Podcasts about incite seminars

Glenn's latest, Non Buddhist Mysticism: Performing Irreducible and Primitive Presence (Eyecorner Press, 2022), presents a radical reorientation to “spiritual” practice. Drawing from François Laruelle's concept of future mysticism and the author's own previous work on non-buddhism, Glenn Wallis galvanizes a materialist spirituality for the twenty-first century. Liberated from the punctilious gaze of the masters, delivered into the hands (and hearts) of the reader, this is a spirituality “born in the spirit of heresy rather than sanctity.” The intended outcome is a subject “fit for the clash with Hell” – a person equipped, lovingly and compassionately, to confront the injustices of the world. We also look at the great work taking place at INCITE Seminars, a place of practice which all listeners are invited to. Order at EyeCorner Press Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Glenn's latest, Non Buddhist Mysticism: Performing Irreducible and Primitive Presence (Eyecorner Press, 2022), presents a radical reorientation to “spiritual” practice. Drawing from François Laruelle's concept of future mysticism and the author's own previous work on non-buddhism, Glenn Wallis galvanizes a materialist spirituality for the twenty-first century. Liberated from the punctilious gaze of the masters, delivered into the hands (and hearts) of the reader, this is a spirituality “born in the spirit of heresy rather than sanctity.” The intended outcome is a subject “fit for the clash with Hell” – a person equipped, lovingly and compassionately, to confront the injustices of the world. We also look at the great work taking place at INCITE Seminars, a place of practice which all listeners are invited to. Order at EyeCorner Press Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Glenn's latest, Non Buddhist Mysticism: Performing Irreducible and Primitive Presence (Eyecorner Press, 2022), presents a radical reorientation to “spiritual” practice. Drawing from François Laruelle's concept of future mysticism and the author's own previous work on non-buddhism, Glenn Wallis galvanizes a materialist spirituality for the twenty-first century. Liberated from the punctilious gaze of the masters, delivered into the hands (and hearts) of the reader, this is a spirituality “born in the spirit of heresy rather than sanctity.” The intended outcome is a subject “fit for the clash with Hell” – a person equipped, lovingly and compassionately, to confront the injustices of the world. We also look at the great work taking place at INCITE Seminars, a place of practice which all listeners are invited to. Order at EyeCorner Press Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/spiritual-practice-and-mindfulness

Glenn's latest, Non Buddhist Mysticism: Performing Irreducible and Primitive Presence (Eyecorner Press, 2022), presents a radical reorientation to “spiritual” practice. Drawing from François Laruelle's concept of future mysticism and the author's own previous work on non-buddhism, Glenn Wallis galvanizes a materialist spirituality for the twenty-first century. Liberated from the punctilious gaze of the masters, delivered into the hands (and hearts) of the reader, this is a spirituality “born in the spirit of heresy rather than sanctity.” The intended outcome is a subject “fit for the clash with Hell” – a person equipped, lovingly and compassionately, to confront the injustices of the world. We also look at the great work taking place at INCITE Seminars, a place of practice which all listeners are invited to. Order at EyeCorner Press Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What would Nietzsche say… about today's divisive issues and debates? I spoke with Glenn Wallis, author of the new book, Nietzsche Now!, on how the Great Immoralist guides us in understanding democracy, identity, civilization, consciousness, religion, and other urgent topics of our time. Wallis identifies six guiding principles in Nietzsche's work that help navigate today's concerns: curiosity, humor, courage, distance, solitude, and humor. Steeped in Nietzsche but never academic, dogmatic, or pious (which Nietzsche would have hated!), Wallis explains with infectious enthusiasm and meticulous care the reasons why Nietzsche may be the most relevant thinker for our time. Glenn Wallis is the editor and translator of The Dhammapada and Basic Teachings of the Buddha (Random House), and the author of A Critique of Western Buddhism (Bloomsbury), An Anarchist's Manifesto, and How to Fix Education (both with Warbler Press). He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and has taught at several universities, including Brown University, and at the University of Georgia as a tenured professor. He is the founder and director of Incite Seminars in Philadelphia. Nietzsche Now! The Great Immoralist on the Vital Issues of Our Time (Warbler Press, 2023) is now available wherever books are sold. Other Think About It episodes mentioned in this podcast: Béatrice Longueness on Immanuel Kant's What is Englightenment? Melissa Schwartzberg on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract Glenn Wallis on Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Threats to Democracy and H. L. Mencken's Notes on Democracy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

