The Seed: Conversations for Radical Hope

What can people of faith offer to broader environmental and other social justice movements? Cherice’s work in ecotheology–a field of liberation theology centered around the relationship between religion and environment–seeks to support communication between communities focusing on theory, action, and reflection. Drawing on early Quaker history and her own ecospirituality, she examines how an insistence on individual integrity can leave us preoccupied with performative virtue, and how people of faith can move away from false charity toward an ethic of liberation. –Cherice Bock (she/her) is a Quaker from Oregon who combines advanced degrees in theology and environmental studies to teach, advocate, and organize with people of faith. Cherice leads Oregon Interfaith Power & Light and is an adjunct professor of ecotheology at Portland Seminary. She co-edited the book Quakers, Creation Care, and Sustainability, and she has a book forthcoming entitled, A Quaker Ecology: Meditations on the Future of Friends. To learn more about Cherice’s work, visit https://chericebock.com View Cherice’s August 2022 Pendle Hill First Monday lecture, “Friends & Sabbath in the Time of Climate Change,” here: https://youtu.be/k6tB3vqebxA–Cherice shares the following quotes: “May we look upon our treasures, and the furniture of our houses, and the garments in which we array ourselves, and try whether the seeds of war have any nourishment in these possessions or not.” - John Woolman“False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the ‘rejects of life,’ to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands—whether of individuals or entire peoples—need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.” - Paolo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed–Find a transcript for this episode here. ----Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. Pendle Hill is a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

eppchez yo-sí yes, a Quaker playwright, inventor, and spiritual companion, offers ways to practice noticing patterns of faithfulness and patterns of oppression to begin moving through transformations of self and community. Using eir own experiences in reparations work and Quaker business settings, ey and Dwight detangle integrity and perfection, calling us  instead into processes of transmutation. Through an interactive audio experiment, eppchez invites us to look inward: What would it look like to move beyond cultures and cycles of domination? How can we use noticing practices in our communities to better align our actions, words, and values?----eppchez yo-sí yes is a Quaker playwright, inventor, and spiritual companion living in Philadelphia. Eir work uses historical research combined with channeled wisdom to remember what our culture of domination has tried to erase. eppchez is one of many Friends working to implement a cultural shift toward active anti-racism among Quakers. Ey are called to earnestly and imperfectly model strategies to do reparations and build systems that make integrity and care more possible. To experience more of eppchez's work, visit  www.almasengine.com----Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. Pendle Hill is a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

Blanca Pacheco, co-director of New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, discusses the relationship between community care and self care, the power of laughter, and the need to elevate personal stories and wholeness in an immigration system that denies resources, rights, and humanity to people of color. Blanca shares the miracles and sacrifices of her own journey, and asks: how can we respect the integrity of ourselves amidst individualism, urgency, and unjust systems?----Blanca Pacheco is a passionate community organizer and a single mother with over 15 years of experience organizing with immigrant communities in Philadelphia. She is currently the Co-Director of New Sanctuary Movement, an interfaith immigrant justice organization which she helped found. Throughout her career she has worked on successful campaigns such as stopping collaboration between Philadelphia Police and ICE, and won Sanctuary campaigns with families fighting their final deportation orders. She is currently one of the leaders in the state of Pennsylvania fighting for Drivers Licenses for All regardless of Immigration Status. Register for “Building Sanctuary Within to Build Sanctuary for Others,” Blanca’s Pendle Hill First Monday Lecture on March 6, 2023, by clicking here.----Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. Pendle Hill is a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

