
Advertise on podcast: The Forum at Grace Cathedral
Rating
4.6from
This podcast has
96 episodes
Language
EnglishPublisher
Grace CathedralExplicit
No
Date created
2011/07/11
Latest episode
2026/10/21
Average duration
61 min.
Release period
18 days
Description
Recorded live at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral, The Forum is a series of stimulating conversations about faith, ethics and culture in relation to the important issues of our day. Host and Dean of Grace Cathedral Malcolm Clemens Young invites artists, inventors, philosophers, pop culturists, elected officials and other inspiring guests to share in a civil, sophisticated discourse that engages hearts and minds to think in new ways about the world.
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Check latest episodes from The Forum at Grace Cathedral podcast
The Forum with Marion Nestle
2026/10/21
The Forum with Marion Nestle
Grace Cathedral, San Francisco
If you want to understand how the food business works, just have a look at a box of breakfast cereal. Hardly anything on supermarket shelves is bigger, bolder, or more deliberately designed. The fiercely competitive industry that brings us Cheerios, Froot Loops, and Trix sells a distinctly American dream: indulgence and health in one convenient package.
Cereal boxes chronicle our shifting national obsessions with health, ingredients, dietary advice, and American culture. They show us what sells food: cartoons for kids, athletes for men, weight loss for women. And hidden in the history of cereal package designs, we find clues to the corporate lobbying that shapes agricultural policy, health claims, and labeling regulations.
With Sugar Coated: Unboxing the Hidden Forces Shaping America's Favorite Breakfast Food, world-renowned food politics expert Marion Nestle joins forces with former cereal executive Lisa Sutherland to unbox the influence of cereal companies on food policy and the power of marketing, revealing, in the process, why Big Food is so good at selling profitable products regardless of their effects on health.
Join Malcolm Clemens Young, dean of Grace Cathedral, for a conversation with Nestle about what cereal boxes reveal about American culture and food politics.
Recorded at Grace Cathedral on October 18, 2026.
Give to Grace
You can help us bring the arts to life at Grace with a gift today to The Forum. gracecathedral.org/give
Become a GraceArts Member
Love engaging dialogue? We offer a special cultural membership program, GraceArts, focused exclusively on the arts and well-being. GraceArts allows a wider community to belong to and support Grace, with discounts and benefits on a robust schedule of events. Learn more and join at gracecathedral.org/join.
About the Guest
Marion Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor, of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University, which she chaired from 1988-2003 and from which she officially retired in September 2017. She is also Visiting Professor of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell. She earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology and an M.P.H. in public health nutrition from the University of California, Berkeley, and has been awarded honorary degrees from Transylvania University in Kentucky (2012) and from the City University of New York's Macaulay Honors College (2016). In 2023, she was awarded The Edinburgh Medal (for science and society). She is the author of many books about the politics of food, nutrition, health, and the environment.
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. Learn more about The Forum here:
gracecathedral.org/the-forum
The Forum with David Treuer
2026/10/14
The Forum with David Treuer
Grace Cathedral, San Francisco
Co-presented with Litquake
In the wake of George Floyd's murder and January 6, National Book Award finalist and bestseller David Treuer decided to hold himself and his family together the only way he knew how: he sat down to write a letter. Ranging from Treuer's upbringing on the Leech Lake reservation in Minnesota to the experiences of his parents, a Jewish Holocaust refugee and the first American Indigenous woman judge, The Savage Mind reveals the terrifying essence of our nation: frontier violence, which has defined our country, culture, and very selves.
Join Malcolm Clemens Young, dean of Grace Cathedral, for a conversation with Treuer about his searing exploration of American violence, which poses the question: How do we understand America, ourselves, and the impulses that seem intent on destroying both?
Recorded at Grace Cathedral on October 11, 2026.
Give to Grace
You can help us bring the arts to life at Grace with a gift today to The Forum. gracecathedral.org/give
Become a GraceArts Member
Love engaging dialogue? We offer a special cultural membership program, GraceArts, focused exclusively on the arts and well-being. GraceArts allows a wider community to belong to and support Grace, with discounts and benefits on a robust schedule of events. Learn more and join at gracecathedral.org/join.
About the Guest
New York Times bestselling author and editor David Treuer is Ojibwe from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, three Minnesota Book Awards, and fellowships from the NEH, Bush Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and was a Fellow at the American Academy Berlin. Treuer's forthcoming book, The Savage Mind: An American Legacy, will be released on October 6, 2026. His most recent book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, was a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Award Finalist, a Minnesota Book Prize winner, a California Book Prize winner, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and was a finalist for the Carnegie Medal. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and Harper's. He is a contributing writer for Atlantic Monthly Magazine and is an editor-at-large for Pantheon Books. He divides his time between his home on the Leech Lake Reservation and Los Angeles, where he is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.