What would Nietzsche say… about today's divisive issues and debates? I spoke with Glenn Wallis, author of the new book, Nietzsche Now!, on how the Great Immoralist guides us in understanding democracy, identity, civilization, consciousness, religion, and other urgent topics of our time. Wallis identifies six guiding principles in Nietzsche's work that help navigate today's concerns: curiosity, humor, courage, distance, solitude, and humor. Steeped in Nietzsche but never academic, dogmatic, or pious (which Nietzsche would have hated!), Wallis explains with infectious enthusiasm and meticulous care the reasons why Nietzsche may be the most relevant thinker for our time. Glenn Wallis is the editor and translator of The Dhammapada and Basic Teachings of the Buddha (Random House), and the author of A Critique of Western Buddhism (Bloomsbury), An Anarchist's Manifesto, and How to Fix Education (both with Warbler Press). He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and has taught at several universities, including Brown University, and at the University of Georgia as a tenured professor. He is the founder and director of Incite Seminars in Philadelphia. Nietzsche Now! The Great Immoralist on the Vital Issues of Our Time (Warbler Press, 2023) is now available wherever books are sold. Other Think About It episodes mentioned in this podcast: Béatrice Longueness on Immanuel Kant's What is Englightenment? Melissa Schwartzberg on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract Glenn Wallis on Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Threats to Democracy and H. L. Mencken's Notes on Democracy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

What would Nietzsche say… about today's divisive issues and debates? I spoke with Glenn Wallis, author of the new book, Nietzsche Now!, on how the Great Immoralist guides us in understanding democracy, identity, civilization, consciousness, religion, and other urgent topics of our time. Wallis identifies six guiding principles in Nietzsche's work that help navigate today's concerns: curiosity, humor, courage, distance, solitude, and humor. Steeped in Nietzsche but never academic, dogmatic, or pious (which Nietzsche would have hated!), Wallis explains with infectious enthusiasm and meticulous care the reasons why Nietzsche may be the most relevant thinker for our time. Glenn Wallis is the editor and translator of The Dhammapada and Basic Teachings of the Buddha (Random House), and the author of A Critique of Western Buddhism (Bloomsbury), An Anarchist's Manifesto, and How to Fix Education (both with Warbler Press). He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and has taught at several universities, including Brown University, and at the University of Georgia as a tenured professor. He is the founder and director of Incite Seminars in Philadelphia. Nietzsche Now! The Great Immoralist on the Vital Issues of Our Time (Warbler Press, 2023) is now available wherever books are sold. Other Think About It episodes mentioned in this podcast: Béatrice Longueness on Immanuel Kant's What is Englightenment? Melissa Schwartzberg on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract Glenn Wallis on Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Threats to Democracy and H. L. Mencken's Notes on Democracy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

What would Nietzsche say… about today's divisive issues and debates? I spoke with Glenn Wallis, author of the new book, Nietzsche Now!, on how the Great Immoralist guides us in understanding democracy, identity, civilization, consciousness, religion, and other urgent topics of our time. Wallis identifies six guiding principles in Nietzsche's work that help navigate today's concerns: curiosity, humor, courage, distance, solitude, and humor. Steeped in Nietzsche but never academic, dogmatic, or pious (which Nietzsche would have hated!), Wallis explains with infectious enthusiasm and meticulous care the reasons why Nietzsche may be the most relevant thinker for our time. Glenn Wallis is the editor and translator of The Dhammapada and Basic Teachings of the Buddha (Random House), and the author of A Critique of Western Buddhism (Bloomsbury), An Anarchist's Manifesto, and How to Fix Education (both with Warbler Press). He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and has taught at several universities, including Brown University, and at the University of Georgia as a tenured professor. He is the founder and director of Incite Seminars in Philadelphia. Nietzsche Now! The Great Immoralist on the Vital Issues of Our Time (Warbler Press, 2023) is now available wherever books are sold. Other Think About It episodes mentioned in this podcast: Béatrice Longueness on Immanuel Kant's What is Englightenment? Melissa Schwartzberg on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract Glenn Wallis on Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Threats to Democracy and H. L. Mencken's Notes on Democracy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Cohesion, Alignment, Separation Hosts: Darren Weeks, Vicky Davis Website for the show: https://governamerica.com Vicky's Websites: https://thetechnocratictyranny.com and http://channelingreality.com COMPLETE SHOW NOTES AND CREDITS AT: