And she preached the most extraordinary sermons, and turned them into books read far and wide. At that time, she was leading a small church in Georgia. The Episcopal priest and public theologian Barbara Brown Taylor was one of the people I started learning about when I left diplomacy to study theology in the early 1990s. It’s fascinating to trace the arc of spiritual searching and religious belonging in my lifetime. “I like it much better than ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ - to be a seeker after the sacred or the holy, which ends up for me being the really real. If you’re in the U.S., find some of them here. There are many resources for mental health support. This conversation quieted and touched a room full of raucous podcasters at the 2023 On Air Fest in Brooklyn. There is so much here to walk away with, and into. It is beyond rare to be in the presence of a person holding high governmental office who speaks about love with ease and dignity - and about the agency to be healers that is available to us all. And for years, he’s been naming and investigating loneliness as a public health matter, including his own experience of that very human condition. He’s a renowned physician and research scientist in his second tenure as U.S.

Vivek Murthy is a brilliant, wise, and kind companion in these questions.

How to name and honor this more openly? How to hold that together with the ways we’ve been given to learn and to grow? Who are we called to be moving forward? Dr. The mental health crisis that is invoked all around, especially as we look to the young, is one manifestation of the gravity of the post-2020 world. We need a modicum of vitality to simply be alive in this time.

Krita apple