The Forum at Grace Cathedral

Malcolm Harris Forum   Grace Cathedral, San Francisco       Just as humans have caused climate change, we hold the power to avert a climate apocalypse, but that will only happen through collective political action.     In WHAT'S LEFT: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis , bestselling author Malcolm Harris cuts through the noise and gets real about our remaining options for saving the world. H...

Mariann Edgar Budde is the bishop and spiritual leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C., and the Washington National Cathedral. On January 21, 2025, many Americans were introduced to Bishop Budde thanks to what The New York Times called "an extraordinary act of public resistance." During her prayer service for Donald J. Trump's second inauguration, Bishop Budde addressed the president...

How do we cultivate collective flourishing? When facing the monumental challenges of our world, we often end up disconnecting to focus on our mental health. Dr. Yuria Celidwen explains this focus on our state of mind alone is precisely why so many of us struggle to flourish. "What's been overlooked is the Indigenous perspective of relationality," she says. "It is the understanding that happiness i...

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco  The internet is broken, and it's urgent that we fix it. We can – and must – do more to safeguard the health and well-being of our children, our democracy, and our society as a whole.   Project Liberty is stitching together an ecosystem of technologists, academics, policymakers, and citizens committed to building a better internet—where the data is ours to manage, th...

Every day the news is filled with stories of extreme weather that threatens our cities, our health, our futures: tornadoes wiping out whole communities; droughts that ignite catastrophic wildfires; storms flooding roads and destroying infrastructure; rising water levels that jeopardize entire nations; new climate-related diseases that threaten our health. Just as World War II raised an existential...

In her book Jesus For Everyone, Not Just Christians renowned biblical scholar and author Amy-Jill Levine uses stories told by and about Jesus to address the issues dividing us today: economics, family values, the legacy of slavery, nationalism, healthcare, and politics.   Join Malcolm Clemens Young, Dean of Grace Cathedral, for a conversation with Dr. Levine about why Jesus's historic and cultural...

Dietary guidelines, alcohol, ultra-processed foods. It seems like new recommendations come out every day. Who is making our food choices?      Marion Nestle, one of the seven most powerful foodies (Forbes Magazine), is a molecular biologist and nutritionist who started the country's first academic food-studies program at NYU, bringing attention to the roles that culture, capitalism, and politics p...

How do we live with fire? Fire is an essential part of California's ecology. Humans have been using it to shape the California landscape for thousands of years. But today many Californians' relationship to fire is one of fear. Obi Kaufmann, author of the best-selling California Field Atlas, now asks: How do we live with fire? What makes fire essential to a healthy and biodiverse Golden State, and...

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 be...

We are thrilled to announce Patrick Makuakāne as our 2024 Artist in Residence. Patrick is a kumu hula (master teacher) whose work blends traditional hula with contemporary music and movements and uplifts Hawaiian culture and history. With his San Francisco-based dance company, Nā Lei Hulu i ka Wēkiu , he has forged his own unique form of hula—hula mua , or hula that evolves.   Join Malcolm Clemens...

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 th...

  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 E...

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? Fin...

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,...

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 a...

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.

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...

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 radic...

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...

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 hi...

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...

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 plan...

Join 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 th...

From the acclaimed author of  Dog Whistle Politics , Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America is an essential road map to neutralizing the role of racism as a divide-and-conquer political weapon and to building a broad multiracial progressive future.      "Ian Haney López has broken the code on the racial politics of the last fifty years ."― Bill Moyers      In 2014...