https://governamerica.com/radio/radio-archives/22375-govern-america-september-12-2020-cohesion-alignment-separation LISTEN LIVE EVERY SATURDAY 11AM TO 2PM EASTERN TIME AT http://live.governamerica.com Technocrats engineering the Fourth Industrial Revolution are transitioning the world into a artificial reality where machines are in control, currencies are digital, property is virtualized, and wealth is only generated within the confines of their game. Meanwhile, in the real world, everyone gets tracked, traced, manipulated, and poverty increases for all except those doing the programming. Deep dive on Incite Seminars and their excellent presentation on Life in a post-pandemic video game. In the final hour, John Perazzo of DiscoverTheNetworks.org joins us to talk about the Marxist orgins of Black Lives Matter. John is a contributing writer to Front Page Magazine and works for the David Horowitz Freedom Center. We discussed his article, Black Lives Matter: Marxist Hate Dressed Up As Racial Justice and touched upon the roots of the BLM organization, their funding, and their detrimental impact upon society.

Rethinking Practice at the Great Feast @INCITE Seminars Saturday, July 25th, 10am-2pm EST / 4-8pm Europe /3pm-7pm UK. Online via Zoom. Come and join us on the 25th at Incite Seminars for an original workshop on Buddhism at the Great Feast for Incite Seminars. Pay what you can and dive into this experimental event online through Zoom. Description below. Western Buddhism and spirituality more broadly provide us with a rich menu of practices, messages and visions of the human condition and what is possible and even desirable to do, avoid, and strive for within a human life. Yet, as many of us have come to realize, these practices, messages and curative fantasies do not always live up to expectation. The overly prescriptive ideals of what it means to be human, what practice is, and what we should be doing with it all too often reduce the Buddhist practitioner to the role of a passive performer of tradition and can lead to a loss of faith, disenchantment, and the feeling of having been conned. Can critique and disenchantment lead us to creatively reclaim our sense of ourselves apart from tradition, and discover new lines of inquiry, practice, and ways of relating? In this hands- and minds-on workshop, we will explore the possibilities of making a new relationship to Buddhist practice through the concept of the The Great Feast of Knowledge. This concept, articulated by Glenn Wallis, asks what happens when we invite any kind of thought, practice, insight or claim to exit its ideological bubble and interact with the great, vast planes of knowledge, human struggle, and discovery that sit outside the walls of its meaning-making apparatus? What might happen if we were to bring figures like the Scottish philosopher John Grey or the postmodern concept of hyperreality into our meditation practice? What would it mean to go on retreat with the ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, or the work of Social Anthropologist Tim Ingold? A key idea from Francois Laurelle that will be useful to us here is the democracy of thought, which served as an inspiration for Wallis's Feast. Laurelle poses that all thought is equal, and for us that means that our own thought can participate at the feast if we can just muster up some courage. There is a price to pay, of course. You must expose your inner-world, and your private practice, your secret desires, needs, and fears, to the wider world and risk their disruption, and even destruction. Armed with epistemic humility and renewed curiosity, whatever happens, the Great Feast brings us back into the collective struggle of our species to come to terms with the human condition. This experimental and explorative workshop may serve to help those who are disillusioned by the whole project of Buddhism, or the spiritual, to find a way forward that remains critical but infuses personal practice with new life. Post-traditional and non-Buddhist tools will be explored initially, though we may manage to make some our own in the process. Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rethinking Practice at the Great Feast @INCITE Seminars Saturday, July 25th, 10am-2pm EST / 4-8pm Europe /3pm-7pm UK. Online via Zoom. Come and join us on the 25th at Incite Seminars for an original workshop on Buddhism at the Great Feast for Incite Seminars. Pay what you can and dive into this experimental event online through Zoom. Description below. Western Buddhism and spirituality more broadly provide us with a rich menu of practices, messages and visions of the human condition and what is possible and even desirable to do, avoid, and strive for within a human life. Yet, as many of us have come to realize, these practices, messages and curative fantasies do not always live up to expectation. The overly prescriptive ideals of what it means to be human, what practice is, and what we should be doing with it all too often reduce the Buddhist practitioner to the role of a passive performer of tradition and can lead to a loss of faith, disenchantment, and the feeling of having been conned. Can critique and disenchantment lead us to creatively reclaim our sense of ourselves apart from tradition, and discover new lines of