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. Learn more about The Forum here:
gracecathedral.org/the-forum
John Macaskill Forum: The Order of St. John
2026/10/07
The Forum with John Macaskill
Grace Cathedral, San Francisco
For nearly a thousand years, the Order of St. John has carried forward a simple but radical commitment: to care for the sick and vulnerable, regardless of faith, background, or ability to pay. What began in Jerusalem as a hospital for pilgrims has evolved into an international humanitarian organization, combining an ancient tradition of service with some of today's most innovative medical and charitable work.
Among the Order's most important endeavors is the St. John of Jerusalem Eye Hospital Group, which provides sight-saving and restorative care throughout the Holy Land, including through mobile clinics reaching communities where medical services are difficult to access. In the United States, members of the Order serve their own communities through the St. John Volunteer Corps, working with organizations that support people in need.
Join Malcolm Clemens Young for a conversation with John Macaskill, Prior of the U.S. Priory of the Order of St. John, about the remarkable history of an institution that has survived for nearly a millennium, the humanitarian work it undertakes today, and what it means to carry an ancient tradition of service into a rapidly changing world. What can a thousand-year-old commitment to healing and hospitality teach us about service—and about what we owe one another?
Recorded at Grace Cathedral on October 4, 2026.
Give to Grace
You can help us bring the arts to life at Grace with a gift today to The Forum. gracecathedral.org/give
Become a GraceArts Member
Love engaging dialogue? We offer a special cultural membership program, GraceArts, focused exclusively on the arts and well-being. GraceArts allows a wider community to belong to and support Grace, with discounts and benefits on a robust schedule of events. Learn more and join at gracecathedral.org/join.
About the Guest
John Macaskill, KStJ. Mr. Macaskill has spent the last forty-four years in the financial services industry in New York and London. John qualified as a Chartered Accountant in Edinburgh, and upon qualifying moved to London where he worked for five years with Chemical Bank, which transferred him to New York – supposedly for eighteen months. He has now been in the United States for over 44 years! John worked at Bankers Trust and finally at JP Morgan before starting his own investment bank as one of the founding partners in 2003. John retired his partnership in 2017. John remains President of his family investment firm. Mr. Macaskill has served on the boards of the Edinburgh International Festival American Board, and the American Board of the National Museum of Scotland. He currently chairs his village's Zoning Board of Appeal, is retired from the vestry of his local St John's church. John has been a member of the Order of St John since 2012, and has served on the Board of Trustees of the St John Eye Hospital Group since 2018. In June 2026 John became Prior of the U.S. Priory of the Order of St John. John and his wife Bridget reside in Long Island, and they have two sons, both appointed to the Order of St John in 2023, and four grandchildren.
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. Learn more about The Forum here:
gracecathedral.org/the-forum
Paulina Borsook: Cyberselfish
2026/09/30
Forum with Paulina Borsook
Grace Cathedral, San Francisco
Twenty-six years after the original publication of Cyberselfish, Paulina Borsook's "smart, funny and irreverent" (The New York Times) critique of high-tech culture reads as a remarkably prescient assessment of an ethos that has seeped into nearly every corner of our world.
Cyberselfish identified the warning signs of a culture profoundly lacking in compassion, deeply suspicious of regulation, more comfortable with computers than people, and surprisingly ignorant of history and politics. It also exposed the contradictions beneath Silicon Valley's mythology of self-reliance: a culture whose extraordinary success was made possible in significant part by massive government investment, yet whose leaders often embraced Ayn Rand, the primacy of shareholder value, and a suspicion of the public institutions that helped make their success possible.
Borsook foresaw that as technology companies reached unprecedented levels of wealth and influence, their leaders would come to believe that success in one sphere entitled them to greater power in others. Today, as tech titans have inserted themselves ever more deeply into politics, culture, education, media, and public life, Borsook's insights seem more relevant than ever. What happens when the people shaping public policy and society at large possess enormous technological and economic power, but little understanding of history, political institutions, or—perhaps most importantly—how to live with other human beings? Cyberselfish called this the true revenge of the nerds.
Join Malcolm Clemens Young for a conversation with Borsook about the assumptions that shaped the early digital age, what they have wrought, and what they might teach us now. Can we imagine a digital culture oriented not simply toward innovation and individual success, but toward human flourishing and the common good?
