MOVIES & MEANING EXPERIENCE 2018 - THE DRAFT SCHEDULE

We’re delighted to announce the early schedule for the 2018 Movies & Meaning Experience, taking place April 26th-28th, at the Diana Wortham Theatre in downtown Asheville, NC.

Now in its fourth year, Movies & Meaning is a three day conference, festival and community gathering, sharing better stories for better lives and a better world. It’s a life-changing experience of wisdom, inspiration, challenge and connection.

We’ll tell seven stories paired with seven conversations, and seven opportunities for positive change - featuring special guests in person including: Alice Walker - Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Color Purple. Mira Nair - Academy Award nominated, Golden Globe & BAFTA winning filmmaker. James McLeary - transformational leader and CEO of the Inside Circle Foundation. Brian McLaren - acclaimed author and activist. Gareth Higgins - Irish peace activist, writer & storyteller, and founder of Movies & Meaning.

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WHAT WILL YOU DO?

I'm testing an idea here.

Our friend Richard Rohr says that the best criticism of the bad always includes the practice of the better. I believe him.

That's probably why some folk tell me they think I go too easy on politics or religion or movies.

Good people taught me a long time ago that we don't need reminding of what's wrong as often as we may think. We already think about problems, suffering, and evil so much, that our perceptions are often distorted into believing everything's getting worse. What both the brain and the world need is a vision of hope rooted in real life.

Not that we shouldn't lament real pain—far from it! If we don't develop healthy ways of grieving loss, voicing anger, and meaningfully expressing sympathy and solidarity with those who suffer, we'll become misers or robots.

But Dr. King's famed speech of protest includes not only the clarification of the evils of racism, but also a dream—a vision for the better.

A vision, of course, of a world in which all of us sit together at the table of community, and lions lie down with lambs.

Along the path to that world, as John O'Donohue taught me, the duty of privilege is absolute integrity, which means our task as individuals and in community must include evaluating our own power, and serving from that place; and evaluating our own lack, and asking for help from that place.

In any case, my tribe won't defeat yours, nor yours mine, without bringing more pain to us all. The problem is not with belonging, but when we make our belonging dependent on causing someone else to suffer.

So here we are.

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THE MOST IMPORTANT PROBLEM IS THE EASIEST ONE TO FIX

In an interview about his vital new book ENLIGHTENMENT NOW, Steven Pinker says that amidst his deeply grounded optimism about the progress that has brought us thus far, his three top concerns are climate change, the threat of nuclear war, and the rise of authoritarian populism and fascism. Seems to me that if we want to make some kind of impact on all three, that our priority should be tribalism - the climate change conversation is diluted and resisted on ideological/tribal grounds, the threat of nuclear war is firmly rooted in a notion of group identity that wants to reduce or eradicate the space for the other, and authoritarian rule appeals to isolationist beliefs.

I think this raises two challenges/opportunities: the first is to question how my own beliefs and practices might manifest as tribalism - in other words, where does the way I want to belong overlap into causing other people to suffer? The second is whether or not I am willing to take one small step to dissolve tribalism by trying to get to know someone whose beliefs I oppose, and seek some common ground.

If you think you voted differently from me at the last election, would you be willing to have a conversation in which we listen to each other about our hopes and concerns, and maybe figure out something we could do for the common good, together?

WHAT WILL YOU BUILD TODAY?

My friend the architect Colin Fraser Wishart says that the purpose of his craft is to help people live better. There’s beautiful simplicity, but also enormous gravity in that statement. Just imagine if every public building, city park, urban transportation hub, and home were constructed with the flourishing of humanity - in community or solitude - in mind. Sometimes this is already the case, and we know it when we see it. Our minds and hearts feel more free, we breathe more easily, we are inspired to create things - whether they be new thoughts of something hopeful, or friendships with strangers, or projects that will bring the energy of transformation yet still into the lives of others. If architecture, manifested at its highest purpose, helps us live better, then it is also easy to spot architecture that is divorced from this purpose.

In our internal impressions of a building or other space made to function purely within the boundaries of current economic mythology - especially buildings made to house the so-called “making” of money - the color of hope only rarely reveals itself. Instead we are touched by melancholy, weighed down by drudgery, even compelled by the urge to get away. But when we see the shaping of a space whose stewards seem to have known that human kindness is more important than the free market, that poetry and breathing matter beyond bank balances and competition (a concert hall designed for the purest reflection of sound, a playground where the toys blend in with the trees, a train station where the transition from one place and way of being to another has been honored as a spiritual act), we know that it is possible to always be coming home.

So what will you build today?