inquiry, practice, and ways of relating? In this hands- and minds-on workshop, we will explore the possibilities of making a new relationship to Buddhist practice through the concept of the The Great Feast of Knowledge. This concept, articulated by Glenn Wallis, asks what happens when we invite any kind of thought, practice, insight or claim to exit its ideological bubble and interact with the great, vast planes of knowledge, human struggle, and discovery that sit outside the walls of its meaning-making apparatus? What might happen if we were to bring figures like the Scottish philosopher John Grey or the postmodern concept of hyperreality into our meditation practice? What would it mean to go on retreat with the ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, or the work of Social Anthropologist Tim Ingold? A key idea from Francois Laurelle that will be useful to us here is the democracy of thought, which served as an inspiration for Wallis’s Feast. Laurelle poses that all thought is equal, and for us that means that our own thought can participate at the feast if we can just muster up some courage. There is a price to pay, of course. You must expose your inner-world, and your private practice, your secret desires, needs, and fears, to the wider world and risk their disruption, and even destruction. Armed with epistemic humility and renewed curiosity, whatever happens, the Great Feast brings us back into the collective struggle of our species to come to terms with the human condition. This experimental and explorative workshop may serve to help those who are disillusioned by the whole project of Buddhism, or the spiritual, to find a way forward that remains critical but infuses personal practice with new life. Post-traditional and non-Buddhist tools will be explored initially, though we may manage to make some our own in the process.

Kahlil Gibran’s 1923 The Prophet is book that’s changed people’s lives. It is a deceptively simple book, but it contains a radical insight. “Of what can I speak save of that which is even now moving in your souls?” What can a book teach us that we cannot know ourselves? To detect this thing inside of us we must break through convention: our escape into social habits, religious and political doctrine, the comforting approval of others, and the truisms and clichés we take for wisdom. And even once we realize that something is “moving in our souls,” Gibran warns us, we tend to repress this insight by submitting to outside authorities to give it a name, a label, or a theory. By turning to religion or other people’s teachings, we dodging the challenge of taking charge of our own conditions, and thus of our freedom. I spoke with Glenn Wallis, a renowned scholar of Buddhism, translator and teacher who has published The Dhammapada, Basic Teachings of the Buddha, and a Critique of Western Buddhism, and who runs Incite Seminars in Philadelphia. Glenn had first read The Prophet when he was 16 and it changed his life profoundly. He then forgot about the book and even dismissed it for decades, until I persuaded him, pleading three times, to reconsider it. This conversation is as much about The Prophet as about the things that move us deeply when we’re younger but which we then, in growing up, learn to dismiss as adolescent. I’d like to think that re-reading a book sometimes lets us rekindle our youthful passion to ignite our lives yet once more. The conversation also led Glenn and myself to co-author an introduction to a new and beautiful edition of The Prophet, published together with The Forerunner and The Madman, by Warbler Classics. Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kahlil Gibran’s 1923 The Prophet is book that’s changed people’s lives. It is a deceptively simple book, but it contains a radical insight. “Of what can I speak save of that which is even now moving in your souls?” What can a book teach us that we cannot know ourselves? To detect this thing inside of us we must break through convention: our escape into social habits, religious and political doctrine, the comforting approval of others, and the truisms and clichés we take for wisdom. And even once we realize that something is “moving in our souls,” Gibran warns us, we tend to repress this insight by submitting to outside authorities to give it a name, a label, or a theory. By turning to religion or other people’s teachings, we dodging the challenge of taking charge of our own conditions, and thus of our freedom. I spoke with Glenn Wallis, a renowned scholar of Buddhism, translator and teacher who has published The Dhammapada, Basic Teachings of the Buddha, and a Critique of Western Buddhism, and who runs Incite Seminars in Philadelphia. Glenn had first read The Prophet when he was 16 and it changed his life profoundly. He then forgot about the book and even dismissed it for decades, until I persuaded him, pleading three times, to reconsider it. This conversation is as much about The Prophet as about the things that move us deeply when we’re younger but which we then, in growing up, learn to dismiss as adolescent. I’d like to think that re-reading a book sometimes lets us rekindle our youthful passion to ignite our lives yet once more. The conversation also led Glenn and myself to co-author an introduction to a new and beautiful edition of The Prophet, published together with The Forerunner and The Madman, by Warbler Classics. Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kahlil Gibran’s 1923 The Prophet is book that’s changed people’s lives. It is a deceptively simple book, but it contains a radical insight. “Of what can I speak save of that which is even now moving in your souls?” What can a book teach us that we cannot know ourselves? To detect this thing inside of us we must break through convention: our escape into social habits, religious and political doctrine, the comforting approval of others, and the truisms and clichés we take for wisdom. And even once we realize that something is “moving in our souls,” Gibran warns us, we tend to repress this insight by submitting to outside authorities to give it a name, a label, or a theory. By turning to religion or other people’s teachings, we dodging the challenge of taking charge of our own conditions, and thus of our freedom. I spoke with Glenn Wallis, a renowned scholar of Buddhism, translator and teacher who has published The Dhammapada, Basic Teachings of the Buddha, and a Critique of Western Buddhism, and who runs Incite Seminars in Philadelphia. Glenn had first read The Prophet when he was 16 and it changed his life profoundly. He then forgot about the book and even dismissed it for decades, until I persuaded him, pleading three times, to reconsider it. This conversation is as much about The Prophet as about the things that move us deeply when we’re younger but which we then, in growing up, learn to dismiss as adolescent. I’d like to think that re-reading a book sometimes lets us rekindle our youthful passion to ignite our lives yet once more. The conversation also led Glenn and myself to co-author an introduction to a new and beautiful edition of The Prophet, published together with The Forerunner and The Madman, by Warbler Classics. Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kahlil Gibran’s 1923 The Prophet is book that’s changed people’s lives. It is a deceptively simple book, but it contains a radical insight. “Of what can I speak save of that which is even now moving in your souls?” What can a book teach us that we cannot know ourselves? To detect this thing inside of us we must break through convention: our escape into social habits, religious and political doctrine, the comforting approval of others, and the truisms and clichés we take for wisdom. And even once we realize that something is “moving in our souls,” Gibran warns us, we tend to repress this insight by submitting to outside authorities to give it a name, a label, or a theory. By turning to religion or other people’s teachings, we dodging the challenge of taking charge of our own conditions, and thus of our freedom. I spoke with Glenn Wallis, a renowned scholar of Buddhism, translator and teacher who has published The Dhammapada, Basic Teachings of the Buddha, and a Critique of Western Buddhism, and who runs Incite Seminars in Philadelphia. Glenn had first read The Prophet when he was 16 and it changed his life profoundly. He then forgot about the book and even dismissed it for decades, until I persuaded him, pleading three times, to reconsider it. This conversation is as much about The Prophet as about the things that move us deeply when we’re younger but which we then, in growing up, learn to dismiss as adolescent. I’d like to think that re-reading a book sometimes lets us rekindle our youthful passion to ignite our lives yet once more. The conversation also led Glenn and myself to co-author an introduction to a new and beautiful edition of The Prophet, published together with The Forerunner and The Madman, by Warbler Classics. Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kahlil Gibran’s 1923 The Prophet is book that’s changed people’s lives. It is a deceptively simple book, but it contains a radical insight. “Of what can I speak save of that which is even now moving in your souls?” What can a book teach us that we cannot know ourselves? To detect this thing inside of us we must break through convention: our escape into social habits, religious and political doctrine, the comforting approval of others, and the truisms and clichés we take for wisdom. And even once we realize that something is “moving in our souls,” Gibran warns us, we tend to repress this insight by submitting to outside authorities to give it a name, a label, or a theory. By turning to religion or other people’s teachings, we dodging the challenge of taking charge of our own conditions, and thus of our freedom. I spoke with Glenn Wallis, a renowned scholar of Buddhism, translator and teacher who has published The Dhammapada, Basic Teachings of the Buddha, and a Critique of Western Buddhism, and who runs Incite Seminars in Philadelphia. Glenn had first read The Prophet when he was 16 and it changed his life profoundly. He then forgot about the book and even dismissed it for decades, until I persuaded him, pleading three times, to reconsider it. This conversation is as much about The Prophet as about the things that move us deeply when we’re younger but which we then, in growing up, learn to dismiss as adolescent. I’d like to think that re-reading a book sometimes lets us rekindle our youthful passion to ignite our lives yet once more. The conversation also led Glenn and myself to co-author an introduction to a new and beautiful edition of The Prophet, published together with The Forerunner and The Madman, by Warbler Classics. Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Professor Cleo McNelly Kearns, is an independent scholar in the fields of modern literature, philosophy of religion, and anthropology and is currently a Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College.  She has published extensively on issues in continental philosophy, feminist theory and aesthetics.  Her work now focuses on global shamanism and on the comparative study of sacrificial rituals across many cultures.   She is the author of T.S. Eliot and Indic Traditions:  A Study in Poetry and Belief (1987) and The Virgin Mary, Monotheism and Sacrifice (2008).  She serves on the editorial board of the journal Literature and Theology and has contributed reviews and essays to a range of publications from History of Religions to the Oxford Handbook on Literature and Theology. Professor Kearns has held fellowships from the Princeton Center for the Study of Religion, the Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton Seminary and the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Notre Dame.  She is a member of the American Academy of Religion, and she has taught at many colleges and universities, including Rutgers University, New York University and the Community College of Vermont.  She is currently a contributing member of Incite Seminars under the direction of Glenn Wallis.   For more information and a full list of her many publications, please see her lengthy academic CV:    http://nd.academia.edu/CleoKearns/CurriculumVitae

Presented as a rational, scientific, and practical religion, modern Buddhism appears to have all the answers. Even the secular forms of mindfulness promise ever-increasing practitioners that Buddhist meditation will provide the solutions to all their mental, emotional, and spiritual issues. But is there a problem with all of this? In his new book, A Critique of Western Buddhism: Ruins of the Buddhist Real, scholar Glenn Wallis argues that there is, and that Buddhism as we know it "must be ruined." On March 11, 2019, Wallis was in conversation with HDS professor Charles Hallisey at the Center for the Study of World Religions. Glenn Wallis holds a Ph.D. in Buddhist studies from Harvard University's Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies. He is the founder and director of Incite Seminars, in Philadelphia. Charles Hallisey is the Yehan Numata Senior Lecturer on Buddhist Literatures at Harvard Divinity School. His research centers on Theravada Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, Pali language and literature, Buddhist ethics, and literature in Buddhist culture. Learn more about Harvard Divinity School and its mission to illuminate, engage, and serve at http://hds.harvard.edu/.

Date: Saturday, February 23, 9am-1pm, at Culture Works in Philadelphia Cost: Pay what you can, upwards to $90. For more than a decade, movement-based scholar AK Thompson has worked with Benjamin to weigh in on the key debates of our crisis-filled era. From engagements with pop culture's latent promise to critiques of the cherished certainties that guide movement struggles, he has foregrounded the operational value of Benjamin's insights. In Premonitions: Selected Essays on the Culture of Revolt (2018), Thompson reveals how we might do things with Benjamin today. Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kahlil Gibran’s 1923 The Prophet is a book that’s changed people’s lives. It is a deceptively simple book, but it contains a radical insight. “Of what can I speak save of that which is even now moving in your souls?” What can a book teach us that we cannot know ourselves? To detect this thing inside of us we must break through convention: our escape into social habits, religious and political doctrine, the comforting approval of others, and the truisms and clichés we take for wisdom. And even once we realize that something is “moving in our souls,” Gibran warns us, we tend to repress this insight by submitting to outside authorities to give it a name, a label, or a theory. By turning to religion or other people’s teachings, we dodging the challenge of taking charge of our own conditions, and thus of our freedom.   I spoke with Glenn Wallis, a renowned scholar of Buddhism, translator and teacher who has published The Dhammapada, Basic Teachings of the Buddha, and a Critique of Western Buddhism, and who runs Incite Seminars in Philadelphia. Glenn had first read The Prophet when he was 16 and it changed his life profoundly. He then forgot about the book and even dismissed it for decades, until I persuaded him, pleading three times, to reconsider it. This conversation is as much about The Prophet as about the things that move us deeply when we’re younger but which we then, in growing up, learn to dismiss as adolescent. I’d like to think that re-reading a book sometimes lets us rekindle our youthful passion to ignite our lives yet once more. The conversation also led Glenn and myself to co-author an introduction to a new and beautiful edition of The Prophet, published together with The Forerunner and The Madman, by Warbler Classics.