Recorded at Grace Cathedral on September 27, 2026.
Give to Grace
You can help us bring the arts to life at Grace with a gift today to The Forum. gracecathedral.org/give
Become a GraceArts Member
Love engaging dialogue? We offer a special cultural membership program, GraceArts, focused exclusively on the arts and well-being. GraceArts allows a wider community to belong to and support Grace, with discounts and benefits on a robust schedule of events. Learn more and join at gracecathedral.org/join.
About the Guest
Paulina Borsook has worked in and around Northern California tech culture since the early 1980s. Formerly on the masthead of Wired, she has written for multiple tech publications and companies and for countless non-tech publications. She is currently a contributing editor for the magazine "InFormation/every day computers are making people easier to use", which offers both silly and serious critiques of tech as written by people within it.
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. Learn more about The Forum here:
gracecathedral.org/the-forum
Lauren Markham
2026/09/23
Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, September 20, 2026
Fiction writer, essayist, and journalist Lauren Markham, in her most recent book Immemorial (longlisted for the Pen America Jean Stein Award and shortlisted for the Northern California book award), has written a speculative essay on language in the face of climate catastrophe: how can we memorialize what has been lost, and what soon will be?
"I am in need of a word," Markham writes in an email to the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, an organization that coins neologisms. She is searching for a way to memorialize something that is in the process of being lost—a landscape, a species, birdsong.
In a dazzling synthesis of reporting, memoir, and essay, Markham reflects on the design and function of memorials, from the traditional to the speculative: the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, a converted prison in Ljubljana, a "ghost forest" of dead cedar trees in a Manhattan park. She reckons with the grief of climate catastrophe and asks whether memorials can do more than remember the past: Can they help us imagine—and perhaps shape—the future?
Join Malcolm Clemens Young for a conversation with Markham about how we might create "a psychic space for feeling" in the face of loss, while also finding the language and imagination to spur action and agitate for change.
Give to Grace
You can help us bring the arts to life at Grace with a gift today to The Forum. gracecathedral.org/give
Become a GraceArts Member
Love engaging dialogue? We offer a special cultural membership program, GraceArts, focused exclusively on the arts and well-being. GraceArts allows a wider community to belong to and support Grace, with discounts and benefits on a robust schedule of events. Learn more and join at gracecathedral.org/join.
About the Guest
A fiction writer, essayist and journalist, Lauren's work most often concerns issues related to youth, migration, the environment and her home state of California. She is the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life, A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging(Riverhead, 2024) and Immemorial(Transit, 2025.) The Far Away Brothers was awarded the 2018 Ridenhour Book Prize, the Northern California Book Award, and a California Book Award Silver Prize. It was named a Barnes & Noble Discover Selection, a New York Times Book Critics' Top Book of 2017, and was shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the L.A. Times Book Award and longlisted for a Pen America Literary Award in Biography. A Map of Future Ruins was named a finalist for the California Book Award, The Northern California Book Award, and the runner up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her most recent book, Immemorial, was longlisted for the Pen America Jean Stein Award. She has reported a range of stories all over the world, including the border regions of Greece and Mexico and Thailand and Texas; arctic Norway; gang-controlled regions of El Salvador; schools in North Slope of Alaska; depopulating towns in rural Sardinia and rural Guatemala, too; home school havens in southern California; imperiled forests in Oregon and Washington; the offices of overwhelmed immigration attorneys in L.A. and Tijuana; the parched olive groves of the Mediterranean; the upscale haunts of women scammed on the Upper East Side; and a war (and reconciliation) with the crows in Oakland, California. Her writing has appeared in outlets such as VQR (where she is a contributing editor), Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The Believer, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Guernica, Freeman's, Mother Jones, Orion, The Atlantic, Lit Hub, California Sunday, Zyzzyva, The Georgia Review, The Best American Travel Writing 2019, and on This American Life. She has been awarded fellowships from The Mesa Refuge, UC Berkeley, Middlebury College, the McGraw Center, the French American Foundation, the Society for Environmental Journalists, the Silvers Prize, the de Groot Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. In addition to writing, Markham has spent nearly two decades working at the intersection of education and immigration. She regularly teaches writing in various community writing centers as well as the University of San Francisco and St. Mary's MFA in Writing Programs, where she co-founded the Storyboard Residency with Chris Feliciano Arnold. She co-edits The Approach and is currently at work on Pageant, a novel about early California.
