her subjects had to say, along with the photographs. This approach of combining photographs and text has allowed her to more fully document human issues.
Published works include Focus on Living: Portraits of Americans with HIV/AIDS (UMass Press). An exhibit of photographs and interviews from the book travelled to 35 community-based venues, from colleges to health centers to LBGTQ centers to a cafe.
Other books: City Families: Chicago and London, and children’s books A Forever Family, Let Me Tell You About My Baby, Just Gus: A Rescue Dog and the Woman He Loved. Roslyn has exhibited her work in England and the US and has taught photography in the US, England, and Italy. Learn more: https://focusonabortion.org/
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.