Glenn Wallis holds a Ph.D. in Buddhist studies from Harvard University's Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies. His training was mainly philological, concentrating on Sanskrit, Pali, and Tibetan Buddhist literature. Glenn has been concerned with how to make classical Buddhist literature, philosophy, and practice relevant to contemporary life. Since the early 1990s, Glenn has taught in the religion departments of several universities, including the University of Georgia (where I received tenure), Brown University, Bowdoin College, and the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Won Institute of Buddhist studies. Glenn Wallis is the founder and director of Incite Seminars. As he describes it, “Glenn founded Incite Seminars as a very personal response to the escalating social inequality, intensifying racial unrest, and eviscerating techno-consumer capitalism that he increasingly witnessed all around him.” Incite Seminars was thus founded on the conviction that education in the humanities offers us a means to recognize, resist, and counter the forces of personal alienation and social division—forces such as hopelessness, bigotry, passivity, and self-delusion. In this episode, David Forbes and I discuss with Glenn the ideas in his recent book, “A Critique of Western Buddhism” (Bloomsbury, 2018). We cover a wide range of topics, some from his provocative blog, Speculative non-Buddhism, such as the “Elixir of Mindfulness.” Our conversation dives into a critique of Western Buddhism via Laurelle’s “non-philosophy” – in our case, “non-Buddhism.” Glenn helps us to understand such notions as the Principle of Sufficient Buddhism, “decision,” the “organon,” and how Western Buddhism backs away from the potency of the Real. Typical Western Buddhist concepts such as wisdom, emptiness, anatta (no-self), “the Dharma” – ideas which could be forces for thought and transformation – are turned around, and returned to the safe and familiar shores of the already known. Western Buddhism seems to suffer from a perpetual parapraxis – a series of misturnings – that relegates it to a form of spiritual self-help, ensuring its entrapment in a self-sealing echo chamber. Thinking things through is itself a form of practice/praxis. Glenn joins us in challenging the common tropes of the mindfulness movement – particularly Jon Kabat-Zinn’s diagnosis that our ADD Nation is suffering from a so-called “thinking disease.” Turning this nonsense on its head, we discuss how thinking – how a force for thought – can cut through the tendency to stay ensnared in the World, liberating thinking for a counter-subject formation that resists capitalism and the neoliberal order.

Date: Saturday, January 19, 9am-1pm Cost: Pay what you can: Suggested amount: $90 Facilitator: Joshua Ramey is a writer, teacher, and activist who studies political economy and anti-capitalist political theory. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Villanova University (2006) and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor in the Interdisciplinary Concentration in Peace, Justice, and Human Rights at Haverford College. He is the author of The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal and Politics of Divination: Neoliberal Endgame and the Religion of Contingency. What is money? Money functions as a unit of account, a medium of exchange, and a store of value, but this is what money does, not what money is. There is a very deep paradox at the heart of money, because money is not itself, but what it represents. Money is the representation of social agreements—agreements about who is obliged to whom, about what is more or less valuable, about what can be changed or altered in the past and the future, and about what must stay the same over time. Far from being a simple thing, money is metaphysical: social, political, abstract, and weird. Although economists tend to think of money only as a “veil” that covers the true reality of exchange relationships, money actually has the power to control which exchanges and which economic activity take place, at all, because money is essentially a form of credit, an expression of approval and judgment of affirmation by some human beings in favor of the activities of others. However, most of us (and most economists) are either confused about or in denial of the fact that money is not a commodity, but a form of credit that is issued into existence almost entirely by private bank loans. And new money is created not on the basis of pre-existing savings or assets, but on the basis of demand for credit and willingness of bankers to supply it. This means that the private banking system has enormous power over not just their own investments, but over the amount and kind of credit available to the entire economy, whose priorities are wildly different from that of the speculative classes. This seminar will introduce the history of money and the formation of the modern monetary system based on private financing. It will then look at the contemporary politics of debt, austerity, and class warfare in order to explore possibilities for concrete struggle against the class power of bankers and megafinance. Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, I interview Dr. Glenn Wallis, a scholar of Buddhist Studies and Founder and Director of Incite Seminars---a series of animated humanities seminars that agitate personal awareness and incite social engagement amongst the general public in Philadelphia. Here, we discuss: (1) His journeys within and beyond educational institutions (2) How political concerns have reshaped his scholarly work (3) How he is creating space for inciting, public dialogues beyond the ivory tower

