Dr. Russell M. Jeung, professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University and a leading sociologist of race, religion, and social movements, was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2021, in recognition of his work launching Stop AAPI Hate. Stop AAPI Hate is a U.S.-based coalition dedicated to fighting racism and discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. As the nation’s largest reporting center tracking anti-AAPI hate acts, the coaliti...
May 12, 2025•1 hr 3 min
Gary Dorrien, the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University, is the author of 24 books and more than 300 articles that range across the fields of social ethics, philosophy, theology, political economics, social and political theory, religious history, cultural criticism, and intellectual history. Social critic Michael Eric Dyson called him: “the greatest theological ethicist of the twenty-first century, our most com...
May 08, 2025•1 hr 3 min
Crystal Williams – writer, poet, advocate, leader, and President of the Rhode Island School of Design – believes that education, art and design, and commitments to equity and justice are essential to transforming our society. For more than two decades, her work to elevate and amplify the multiplicity of human experience in higher education has galvanized the imagination about who we have been and who we can become. In her inaugural address, she asked: “Can you imagine a single national or intern...
May 05, 2025•1 hr 3 min
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. Harris outlines the three strategies—progressive, socialist, and revolutionary—that have any chance of succeeding...
May 02, 2025•1 hr 3 min
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 directly, imploring him “to have mercy on the people in our country who are scared now,” from those ...
Apr 14, 2025•56 min
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 is only possible in community, when we cultivate our relationships toward all kin, from human to more...
Apr 07, 2025•1 hr 5 min
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, the platforms are ours to govern, and the power is ours to reclaim. Join Malcolm Clemens Young, Dean of G...
Mar 31, 2025•1 hr 2 min
Mar 31, 2025•56 min
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 threat that united Americans in a common cause, the dangers of climate change are similarly challen...
Mar 24, 2025•1 hr 3 min
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 influence makes him fascinating, provocative, and relevant for everyone, not only Christians. Recorde...
Mar 17, 2025•1 hr 2 min
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 play in what and how much we eat. Join Malcolm Clemens Young for a conversation with Nestle about how to n...
Feb 10, 2025•1 hr 3 min
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 how do we benefit from its teachings? With the same solution-minded ethic as his much-admired The St...
Feb 03, 2025•34 min
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. Mill...
Nov 11, 2024•1 hr 3 min
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 Young for a conversation with Makuakāne about exploring the cathedral’s 2024 theme, “the Year of Memory...
Nov 04, 2024•1 hr 3 min
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 Expressio...
Oct 15, 2024•1 hr 8 min
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 opport...
Oct 06, 2024•1 hr 6 min
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 Califo...
Oct 01, 2024•1 hr 5 min
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...
Sep 23, 2024•59 min
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.
Aug 12, 2024•1 hr 5 min
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, no...
Jun 10, 2024•1 hr 2 min
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...
Jun 03, 2024•1 hr
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 demonstrably world-changing. Palo Alto is also a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian buria...
May 23, 2024•1 hr 1 min
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 his chapel, an inventor of the first American subway, a female anti-slavery activist in Philadelphia ....
May 06, 2024•1 hr
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 key tactic of her ongoing study of language. Every year we choose a theme to inspire us and to crea...
Apr 29, 2024•57 min
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 plants and animals may need to migrate uphill or northward as the planet warms. These velocities could b...
Mar 11, 2024•1 hr 2 min
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 the Rosie the Riveter National Historic Site as an interpretive oral historian until she retired at 10...
Mar 06, 2024•35 min
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, Ian Haney López in Dog Whistle Politics, named and explained the coded racial appeals exploited by right-wing po...
Mar 06, 2024•1 hr 1 min
Many American policy makers are squeamish about religion’s role in diplomacy. Nevertheless, religion plays a crucial and complex part in global affairs, such as in sustainable development, various human rights issues, and fomenting and mitigating conflict. Shaun A. Casey, the founding director of the US Department of State’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs, makes a compelling case for the necessity of understanding global religion in his book, Chasing the Devil at Foggy Bottom. In this fre...
Feb 08, 2024•1 hr 1 min
Grace Cathedral, San Francisco January 21, 2024 Join Malcolm Young, Dean of Grace Cathedral, in conversation with leading peace activist, author, and Nobel Peace Prize Nominee Rev. John Dear, talking about his new book, The Gospel of Peace: A Commentary on Matthew, Mark and Luke from the Perspective of Nonviolence. “John Dear is one of the few towering figures in the Christian nonviolent freedom and peace movement in our time! This powerful book should not be missed!” — Cornel West “Prepare to b...
Jan 21, 2024•1 hr 3 min
Grace Cathedral, San Francisco November 15, 2023 Poet, speaker, and one of the UK’s foremost transgender theologians, Jay Hulme , joined us on a rare visit to the United States. Author of the viral poem ‘ Jesus at the Gay Bar ,’ Jay read from his new collection of poetry, The Vanishing Song ; shared his vision of cathedrals as queer/trans; and talked about transgender politics across the Atlantic. This program was part of our celebration of The Year of Poetry , Grace Cathedral’s 2023 theme. Duri...
Nov 29, 2023•1 hr 3 min
