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_outlineJoin Malcolm Clemens Young for a conversation with Bonnie Tsui about her latest book, On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters.
In On Muscle, Tsui brings her signature blend of science, culture, immersive reporting, and personal narrative to examine not just what muscles are but what they mean to us. Cardiac, smooth, skeletal—these three different types of muscle in our bodies make our hearts beat; push food through our intestines, blood through our vessels, babies out the uterus; attach to our bones and allow for motion. Tsui also traces how muscles have defined beauty—and how they have distorted it—through the ages, and how they play an essential role in our physical and mental health.
Buy the Book
About the Guest
Bonnie Tsui is a longtime contributor to The New York Times and the author of the new book On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters, a vivid, thought-provoking celebration of musculature that was named one of NPR’s “Books We Love” 2025 and an Amazon Editors’ Pick for Best Nonfiction of 2025; it is currently being translated into six languages. Her bestselling books include Why We Swim, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Time magazine and NPR Best Book of the Year, and American Chinatown, which won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. Her work has been recognized and supported by Harvard University, the National Press Foundation, and the Best American Essays series. She lives, swims, and surfs in the Bay Area.
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. Learn more about The Forum and upcoming discussions. You can help us bring the arts to life at Grace with a gift today to The Forum.