Community organizers Rami Nashashibi and Lucas Johnson have much to teach us about using love — the most reliable muscle of human transformation — as a practical public good. Nashashibi is the founder of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network, a force for social healing on Chicago’s South Side. Johnson is the newly-named executive director of The On Being Project’s Civil Conversations Project. In a world of division, they say despair is not an option — and that the work of social healing requires us to get “proximate to pain.”
Rami Nashashibi is founder and executive director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN) in Chicago. He was named a MacArthur fellow in 2017 and an Opus Prize laureate in 2018.
Lucas Johnson is the executive director of The On Being Project’s Civil Conversations Project. He was previously international coordinator for the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, a century-old peace-building organization. Lucas is also a community organizer, writer, and a minister in the American Baptist Churches.
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Rami Nashashibi and Lucas Johnson — Community Organizing as a Spiritual Practice.” Find more at onbeing.org.
adrienne maree brown — On Radical Imagination and Moving Towards Life
“The End of Poetry” by Ada Limón
Atul Gawande — On Mortality and Meaning
“Ars Poetica #100: I Believe” by Elizabeth Alexander
Luis Alberto Urrea — On Our Belonging to Each Other
Ross Gay — On the Insistence of Joy
Janine Benyus and Azita Ardakani Walton — On Nature's Wisdom for Humanity
Befriend Your Body: A Compassionate Body Scan
Christine Runyan — On Healing Our Distressed Nervous Systems
“Joy is the Justice (We Give Ourselves)” by J. Drew Lanham
Lyndsey Stonebridge and Lucas Johnson — On Love, Politics, and Violence (Channeling Hannah Arendt)
New From Poetry Unbound: A Series on Conflict and the Human Condition
Colette Pichon Battle — On Knowing What We're Called To
Kate DiCamillo — On Nurturing Capacious Hearts
Wisdom, Solace, and Courage for 2024
Nick Cave — Loss, Yearning, Transcendence
A Word from Krista
Sara Hendren — Our Bodies, Aliveness, and the Built World
Christiana Figueres — Ecological Hope, and Spiritual Evolution
Clint Smith — What We Know in the "Marrow of Our Bones"
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Baseball Tonight with Buster Olney
Selected Shorts
This American Life
The Frank Skinner Show
Judge John Hodgman