Our second podcast episode for the week is for Incite Seminars with regular guest Glenn Wallis. As per usual, our conversation takes many interesting and creative turns, and is longer than the usual Incite seminar podcasts. We discuss the topics of Unlearning, education versus learning, and introducing radical ideas into Dharma halls, as well as much more. As indicated in the introduction to this podcast, Glenn will be returning soon for a regular podcast discussion of his brand-new book A Critique of Western Buddhism, out now for Bloomsbury. For those interested in engaging with Glenn directly, his Unlearning Seminar takes place in Philadelphia September 29th and is a must for educators looking to think about educating differently. Click on the link to find out more: Incite Seminars: Unlearning & Radical Education. Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our second podcast episode for the week is for Incite Seminars with regular guest Glenn Wallis. As per usual, our conversation takes many interesting and creative turns, and is longer than the usual Incite seminar podcasts. We discuss the topics of Unlearning, education versus learning, and introducing radical ideas into Dharma halls, as well as much more. As indicated in the introduction to this podcast, Glenn will be returning soon for a regular podcast discussion of his brand-new book A Critique of Western Buddhism, out now for Bloomsbury. For those interested in engaging with Glenn directly, his Unlearning Seminar takes place in Philadelphia September 29th and is a must for educators looking to think about educating differently. Click on the link to find out more: Incite Seminars: Unlearning & Radical Education https://inciteseminars.com/unlearning-radical-education-theory/ Links O'Connell Coaching: oconnellcoaching.com Post-Traditional Buddhism: posttraditionalbuddhism.com Facebook: www.facebook.com/imperfectbuddha Twitter: twitter.com/Imperfectbuddha

In this episode of the imperfect Buddha podcast I speak with Glenn Wallis again. We cover a range of topics but at the core of our discussion is darkness: a topic that many folks shy away from and yet in our problematic times is a theme that needs looking at more closely and more deeply. Glenn will be leading a workshop on darkness on 4 August in Philadelphia. If you're interested in participating, take a look at the webpage dedicated to the event at the Incite seminars websites: https://inciteseminars.com/darkness/ We talk about the motivations behind Incite seminars and why they are an important response to the challenges of our times, as well as the need for creativity in approaching practice, whether Buddhist or philosophical, and theory. We also touch on the work of Peter Sloterdjik and in particular his book ‘You must change your life' which I for one found challenging. We also talk about the Speculative non-Buddhism website and what's happening there. We also touch on the topic of our upcoming episode on neoliberalism and Buddhism with Ron Purser. As always Glenn is a great conversationalist and someone who is thinking at the edge of what passes for normal in terms of Buddhism, spirituality, enquiry and the pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the complex, multifaceted world we live in. So, brush off your critical thinking skills, wake up your creative desire to think deeply and widely and take a listen. Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to a new project. The Imperfect Buddha podcast is collaborating with Incite seminars by bringing you short podcast interviews with workshop facilitators at their upcoming events. This is done to promote such seminars, but more importantly, to spread the good word, and collaborate with like-minded folks. Incite seminars act as a breeding ground for intense engagement and enquiry into the humanities. They feature a range of speakers who are experts in their field. These podcast interviews will be shorter and feature just 10 questions with some space for discussion. They will give you a sense of what you will find by participating in the Incite seminars as well as an introduction to an important topic that you may wish to go off and read about on your own afterwards. The first podcast features Ulrich Baer introducing listeners to the themes of his seminar: Rilke & Heidegger and notions of being and presence. The themes are all wonderfully relevant to Buddhists, traditional or otherwise.  Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices