“Just Making” with Mitali Perkins: An Author Event by NCB’s Radix Live

Why should we make art while injustice and suffering wreak havoc? How can we justify making beautiful things? Author Mitali Perkins isn't afraid of hard questions about justice and art. She knows that the creative life can seem selfish. As the daughter of immigrants, she studied toward a career of eradicating poverty and knows the internal voice that challenges: "How dare you retreat to your studio to create?"
Yet Perkins learned that writing fiction wasn't setting aside her passion for a better world but pursuing it. In Just Making: A Guide for Compassionate Creatives, she offers a justice-driven perspective unique among books on creativity. "My ancestors are village Bengali women who made beautiful things but didn't dare to dream of art as a career," she writes. Women across the globe have crafted beauty and order amid chaos, war, and deprivation, and Perkins turns our attention to what we learn from them.
Just Making introduces us to strategies such as forgetfulness in flow, tenderness in trauma, and crossing borders.…

Aaron Rosen: Rethinking Religious Imagery

Aaron Rosen is a writer, curator, and non-profit leader, respected internationally for his work in the public humanities, interfaith dialogue, and the arts.  He is Executive Director of The Clemente Course in the Humanities, and founded and directs the not-for-profit…

From Solitude to Solidarity: Ron Dart on Evelyn Underhill and the Contemplative Path (NCB’s Radix Live)

What does contemplation have to do with the everyday life of faith? And why does it matter now?

Words like stillness, centering prayer, silence, meditation, attention, and contemplation were finding renewed resonance in Christian conversation. But what did they actually mean—and what did they mean for the rest of us? In this interactive online event, Ron Dart explored how the contemplative path is not a spiritual luxury for the few, but a vital calling for the many—a way of seeing, praying, and being that Evelyn Underhill might have called "the education of the whole person."

Ron introduced Underhill, one of Christianity’s most respected guides to the inner life, and reflected on her wisdom for our anxious and noisy age. Drawing from her writings, he unpacked why contemplation is not only personal but communal—not withdrawal from the world, but a way to be more deeply present in it. The event also…

Kathryn Barush: Pilgrimage and Material Religion

Kathryn is Bertelsen Professor of Art History and Religion at the Graduate Theological Union and Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University. She has published extensively on the theory of pilgrimage, especially as it relates to art experience. Her recent project, Imaging…