The Forum at Grace Cathedral Grace Cathedral

 
 
We are thrilled to announce the gift to the cathedral of Our Lady of the Flowers, a photographic work by artist David LaChapelle, which we will be celebrating at an opening reception in the cathedral on March 11, 2023. Join Malcolm Clemens Young for a conversation with LaChapelle about the story of Our Lady of the Flowers, and his storied career.  

David LaChapelle was born in Connecticut in 1963 and attended high school at North Carolina School of The Arts.  Originally enrolled as a painter, he developed an analogue technique by hand-painting his own negatives to achieve a sublime spectrum of color before processing his film. At age 17, LaChapelle moved to New York City.  Following his first photography show at Gallery 303, he was hired by Andy Warhol to work at Interview Magazine. Through his mastery of color, unique composition, and imaginative narratives, LaChapelle began to expand the genre of photography.  His staged tableau, portrait, and still life works challenged devices of traditional photography and his work quickly gained international interest. By 1997, The New York Times predicted, “LaChapelle is certain to influence the work of a new generation...in the same way that Mr. Avedon pioneered so much of what is familiar today.” In the decades since, LaChapelle has become one of the most published photographers throughout the world with an anthology of books including LaChapelle Land (1996), Hotel LaChapelle (1999), Heaven to Hell (2006), Lost & Found and Good News (2017).  Simultaneously, his work has expanded into music video, film, and stage projects.  His 2005 feature film Rize was released theatrically in 17 countries. Many of his still and film works have become iconic archetypes of America in the 21st century. In the past 30 years, LaChapelle has exhibited internationally in galleries and museums including the National Portrait Gallery (London), Musée de Monnaie (Paris), Barbican Centre (London), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Musee D’Orsay (Paris), Groninger Museum (The Netherlands), Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome), Palazzo Reale (Milano), National Portrait Gallery (Washington D.C.), Casa dei Tre Oci (Venice), La Venaria Reale (Turin), MUDEC (Milan), and Fotografiska (New York). .davidlachapelle.com.  

You can help us bring the arts to life at Grace with a gift today to The Forum. Please go to Gracecathedral.org/give-form.  

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. Gracecathedral.org/the-forum.   

“Our breath is a beautiful, healing, mysterious gift, and so is this book. I already feel like it’s going to change my life.” —  Elizabeth Gilbert 
There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences.  
James Nestor is an award-winning author and journalist who has written for Scientific American, Outside, The New York Times, and more. His latest book, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, was an instant New York Times and London Sunday Times bestseller. 
Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head. The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of São Paulo.
Join Malcolm Clemens Young for a conversation with Nestor about his new book, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, how the human species has lost the ability to breathe properly—and how to get it back. 

St. Augustine is perhaps the most significant Christian thinker after St. Paul. Often pictured by Western painters holding in his hand his heart blazing with passionate love, he consistently and repeatedly insisted―from his earliest writings until close to his death―that the essential characteristic of God is love. Yet he also insisted on the doctrines of original sin and everlasting punishment for the damned. How did he reconcile this apparent contradiction? And can it bring us any closer to understanding a God seemingly indifferent to human suffering?  
Margaret Miles is the Emerita Professor of Historical Theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, where she also served as Dean for six years. She was the first tenured woman at Harvard University Divinity School, where she taught from 1978 to 1996. The author of more than twenty-five books, she has studied Augustine for over fifty years, and while deep in writing her latest and perhaps last book, Beautiful Bodies, she joins Malcolm Clemens Young for a conversation about some of her exciting findings.  
You can help us bring the arts to life at Grace with a gift today to The Forum. Learn all the many ways to give at gracecathedral.org/give.
About the Guest
Margaret R. Miles is Emerita Professor of Historical Theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. She was Bussey Professor of Theology and the first tenured woman at Harvard University Divinity School from 1978 to 1996, and Dean of GTU from 1996 until her retirement in 2002. Recent books include both research books and books that explore a problem that is both personal and social: Reading Augustine: On Memory, Marriage, Tears and Meditation, Augustine and The Fundamentalist’s Daughter, Getting Here From There (with Hiroko Sakomura), The Wendell Cocktail, and The Long Goodbye: Dementia Diaries.
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.