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. Learn more about The Forum here: gracecathedral.org/the-forum
Bishop William Swing Forum: An Unusual Swing
2026/09/17
William E. Swing Forum: An Unusual Swing
Grace Cathedral, San Francisco
In his sixth book, An Unusual Swing: A Bishop's Follow-Through, William E. Swing—the seventh Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California and founder of the United Religions Initiative—reflects on the first twenty-five years of the global interfaith movement he launched, as well as the personal journey that transformed him from an Episcopal bishop into one of the world's leading advocates for cooperation across religious traditions.
Dedicated to "all the people who arrived at the border of an ancient, modern, or very personal hostility and bravely crossed a boundary or a bridge to live in the demanding uncharted landscape of peace," An Unusual Swing is both a memoir and a meditation on reconciliation. It offers a deeply personal account of the courage, imagination, and persistence required to build relationships across lines of difference. At a time when religious and cultural divisions continue to shape our world, Bishop Swing's story offers enduring wisdom about the possibilities that emerge when we choose dialogue over distrust.
Join Malcolm Clemens Young for a conversation with Bishop Swing about the experiences that shaped his remarkable vocation, the lessons he has learned from a lifetime of interfaith leadership, and why the work of building peace across religious and cultural boundaries remains as urgent today as ever.
Bishop William E. Swing also preached at Choral Eucharist at 11 a.m.
Recorded at Grace Cathedral on September 13, 2026.
Give to Grace
You can help us bring the arts to life at Grace with a gift today to The Forum. gracecathedral.org/give
Become a GraceArts Member
Love engaging dialogue? We offer a special cultural membership program, GraceArts, focused exclusively on the arts and well-being. GraceArts allows a wider community to belong to and support Grace, with discounts and benefits on a robust schedule of events. Learn more and join at gracecathedral.org/join.
About the Guest
William E. Swing is a retired bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California. Ordained to the priesthood in West Virginia, he served there before becoming the seventh rector of St. Columba's Episcopal Church in Washington D.C. From 1979 to 2006 he served as the seventh bishop of California, overseeing the vitality of congregations, cathedral, camps and conference centers, a hospital, and a capital development bank in the five counties of the San Francisco Bay Area. His special concerns included AIDS, for which the American Foundation for AIDS Research presented him with the Award of Courage. The San Francisco Chronicle designated him a finalist for their Visionary of the Year award in 20218 for his achievements as founder and president of the United Religions Initiative, the world's largest grass-roots interfaith organization. He lives in San Mateo, California, with his wife Mary, near their two children and three grandchildren.
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. Learn more about The Forum here:
gracecathedral.org/the-forum
Anne Lamott and Neal Allen Forum: Good Writing
2026/05/10
Anne Lamott and Neal Allen Forum: Good Writing
Grace Cathedral, San Francisco
Join bestselling author Anne Lamott and writer and spiritual coach Neal Allen for an inspiring and entertaining conversation that will change the way you think about language. Drawing on their new book Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences, they offer powerful techniques for transforming worthy sentences into unforgettable ones.
With humor, candor, and a touch of creative tension, Lamott and Allen explore how writing and language shape not only our creativity, but also our relationships and everyday lives. Bringing together Neal's finely honed insights from a career in journalism and business, and Anne's beloved wit and wisdom— familiar to readers of Bird by Bird and her many bestselling books —the two explore both the fundamentals and nuances of great prose, offering practical techniques, real-life examples, and an honest look at the writing process.
Join Malcolm Clemens Young, Dean of Grace Cathedral, as he hosts a lively dialogue with Lamott and Allen about their shared passion for better sentences and the deeper question beneath it: why certain words stay with us, echoing long after they are spoken or read. Even when they don't agree on every detail, their exchanges reveals a fresh perspective and a renewed sense of curiosity, generosity, and joy in writing.
Recorded at Grace Cathedral on May 10, 2026.
Give to Grace
You can help us bring the arts to life at Grace with a gift today to The Forum. gracecathedral.org/give
Become a GraceArts Member
Love engaging dialogue? We offer a special cultural membership program, GraceArts, focused exclusively on the arts and well-being. GraceArts allows a wider community to belong to and support Grace, with discounts and benefits on a robust schedule of events. Learn more and join at gracecathedral.org/join.
