Visions For the Common Good

Hosted by theologian and teacher Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox, these dialogues bring together voices from leadership, global justice, Indigenous wisdom, creation spirituality, and systems science to ask:

• What does the common good mean in a fractured world?
• What forms of moral imagination are required now?
• What visions can guide us toward repair rather than collapse?

This series is not about ideology or doctrine. It is about recovering wisdom for a world in transition.

Why This Series, Why Now?

We are living through a convergence of crises:

• the erosion of trust in institutions
• deepening political and cultural polarization
• accelerating ecological disruption
• widespread spiritual fatigue and moral confusion

Many people sense that the frameworks that once guided public life—religious, political, economic—are no longer sufficient. But the longing for a shared moral horizon remains.

This series invites you into four carefully curated conversations that explore the future of the common good across:

• spiritual wisdom
• ethical struggle
• Indigenous traditions
• and the intelligence of living systems

Together, these voices offer not answers, but orientation—ways of seeing, imagining, and inhabiting the world that can sustain courage, compassion, and creative possibility.

Schedule

Tuesdays in March & April:

March 17: 7-9pm ET
March 24: 7-9pm ET
March 31: 7-9pm ET
April 7: 7-9pm ET

Format

Conversations will happen live online via Zoom
We will record all sessions and make those available to all registrants

Registration includes

• Access to all four live sessions
• Session recordings
• Optional reflection resources
  

Session 1: The Crisis of the Common Life and the Need for New Visions - with Cameron Trimble

We begin by naming the moment we are living in — a time when inherited moral frameworks feel increasingly fragile and the institutions that once held social trust no longer offer shared orientation. Many people sense that something deeper than political disagreement is underway: a crisis of imagination about how we live together at all.

In this opening conversation, Matthew Fox and Cameron Trimble explore:

• what we mean by the common good
• the collapse of moral authority and institutional trust
• the nature of the current “polycrisis”
• why imagination is now as important as policy or belief
• how spiritual wisdom and futures thinking together shape moral vision

This session sets the interpretive frame for the entire series

Session 2: The More-Than-Human World and the Recovery of Belonging - with David Abram

We widen the lens beyond human societies to the living, sensing world of which we are a part. In a culture shaped by abstraction and separation from the natural world, many people experience a quiet loss of belonging — a disconnection not only from ecosystems, but from perception, place, and the animate presence of the Earth itself.

In this conversation, Matthew Fox and David Abram explore how reawakening our perceptual and relational connection with the more-than-human world reshapes our understanding of the common good. Together, they reflect on how ecological participation, embodied perception, and reverence for living landscapes can restore a sense of belonging in a time of profound ecological and cultural disruption.

This session will explore:

• the more-than-human world as a community of subjects, not objects
• perception and sensory experience as sources of moral and spiritual intelligence
• how modern cultures lost their felt reciprocity with the living Earth
• what it means to recover belonging, responsibility, and kinship within an animate world

This session invites attentiveness, humility, and wonder—offering a vision of the common good rooted not only in human ethics, but in our participation within the larger, living fabric of life.

Session 3: Land, Belonging, and the Sacred Work of Repair - with Randy Woodley

Across much of the modern world, ideas of progress have been built upon separation — from land, from ancestry, and from forms of wisdom that once guided human communities in reciprocity with place. The result has been not only ecological damage, but spiritual and cultural dislocation.

In this session, Matthew Fox and Randy Woodley explore:

• Indigenous visions of the common good
• land, kinship, and relational responsibility
• decolonizing spirituality and moral imagination
• what dominant cultures must unlearn to survive

This conversation invites a deep reckoning with history, land, and belonging—and a re-centering of wisdom that predates modern systems of domination.

Session 4: Compassion, Justice, and the Moral Economy of the Future - with Lynne Twist

The common good cannot be imagined apart from the realities of suffering, inequality, and the structures that shape human opportunity across the planet. In an age of extraordinary wealth alongside widespread deprivation, moral vision must engage not only personal ethics but the systems that govern our shared life.

In this session, Matthew Fox and Lynne Twist explore:

• the spiritual foundations of economic justice
• compassion as a force for social transformation
• healing global systems without reproducing domination
• the moral imagination needed for planetary repair

This conversation grounds the series in lived struggle, ethical seriousness, and global responsibility.

What You Will Gain

Participants in this series will:

• develop a deeper understanding of the forces shaping our shared world
• gain language for moral complexity and spiritual discernment
• encounter wisdom across traditions and disciplines
• recover imagination as a spiritual and civic capacity
• leave with renewed orientation, courage, and perspective

This is not a course to master. It is a conversation to inhabit.