Orland Bishop and Host Michael Lerner

Part of the Spiritual Biography Series

The Seventh Shrine: Spiritual Biography Continued

Join Host Michael Lerner for another series of spiritual biography conversations with social activist and community leader Orland Bishop. Together, they look at his life and work, working from his book, The Seventh Shrine: Meditations on the African Spiritual Journey from the Middle Passage to the Mountaintop. This four-part conversation is a follow up to the 2011 spiritual biography (also four parts) Michael hosted with Orland. And read a news article about the Sacred Hospitality of Orland Bishop on the Commonweal news pages.

To watch or listen to all eight of the conversations, we’ve created playlists on YouTube and Soundcloud –and you can search to find them on our Apple Podcasts and Spotify sites. Read the transcripts (which have been edited lightly) of the conversation here: part 1 (PDF), part 2 (PDF), part 3 (PDF), and part 4 (PDF).

Listen (audio only)

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Orland Bishop

Orland Bishop is the founder and director of ShadeTree Multicultural Foundation in Los Angeles, where he has pioneered approaches to urban truces and mentoring at-risk youth that combine new ideas with traditional ways of knowledge. ShadeTree serves as an intentional community of mentors, elders, teachers, artists, healers, and advocates for the healthy development of children and youth. Orland’s work in healing and human development is framed by an extensive study of medicine, naturopathy, psychology, and Indigenous cosmologies, primarily those of South and West Africa.

Host Michael Lerner

Michael is the president and co-founder of Commonweal. His principal work at Commonweal is with the Cancer Help Program, CancerChoices.org, the Omega Resilience Projects, the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, and The New School at Commonweal. He was the recipient of a MacArthur Prize Fellowship for contributions to public health in 1983 and is author of Choices in Healing: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Therapies (MIT Press).