Gone With the Wind, a nostalgic tale full of the myths of the Southern belle, Southern culture, ‘good food and good manners,’ is still the second most popular book in the USA after the Bible. And the story of slavery in America is not over. It lives on in how we speak to one another, in how we treat one another, in how our societies are organized. Our ability to dehumanize one another can be traced all the way from the plantation to a US President’s Twitter account.  

Patricia J. Williams is University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities at Northeastern University, and Director of Law, Technology and Ethics Initiatives. Her award-winning column, "Diary of a Mad Law Professor," appeared in The Nation Magazine for two decades, and she is the recipient of seven honorary doctorates and a MacArthur fellowship.  She is the author of six books, including The Alchemy of Race and Rights, which was named one of the “feminist classics of the last 20 years” that “literally changed women’s lives” by Ms. magazine; and one of the 10 best non-fiction books of the decade by Amazon.com.   

Join Malcolm Clemens Young in a conversation with Williams about her latest book Giving A Damn: Racism, Romance and Gone With the Wind and how when you begin to unpick current debates around immigration, freedom of speech, the culture wars and wall-building, beneath them lies the unexamined history of enslavement in the West. 

You can help us bring the arts to life at Grace with a gift today to The Forum. Learn all the many ways to give at gracecathedral.org/give. Thank you!  

About the Guest 

Patricia J. Williams is University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities at Northeastern University, and Director of Law, Technology and Ethics Initiatives.  A graduate of Wellesley College and Harvard Law School, she is also Professor Emerita at Columbia University School of Law.  She is the author of six books, her latest being Giving A Damn: Racism, Romance and Gone With the Wind, from Harper Collins.  Her award-winning column, "Diary of a Mad Law Professor," appeared in The Nation Magazine for two decades. She is the recipient of seven honorary doctorates and a MacArthur fellowship.   

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.  More about Grace Forum Online

Awe is mysterious. How do we begin to quantify the goose bumps we feel when we see the Grand Canyon, or the utter amazement when we watch a child walk for the first time? How do you put into words the collective effervescence of standing in a crowd and singing in unison, or the wonder you feel while gazing at centuries-old works of art? Up until fifteen years ago, there was no science of awe, the feeling we experience when we encounter vast mysteries that transcend our understanding of the world. Scientists were studying emotions like fear and disgust, emotions that seemed essential to human survival. Revolutionary thinking, though, has brought into focus how, through the span of evolution, we’ve met our most basic needs socially. We’ve survived thanks to our capacities to cooperate, form communities, and create culture that strengthens our sense of shared identity—actions that are sparked and spurred by awe.
Dacher Keltner is a foremost expert on the science of emotions and consultant to Pixar’s Inside Out. A professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and the faculty director of the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center, he is the author of the best-selling books Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life and The Compassionate Instinct.
Join Malcolm Clemens Young for a conversation with Dacher Keltner about his new book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life and how greatly we need this elusive emotion.
You can help us bring the arts to life at Grace with a gift today to The Forum. Learn all the many ways to give at gracecathedral.org/give. Thank you!  
About the Guest
Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and the faculty director of the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center. A renowned expert in the biological and evolutionary origins of human emotion, Dr. Keltner studies the science of compassion, awe, love, and beauty, and how emotions shape our moral intuition. His research interests also span issues of power, status, inequality, and social class. He is the author of the best-selling book Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life and of The Compassionate Instinct.
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.  gracecathedral.org/the-forum.

Hosted in partnership with the Northern California Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Foundation, this annual service and Forum conversation gathers local and national interfaith leaders around a theme in Dr. King’s life and work. This year’s theme is “Freedom, Justice, and Beloved Community.”
The theme is taken from Coretta King’s remarks at the Atlanta grave site of her late husband in 1993, the 25th anniversary of his assassination: “Freedom and justice cannot be parceled out in pieces to suit political convenience. I don’t believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others.”
Hosted by: The Rt. Rev. Dr. Marc Handley Andrus, Bishop, Episcopal Diocese of California Aaron Grizzell, Executive Director, Northern California MLK Foundation
Participants include: Rev. Dr. Sakena Young-Scaggs, Sr. Associate Dean of Religious & Spiritual Life at Stanford; and Sr. Pastor of Stanford Memorial Church Dr. Tracey E. Hucks, Suzanne Young Murray Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School Dr. Raymond Carr, Visiting Scholar/Visiting Professor, Harvard Divinity School