Why a podcast season on the Quaker testimony of integrity? What makes it relevant now? Host Dwight Dunston and Pendle Hill executive director Francisco Burgos give an introduction of the Quaker testimony of integrity and offer their definitions and groundings. Francisco interviews Dwight about the testimony’s relevance to community and authenticity, Dwight’s experience recording The Seed’s second season, and what listeners can expect from upcoming episodes.Dwight Dunston is a West Philly-based facilitator, hip-hop artist, educator, and activist who has brought his creativity, care, and compassion to schools, community centers, retirement homes, festivals, and stadiums all over the country and internationally. His love of people and his belief that our stories and histories hold the key to our healing and wholeness has inspired him to design unique workshops, classes, and programs that support individuals to feel more rooted and heart-opened to themselves and to others.Francisco Burgos is the executive director of Pendle Hill. Francisco comes to Pendle Hill from the Center for Community Initiatives at the Monteverde Institute in Costa Rica. He was born in Santo Domingo, but identifies as an internationalist. Francisco was a poet, an educator, a father, and as a self described dreamer whose visions are grounded in reality.----Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. Pendle Hill is a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

Welcome to Season Two of The Seed: Conversations for Radical Hope. This season, we're exploring the Quaker testimony of Integrity: What does it look like to meaningfully live out our deepest spiritual truths with authenticity and grace? ----Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. Pendle Hill is a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

“My life’s work is really finding ways to remind people of, and validate, what they already know.” Ricardo Levins Morales thinks of his art as a medicinal practice, dedicated to treating both our cultural immediate diagnoses and the underlying inflammations, helping people to see their realities with more clarity. “The underlying inflammation in our society is hopelessness, despair, and disappointment,” but drawing on the cycles of the natural world, Ricardo reminds us of our places in the deep liberatory cycles of the world, and how awareness of these timelines is a necessary ingredient for hope. If despair shuts down our ability to take in information, hope is the practice of awareness of our current condition and what’s happening beyond our field of vision, bringing us to a greater sense of agency, power, and mutual responsibility to each other and the earth. Using this as a frame, Ricardo and Dwight grapple with what it would mean to embrace the cycles and focus on changing the soil in order to plant the seeds of new worlds.–Ricardo Levins Morales is an artist and organizer based in Minneapolis. He considers his art political medicine to support individual and collective healing from the injuries and ongoing reality of oppression. He was born into the anti-colonial movement in Puerto Rico and was drawn into activism in Chicago when his family moved there in 1967. This began with the Black Panther Defense Committee and has included organizing for labor, racial justice, and environmental struggles.Learn more about Ricardo’s work by visiting https://www.rlmartstudio.com/ View Ricardo’s June 2020 Pendle Hill First Monday lecture, “Planting in an Earthquake,” here: https://youtu.be/DWqBIcwxsTk –The Seed asks guests to share a quote or text that has been transformational to them. Ricardo shared the following quote from Amilcar Cabral’s essay “Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories”: “Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children.” –Find the transcript of this episode here.----Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. Pendle Hill is a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

How can we practice courage?  How do we build our “fear toolbox” and find our roles in social change work? In this episode, Eileen breaks down concrete steps for discernment around these questions. Her work as an environmental activist and spiritual writer has long focused on building effective movements that are grounded in love and harness people’s power. Here, she and Dwight break down the turning points and learnings over her career that have transformed her thinking about the relationships between love, power and justice, and about the illusion of separation.–Eileen Flanagan has served as both clerk and campaign director of Earth Quaker Action Team, which uses nonviolent direct action to pressure corporations contributing to climate change. She has also been a Pendle Hill Resident Teacher, a university lecturer on racism, and Trainings Coordinator for Choose Democracy, which trained 10,000 people in nonviolent strategies to prevent a coup in the lead up to the 2020 election. Her online courses on effective and spiritually grounded activism have engaged people around the world. The award-winning author of three books, she tells the story of her leading to work on climate justice inRenewable: One Woman’s Search for Simplicity, Faithfulness, and Hope. Read more about Eileen's work at eileenflanagan.com.Listen to Eileen’s November 2020 First Monday Lecture, “What Happens Wednesday? Preparing Ourselves for the Work Ahead” here. Register for Eileen’s upcoming Pendle Hill workshop, Making Our Activism More Effective through Nonviolent Direct Action, here.–The Seed asks guests to share a quote or text that has been transformational for them. Eileen shared the following quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech “Where Do We Go From Here?”:“What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best … is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power, correcting everything that stands against love.”–Find the transcript for this episode here.----Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. Pendle Hill is a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