About the Guests
Neal Allen is a spiritual coach and writer. His wife, Anne Lamott, and he wrote Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences. Other books are Better Days: Tame Your Inner Critic, from Namaste Publishing (2023) and Shapes of Truth, which describes a recent, spectacular discovery about the human soul. Every once in a while a short story of his gets published. They've appeared in two Flash in the Attic anthologies that Amazon carries, and The MacGuffin. His literary heroes are all over the place: Faulkner, Henry Miller, Ishmael Reed, Virginia Woolf, Poe, Yeats, Olds, Dostoevsky come to mind. His spiritual heroes likewise: Lao Tzu, T.S. Eliot, Dogen, Jed McKenna, A.H. Almaas, Gurdjieff, Trungpa, Adyashanti, Patanjali, and whoever wrote the Gospels, Mahabharata, and early Buddhist discourses. More at shapesoftruth dot com.
Anne Lamott is the New York Times bestselling author of Help, Thanks, Wow; Small Victories; Stitches; Some Assembly Required; Grace (Eventually); Plan B; Traveling Mercies; Bird by Bird; Operating Instructions; Dusk, Night, Dawn; and Somehow: Notes on Love. Her most recent book is Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences, co-written with her husband, Neal Allen. She is also the author of several novels, including Imperfect Birds and Rosie. A past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an inductee to the California Hall of Fame, she lives in Northern California.
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. Learn more about The Forum here:
gracecathedral.org/the-forum
Bill Fontana: Resonance
2026/05/06
Forum with Bill Fontana: Resonance
Grace Cathedral, San Francisco
San Francisco artist Bill Fontana is internationally recognized for his pioneering experiments in sound. Since the late 1960s, he has consistently used sound as a sculptural medium to interact with and transform our perceptions of visual and architectural spaces. Applying his knowledge of composition, he draws out patterns of sound from natural and constructed worlds to create sound works that have the potential to conjure up visual imagery in the mind of the listener. Many of Fontana's works create live listening networks that collect information from sources as diverse as the slowly vanishing sounds of Japan, the Bosporus River in Istanbul and its cisterns, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the Millennium Bridge in London, the sounds of the sea of the Normandy coast, fog horns in San Francisco, old growth forests, hydroelectric turbines, diverse urban and marine environments, the silent bells of both Notre Dame and the Great Bell of the Vatican; the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, rain forests from three continents, and the melting Dachstein Glacier in the Austrian Alps.
As Grace Cathedral's 2026 Artist in Residence, Fontana will create a sound sculpture with our silent bells, his first bell project in the United States.
Join Malcolm Clemens Young, Dean of Grace Cathedral, for a conversation with Fontana about his illustrious career and his fascination with resonance.
Recorded at Grace Cathedral on May 3, 2026.
Give to Grace
You can help us bring the arts to life at Grace with a gift today to The Forum. gracecathedral.org/give
Become a GraceArts Member
Love engaging dialogue? We offer a special cultural membership program, GraceArts, focused exclusively on the arts and well-being. GraceArts allows a wider community to belong to and support Grace, with discounts and benefits on a robust schedule of events. Learn more and join at gracecathedral.org/join.
About the Guest
In a career spanning 55 years, Bill Fontana has become internationally recognized for his pioneering experiments in sound. Since the late 1960s, he has consistently used sound as a sculptural medium to interact with and transform our perceptions of visual and architectural spaces. Applying his knowledge of composition, he draws out patterns of sound from natural and constructed worlds to create sound works that have the potential to conjure up visual imagery in the mind of the listener. He has realized sound sculptures and radio projects for institutions, museums, and broadcast organizations around the world. His work has been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in both Paris and Shanghai; the Vatican, Rome; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Arc de Triomphe, Paris; Arter, Istanbul; MAAT, Lisbon; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; the Blanton Museum, Austin; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Post Museum, Frankfurt; the Art History and Natural History Museums in Vienna; both Tate Modern and Tate Britain and the Palace of Westminster in London; the 1999 Venice Biennale, MAXXI Rome; Madison Square Park, New York; Soundscape Park, Miami Beach; Kunsthaus, Graz Austria; the National Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; the Art Gallery of NSW Sydney; the Kolumba Museum, Cologne; Ennova Art Museum, China. He has done major sound art projects for the BBC, the European Broadcast Union, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, West German Radio (WDR), Swedish Radio, Radio France, and the Austrian State Radio. Many of these works create live listening networks that collect information from sources as diverse as the slowly vanishing sounds of Japan, the Bosporus River in Istanbul and its cisterns, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the Millennium Bridge in London, the sounds of the sea of Normandy Coast, fog horns in San Francisco, old growth forests, hydroelectric turbines, diverse urban and marine environments, the silenced bells of both Notre Dame and the Great Bell of the Vatican; the imagined sounds of the Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin, the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, rain forests from three continents, and the melting Dachstein Glacier in the Austrian Alps. Fontana's projects have explored hybrid listening technologies using acoustic microphones, underwater sensors (hydrophones), and structural/material sensors (accelerometers). His more recent works are explorations of the relationship between image and sound, expressed through the combined mediums of audio and video.
