The Middle Way Society

Our guest today is Peter Block  who is a consultant and speaker in the areas of organization development, community building, and civic engagement. He’s the author of several books including Another Kingdom: Departing the consumer culture, The Community: the structure of belonging and perhaps his most well-known work The Abundant community which he co-wrote with John McNight and which has now beco...

My guest today is Adam Briggle, who is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas. He is the author of A Rich Bioethics, co-author of Ethics and Science: An Introduction, and author of A Field Philosopher's Guide to Fracking. He recently had a joint article with the philosopher Robert Frodeman published in the New York Times entitled “When Philosophy Lost its W...

My guest today is Stephen Farah who is the senior lecturer at the Centre for Applied Jungian Studies in Johannesburg, South Africa. He became passionate about Jungian psychology after experiencing it as radically life changing when he first encountered it in the late nineties. Stephen’s interest are consciousness, meaning and the  individuation project. He has a  BA Honours degree in philosophy fr...

This week’s guest is the social psychologist and social activist Dr. Melanie Joy. Melanie is perhaps most well known for coining the term Carnism, which she popularized in her book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows. She’s the founder and president of Beyond Carnism, a charitable organisation which she founded in 2010 and Carnism will be the topic of our discussion today.

The Buddhist scholar and author Stephen Batchelor talks to Susan Averbach about his new book After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age. They then move on to discussing whether the Middle Way can or should be promoted beyond the Buddhist tradition and Stephen also outlines a new initiative he has become involved in, The Bodhi College , an ethical and philosophical framework for those...

A discussion hosted by Barry Daniel, with Susan Averbach, Robert M Ellis and Willie Grieve. If we are going to avoid using ‘faith’ as a cover word for dogmatic belief, what does it mean? What can we have faith in, and how does faith relate to the Middle Way?

Alva Noë is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His work has focused mainly on the theory of perception and consciousness with which he straddles in particular the fields of cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. He’s also interested in phenomenology, the philosophy of John Dewey and the theory of art. His books include Action in Perception, Out of our Heads,...

Our guest today is Mark Williams who is a professor of paleobiology at the University of Leicester. He’s the co-author, along with Jan Zalasiewicz of The Goldilocks Planet: The 4 billion year story of Earth's Climate and has published several peer reviewed papers on paleobiology, paleoenvironments and paleoclimates in conjunction with other researchers including his latest ‘The Anthropocene Biosph...

Our guest today is Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the first woman ever to be tenured in psychology at Harvard. Her studies include the illusion of control, decision-making, aging and mindfulness theory and she has often been described as the mother of mindfulness. She has written many books including the best selling, Mindfulness, The Powerof Mindful Learning, On...

Our guest today is Peter Sheath, a mental health nurse, counsellor, consultant, trainer and person in long term recovery who has been involved in the field of health and social care for many years. He has worked in a variety of mental health settings including managing acute psychiatry units, community psychiatric nursing, day centre management and nurse teaching. Peter is extremely passionate abo...

Our guest today is Steven Heine, a Canadian professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia and a leader in the field of cultural psychology. In 2010, he, along with his colleagues Joseph Henrich and Ava Norenzayan wrote the ground-breaking paper ‘The WEIRDest’ people in the world?’ with WEIRD meaning Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. The paper suggests that the...

In this round table discussion, Susan Averbach, Tim Kaine and Shana Averbach discuss what they understand by feminism, how it has evolved, the progress it has made and the challenges it faces. Reversing gender roles in fiction and professional documentation is also discussed as well looking at gender equality in the work place to what degree feminism is a phenomenon of the developed world. (In the...

Our guest today is Dr Marc Lewis, a developmental neuroscientist and currently a professor at the Radboud University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. For many years his work centred on dynamic systems approaches to understanding the development of emotions and personality but recently he has perhaps become most well known for his account of his own personal experience of drug addiction Memoirs of A...

This week the historian Christopher Beckwith talks about his latest book Greek Buddha with the chair of the society Robert M Ellis

We are joined today by David Mcraney, an internationally bestselling author, journalist, and lecturer who created the You Are Not So Smart blog, books, and podcast. David, who lives in Mississippi, cut his teeth covering Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast and across the Deep South. Since then, he has been a beat reporter, editor, photographer, voiceover artist and television host. Before that, he...

We are joined today by Monica Dare who is a Pilates and Alexander Technique instructor. Monica trained in London with Body Control Pilates in 1998; from there she moved to Brighton where she worked at one of the UK's leading studios for 18 months.  She continued her studies in Kendal in the Lake District where she completed a three year full time training course qualifying in The Alexander Techniq...

Joining us today is Arno Michaelis. Arno is now a peace activist, but spent the late 1980s and early 1990s deeply involved with racist skinhead organizations, and was lead singer of the hate-metal band Centurion, which sold 20,000 CDs by the mid-nineties and is still popular with racists today. Single parenthood, love for his daughter, and the forgiveness shown by people he once hated all helped t...

We are joined today by Sarah Dickinson, who is a volunteer with Samaritans, a registered charity aimed at providing emotional support to anyone in emotional distress, struggling to cope, or at risk of suicide throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland. She’s going to tell us a little bit about the rationale of the organisation, what it does, how one can volunteer and how it might relate to the Midd...

My guest today is Hári Sewell who is the director of HS Consultancy Associates, specialists in mental health, equalities & social care. He’s the author of several books, including ‘Working with Ethnicity, Race and Culture in Mental Health’ and ‘The Equality Act 2010 in Mental Health’. He is a social worker by background with over 20 years experience. Until recently he was the Executive Director on...

Today’s guests are Pete Goble and Rich Flanagan. Pete is a retired nurse and currently a Buddhist Health Care Chaplain. Rich is an Operating Department Practitioner, working in the NHS, specialising in anaesthetics and post-operative recovery. They’re both members of the Middle Way Society and they are here to talk today about how people perceive pain, the assumptions we make about it, how it’s in...

Today’s guest is Susan Greenfield. Baroness Greenfield is a neuroscientist, writer, broadcaster and member of the House of Lords. Her research has focused on brain physiology, especially on the brain mechanisms of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. She’s also become well known as a populariser of science and has written many books including ‘Journey to the Centres of the Mind’, ‘The Private Lif...

In this latest member profile Barry Daniel talks to Susan Averbach about his life and background, why he joined the society, what other interests he has and how it has been for him producing the Middle Way Society Podcast.

This week’s guest is the environmentalist Jonathon Porritt who is the founder director of Forum for the Future, the UK’s leading sustainable development charity. He’s the former chair of the Green Party and former director of Friends of the Earth. He’s going to talk to us today about his latest book ‘The World we Made: Alex McKay's Story from 2050’ and the prospects for people engaging with the is...

We are joined by the philosopher Richard Shusterman, the professor of philosophy at Florida Atlantic University. He’s the author of several books including Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life, Body Consciousness and Thinking through the Body. He’s also travelled widely and is arguably something of a polymath having held appointments in other disciplines in the humanities....

We are joined today by the chair of the Middle Way Society Robert M. Ellis who talks to us about politics and how it might relate to the Middle Way.