Cai Quirk frames their art and their work expanding gender narratives as a collaboration between themself, the natural world, and Spirit. Despite the continued erasure of queer stories, Cai reminds us that the natural world keeps these stories of the “fluidity and diversity of ourselves…for us to be able to relearn.” In their conversation with Dwight, Cai invites us into those processes of collaboration, expansion, and relearning.–Cai Quirk (they/them or ey/em) is a lifelong Quaker with passions for Witness, personal discernment, and diverse methods of spiritual deepening. With a gender that transcends binaries, Cai is practiced at deeply questioning societal expectations and norms and in shifting towards roots of individual and group integrity. Spiritual deepening, Witness, and integrity are expanded in Cai’s writing, photography, and music practices. Cai’s upcoming book of photography and stories, Transcendence: Queer Restoryation, connects themes of spirituality, mythology, and gender diversity, nature and storytelling. Learn more about Cai’s work here: https://caiquirk.com/Preorder Cai’s upcoming book, Transcendence: Queer Restoryation, here.Listen to Cai’s First Monday lecture, “Myths of Gender,” here.–The Seed asks guests to share a quote or text that has been transformational for them. Cai shared the following quote from Winona LaDuke: “When we start our stories at the moment of harm, we get limited, we lose imagination. What were our stories before the harm? We can reimagine our pasts, imagine the pieces, the stories that weren’t handed down.”–Find the transcript for this episode here. ----Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. Pendle Hill is a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

Dwight sits down with Rev. Rhetta Morgan to discuss the power and purpose of heartbreak, the magic of sitting with grief, and the connection between healing self/others/world. What does it mean to heal and hope in the midst of the unspeakable?  “I want to invite people to go in the direction of the illogical,” Rev. Rhetta says. “It is illogical to be hopeful when everything around you is falling apart. I want you to do it anyway. I want you to go in that direction of the transcendent.” This conversation digs into the complexity, beauty, pain, and alchemy of radical hope and its power in the chaos and crises of our current moment. —Reverend Rhetta Morgan is a singing healer, spiritual activist, and interfaith minister who has been gathering tools for healing and inspiration for over 40 years. She is a valued teacher at Pendle Hill, offering workshops and lectures on topics including faithfulness and action, grief and healing, and nonviolent action. Through her gifts of prayer, poetry, facilitation, and sermonizing she cultivates hope and nurtures connection in her community as a pathway back to belonging and wholeness. —You can learn more about Rev. Rhetta’s work on her website, https://reverendrhetta.com/  Listen to Rev. Rhetta’s First Monday Lecture, "Into the Night: Holiness of Darkness," here. —Find the transcript for this episode here.----Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. Pendle Hill is a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

Can a podcast be a seed for social and individual healing? How can we expand Pendle Hill conversations?—Welcome to The Seed: Conversations for Radical Hope! In our opening episode, host Dwight Dunston and Pendle Hill executive director Francisco Burgos share their dreams for The Seed. Can a podcast be a seed for social healing? How can we expand Pendle Hill's conversations and spaces of transformation to continue building Beloved Community with a new medium? Dwight and Francisco discuss their own relationships to spirituality, activism, and Pendle Hill and attempt to answer the questions “Who is Dwight Dunston? Who is Francisco Burgos?”—Francisco Burgos is the executive director of Pendle Hill. Francisco comes to Pendle Hill from the Center for Community Initiatives at the Monteverde Institute in Costa Rica. He was born in Santo Domingo, but identifies as an internationalist. Francisco was a poet, an educator, a father, and as a self described dreamer whose visions are grounded in reality.Listen to Francisco’s First Monday lecture “Re Creating Hope” here.— Find the transcript for this episode here. ----Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. Pendle Hill is a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

The Seed: Conversations for Radical Hope is an upcoming Pendle Hill podcast where Quakers and other seekers explore visions of the world growing up through the cracks of our broken systems. In celebration of World Quaker Day, our first episode will be released October 2, 2022. Be sure to subscribe and follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook for updates! ----Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. Pendle Hill is a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.