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. Learn more about The Forum here:
gracecathedral.org/the-forum
Dave Evans: How to Live a Meaningful Life
2026/04/15
Dave Evans Forum: How to Live a Meaningful Life
Grace Cathedral, San Francisco
In a world grappling with major societal shifts and increasing isolation, it's easy to feel like nothing we do matters. So many of us feel like something is missing, disconnected, and stuck. There must be more to life than simply surviving each day—but how do we uncover it?
Bestselling author Dave Evans, with Bill Burnett, the "empowering" (Publishers Weekly) visionaries behind Stanford's renowned Life Design Lab, have already inspired millions of readers to use design thinking principles to craft lives and careers they love. Now, in How to Live a Meaningful Life, they take on the most profound design problem of all: how to make a life rich with meaning and purpose. Evolving their revolutionary framework, Burnett and Evans present the latest research on what makes life worth living, showing us how to bring wonder, coherence, flow, and community into our everyday experiences. Instead of cramming more into an already packed life, they give us the steps we need to extract more out of it, moment by moment.
Join Malcolm Clemens Young, Dean of Grace Cathedral, for a conversation with Evans about how to transform your ordinary days into ones brimming with joy, purpose, and meaning.
Recorded at Grace Cathedral on April 12, 2026.
Give to Grace
You can help us bring the arts to life at Grace with a gift today to The Forum. gracecathedral.org/give
Become a GraceArts Member Love engaging dialogue? We offer a special cultural membership program, GraceArts, focused exclusively on the arts and well-being. GraceArts allows a wider community to belong to and support Grace, with discounts and benefits on a robust schedule of events. Learn more and join at gracecathedral.org/join.
About the Guest
Dave Evans is all about helping you design a life and a way to live it that brings you fully alive. After 30+ years in tech (led the Apple mouse, a co-founder of Electronic Arts, etc.) he pivoted from making things to designing lives in 2007 and co-founded the Stanford Life Design Lab, then co-authored the worldwide bestseller, Designing Your Life. He and Bill Burnett lead a movement to help people get unstuck and design the meaningful lives they deserve.
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. Learn more about The Forum here:
gracecathedral.org/the-forum
Ana Raquel Minian: In the Shadow of Liberty
2026/03/25
Ana Raquel Minian Forum: In the Shadow of Liberty
Grace Cathedral, San Francisco
Many Americans have watched in horror as children are torn from their parents and American citizens have been killed under the current administration's immigration policy. But as historian Ana Raquel Minian reveals in In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention, this is only the latest chapter in a saga tracing back to the 1800s—one in which immigrants to the United States have been held without recourse to their constitutional rights. Braiding together the vivid stories of four migrants seeking to escape the turmoil of their homelands for the promise of America, In the Shadow of Liberty gives this history a human face, and explores how sites of rightlessness have evolved, and what their existence has meant for our body politic. Though these "black sites" exist out of view for the average American, their reach extends into all of our lives: the explosive growth of the for-profit prison industry traces its origins to the immigrant detention system, as does the emergence of Guantanamo and the gradual unraveling of the right to bail and the presumption of innocence. Through these narratives, we see how the changing political climate surrounding immigration has played out in individual lives, and at what cost.
Join Malcolm Clemens Young, Dean of Grace Cathedral, for a conversation with Minian about the hidden story of immigrant detention in the United States, and what history can teach us in the current moment.
Recorded at Grace Cathedral on March 22, 2026.
Give to Grace
You can help us bring the arts to life at Grace with a gift today to The Forum. gracecathedral.org/give
Become a GraceArts Member
Love engaging dialogue? We offer a special cultural membership program, GraceArts, focused exclusively on the arts and well-being. GraceArts allows a wider community to belong to and support Grace, with discounts and benefits on a robust schedule of events. Learn more and join at gracecathedral.org/join.
About the Guest
Ana Raquel Minian is a Professor in the Department of History at Stanford University and an award-winning author. They are the recipient of numerous prestigious honors, including the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship (2020), awarded to the nation's most creative thinkers, and PEN America's Nonfiction Award (2025) for their second book. Their first book, Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration (Harvard University Press, 2018), won wide acclaim and multiple awards. Minian's second book, In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention (Viking, 2024), winner of PEN America's Nonfiction Award, was widely reviewed, including by the American Bar Association, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Times, which selected it as an Editors' Choice Book. In 2022, Minian launched and now co-directs the Migration and Asylum Lab, which brings together scholars from multiple disciplines and institutions to support asylum adjudication processes. At Stanford, they teach courses on migration, Latinx history, Mexican American history, social movements, and the histories of incarceration and detention.
