politicized by tenderness, with adrienne maree brown

One of my favorite conversations on or off mic with anybody any time--it is pure joy to welcome adrienne maree brown--an absolute force of a writer/public intellectual/creative genius, one of the thinkers who energizes me most, and makes me feel most hopeful about the future. This conversation has everything: from Kendrick (and the constructive implications of Drake being "called in!"), to the Neverending Story, to what it means for her to be "steeped in God/steeped in the holy," her journey from a conservative evangelical upbringing to the wide open spaces she is in now, to the essential soul to soul recognition we can have that transcends the boundaries of mere words, and how she finds a way to remain tender in a time that feels anything, but. In a moment that feels bleak for many of our friends, her clear-eyed assessment of this apocalyptic time--and yet absolute fearlessness about it, is oxygen, an invitation to the kind of "long time" she finds in nature and her own connection to a larger story. I was especially excited to talk to her too, about how her work in her brilliant new book Loving Corrections has helped me find language for naming our need for acknowledging harm and making amends, without the moralistic baggage that religious versions of those ideas sometimes carry.

You may know her from books like Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, We Will Not Cancel Us, or from her hilarious and poignant IG posts, or have heard her in conversation with folks we love like Glennon Doyle and Krista Tippett. She is "growing a garden of healing ideas. Informed by decades of movement facilitation, somatics, science fiction scholarship and doula work." However you know her, I hope you know her or get to know her better, and contend with her critical witness . What a gift this stunning conversation is! It has been a minute from my brief holiday/winter term hibernation, but we are back with a bang, with a lot more goodness to come in the days ahead...I know you will find this as life-giving as I did!