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. Learn more about The Forum here:
gracecathedral.org/the-forum
Rebecca Solnit Forum: Notes on a World of Change
2026/03/18
Rebecca Solnit Forum: Notes on a World of Change
Grace Cathedral, San Francisco
As white nationalist and authoritarian movements push toward isolation and individualism, other currents continue to gather strength. Antiracism, feminism, expansive understandings of gender, environmental thinking, scientific discovery, and Indigenous and non-Western ways of knowing resonate across borders and generations, pointing toward a more relational and interconnected world.
Few writers trace these converging currents with the clarity and moral imagination of Rebecca Solnit. A writer, historian, and activist, Solnit is the author of more than twenty books exploring feminism, western and urban history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and catastrophe. Across her work, she listens for the deeper frequencies of change—the ways ideas, struggles, and solidarities echo across time.
In The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change, a sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit reflects on the profound shifts that have unfolded since 1960, and the long vibrations of change that often go unheard in the moment.
Join Malcolm Clemens Young, Dean of Grace Cathedral, for a conversation with Rebecca Solnit about how social, political, scientific, and cultural transformations resonate across the past seventy-five years—and how listening for those resonances can help us imagine what comes next.
Recorded at Grace Cathedral on March 15, 2026.
Give to Grace
You can help us bring the arts to life at Grace with a gift today to The Forum. gracecathedral.org/give
Become a GraceArts Member Love engaging dialogue? We offer a special cultural membership program, GraceArts, focused exclusively on the arts and well-being. GraceArts allows a wider community to belong to and support Grace, with discounts and benefits on a robust schedule of events. Learn more and join at gracecathedral.org/join.
About the Guest
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and urban history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and catastrophe. Her books include Orwell's Roses; Recollections of My Nonexistence; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she writes regularly for the Guardian, serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International, and recently launched the climate project Not Too Late (nottoolateclimate.com).
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. Learn more about The Forum here:
gracecathedral.org/the-forum
SF Symphony Performs Mozart's Requiem: Inside Music Talk with Dean Malcolm Clemens Young
2026/03/06
The San Francisco Symphony performed Mozart's Requiem with guest conductor Manfred Honeck, in a special version that reimagines the piece in the context of an 18th-century funeral service. In collaboration with the Symphony, Dean Malcolm Clemens Young gives a preconcert talk before the performance.
Adam Hochschild Forum: American Midnight
2026/03/04
Adam Hochschild Forum: American Midnight
Grace Cathedral, San Francisco
Between World War I and the Roaring Twenties lies a largely forgotten chapter of American history—one whose tensions still echo a hundred years later. In these turbulent years, democracy was tested by war, pandemic, and violence driven by conflicts over race, immigration, and labor rights.
In American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis, legendary historian Adam Hochschild brings this moment vividly to life, revealing both the repression that darkened the era and the Americans who struggled to repair a fractured nation. The forces they confronted did not disappear; they continue to reverberate.
Join Malcolm Clemens Young, Dean of Grace Cathedral, for a conversation with Hochschild on how the past resonates into the present, and shapes the questions we're asking today.
Recorded at Grace Cathedral on March 1, 2026.
Give to Grace
You can help us bring the arts to life at Grace with a gift today to The Forum. gracecathedral.org/give
Become a GraceArts Member
Love engaging dialogue? We offer a special cultural membership program, GraceArts, focused exclusively on the arts and well-being. GraceArts allows a wider community to belong to and support Grace, with discounts and benefits on a robust schedule of events. Learn more and join at gracecathedral.org/join.
About the Guest
Adam Hochschild (pronunciation: "Hoch" as in "spoke"; "schild" as in "build") is the author of eleven books. American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis is his most recent. His preceding book, the biography Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes, was published in 2020. Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, appeared in 2016. Of his earlier books, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN USA Literary Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa and To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 were both finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels and the recent Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays collect his shorter pieces, including magazine reporting from five continents. Earlier in his career, he was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, a commentator on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," and a co-founder, editor, and writer at Mother Jones magazine. He has received the Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Award from the American Historical Association and in 2014 was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a three-time winner of the California Book Awards' Gold Medal for Nonfiction.
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. Learn more about The Forum here:
gracecathedral.org/the-forum
Eugene Kirpichov: Regenerative Economics
2026/02/25
The Forum with Eugene Kirpichov
Grace Cathedral, San Francisco
Many believe today's economic model is failing. There is a science-based, hopeful alternative: a regenerative model that works like a living system, helping leaders, communities, and citizens navigate climate chaos, inequality, and ecological breakdown with clarity and purpose. Instead of reacting to crisis after crisis, a regenerative economy creates the conditions for systems to thrive, adapt, and evolve.
Eugene Kirpichov left a rewarding and fulfilling career as a machine learning engineer at Google because he could no longer justify working on anything other than climate change. He founded the community Work on Climate with a mission to mobilize humanity's talent to build a regenerative green economy. Work on Climate quickly built the world's largest and most successful community of its sort – with tens of thousands of members around the globe, thousands of whom have found purposeful work that heals the planet, getting hundreds of millions of people to contribute their talent to fixing climate change.
Join Malcolm Clemens Young, Dean of Grace Cathedral, for a conversation with Kirpichov about how regenerative economics can bring our economic systems back into tune with the living systems they depend on.
Recorded at Grace Cathedral on February 22, 2026.
Give to Grace
You can help us bring the arts to life at Grace with a gift today to The Forum. gracecathedral.org/give
Become a GraceArts Member
Love engaging dialogue? We offer a special cultural membership program, GraceArts, focused exclusively on the arts and well-being. GraceArts allows a wider community to belong to and support Grace, with discounts and benefits on a robust schedule of events. Learn more and join at gracecathedral.org/join.
About the Guest
Eugene leads Work On Climate, managing staff and driving top-level strategy and partnerships. In his past life as a software engineer, he worked on Google's bigdata and AI systems. Eugene dedicates his free time to climbing, enjoying art and music, and his two cats This One and That One.
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. Learn more about The Forum here:
gracecathedral.org/the-forum
Randall Balmer Forum: America's Best Idea
2026/02/18
The Forum with Randall Balmer
Grace Cathedral, San Francisco
The 1st Amendment to the US Constitution codified the principle that government should play no role in favoring or supporting any religion, while allowing free exercise of all religions (including unbelief). More than 200 years later, the results from this experiment are overwhelming: The separation of church and state has shielded the government from religious factionalism, and the United States boasts a diverse religious culture unmatched in the world.
But changes have been taking place at an accelerating pace in recent years. The current Supreme Court has shifted away from excluding the influence and practice of religion at public institutions and in our laws and policies, and moved dramatically toward protecting the inclusion and promotion of religion in publicly funded undertakings. Moreover, adherents to a Christian Nationalism ideology have grown more vocal and emboldened, and are increasingly moving into positions of power.
Randall Balmer, one of the premier historians of religion in America, reviews both the history of the separation of church and state and various attempts to undermine that wall in his New York Times bestseller, America's Best Idea: The Separation of Church and State.Despite the fact that the 1st Amendment and the separation of church and state has served the nation remarkably well, he argues, its future is by no means assured.
Join Malcolm Clemens Young, Dean of Grace Cathedral, for a conversation with Balmer about everything you need to know for shaping and defending your own beliefs on the role of religion in American life.
Recorded at Grace Cathedral on February 15, 2026.
Give to Grace
You can help us bring the arts to life at Grace with a gift today to The Forum. gracecathedral.org/give
Become a GraceArts Member
Love engaging dialogue? We offer a special cultural membership program, GraceArts, focused exclusively on the arts and well-being. GraceArts allows a wider community to belong to and support Grace, with discounts and benefits on a robust schedule of events. Learn more and join at gracecathedral.org/join.
About the Guest
Randall Balmer (Ph.D., Princeton University), a prize-winning historian, Emmy Award nominee and ordained Episcopal priest, is the John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College. He was professor of American religious history at Columbia University for twenty-seven years, and he has been a visiting professor at Princeton, Yale, Drew, Emory, and Northwestern universities and in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including Evangelicalism in America and Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter. Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America, now in its fifth edition, was made into a three-part series for PBS. He is writing and will host his third PBS documentary, a history of the Orthodox Church in Alaska. His commentaries about religion in America appear in newspapers across the country.
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. Learn more about The Forum here:
gracecathedral.org/the-forum
Podcast reviews
Read The Forum at Grace Cathedral podcast reviews
MaryBeth from Oberlin'61 2013/07/18
Thanks for this opportunity to hear the Forums on my
Convenient for my iPod! I asked for Grace to make its public events more available to the distant parts of the diocese, and Voila! I found this on iT...
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