From Suffering to Spiritual Growth

Join Buddhist chaplain Soren Glassing, Reimagine board member Pastor Corey Kennard, and Rabbi Sydney Mintz as they guide us in taking meaningful steps towards growth when facing grief and spiritual crisis. Following their insightful dialogue, we invite you to participate in peer-led breakout groups to initiate action in spiritual development. We'll address some of the following questions:

If one definition of trauma is a disruption of core belief systems, what is that for you in relation to the loss of a family member?

Can you share any insights about yourself resulting from the grief you're experiencing? What have you learned about yourself? Can you name at least one new opportunity or see one new pathway that has cleared?

What can you do to regulate these difficult emotions? What are some examples of mindfulness practices?

Can you name an act of service to help others facing a similar grief?

About Reimagine and the series "From Suffering to Spiritual Growth"

Reimagine's mission is to help all people face adversity, loss, and mortality, and channel the hard parts of life into meaningful action and growth. www.letsreimagine.org

We all must process adversity, loss, and mortality.

But there are many pathways forward to transform life’s challenges into meaningful growth. This April, join us for the series “From Suffering to Spiritual Growth” to explore the key question: How might the hard things in life lead to a spiritual deepening?

This is for people of all faiths and no faith—and everyone in between. Together, we will learn about fundamental spiritual concepts and rituals to enhance our personal journeys; we will experience the inspiring stories of leaders who have found spirituality to navigate grief and loss; and, through participatory peer-led breakout sessions, we will be guided by a pastor, a Buddhist monk, and a rabbi to take action in our spiritual growth.

Speakers

Soren Glassing

Soren Glassing is a Zen Buddhist monk and Staff Chaplain at New York Presbyterian Columbia University Medical Center. He is the head chaplain on the Palliative Care team and also works on the psychiatric unit. He has been practicing Zen since 1985 both in America (at Dai Bosatsu Zendo Kongo-ji) and in Japan (at Shogenji, Gifu-Ken) and was the head monk and co-director of the Zen Studies Society in New York City. He began training as a chaplain in 2008 with The New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care and completed his training as a resident chaplain at New York Presbyterian Hospital in 2012. Soren leads ongoing weekly meditation, spirituality, and various support groups throughout the hospital. He teaches spirituality in the healthcare setting to new medical students, mentors residents and fellows, and teaches clinicians ways to reduce stress and burnout on the job. For the past several years Soren has presented several 90 minute workshops and Personal Development Intensives at the Association for Professional Chaplain annual convention, and has taught webinars on Buddhism and the contemplative arts. He lives in New York City.

Corey L. Kennard

Corey Kennard is Pastor of Amplify Christian Church, healthcare activist, spiritual life coach, and serves on the board of directors at Reimagine. Corey has been involved in the healthcare field for over 20 years with over a decade of experience in the areas of palliative care and hospice. His holistic approach serves as the foundation for his desire to see all human beings treated with dignity, honor, and respect in all facets of life. He currently seeks to enhance the patient and family experience in healthcare settings.

Corey was instrumental in creating a teaching module for understanding spirituality at the end of life for African-Americans for Duke University's Institute on Care at the End Of Life (ICEOL) national training program. Corey served as a National Advisory Board Member for The Hospice Foundation of America, and was a co-director of a Community Faith "Advance Care Planning'' Project for the University of Virginia. He was the recipient of the Michigan Chronicle's Men of Excellence Award as being one of the Top 50 Most Influential African-American Men in the Metropolitan Detroit Region.

Corey is the author of Goliath Must Fall and Hamburgers and a Holy Man. He shares his life’s work with his wife Kristen, and they are the blessed parents of three wonderful children – Kayla Ariana, Kourtney Lael, and Corey Lynn II.

You can connect with Corey on Twitter, and Instagram.

Rabbi Sydney Mintz

Rabbi Sydney Mintz is Senior Associate Rabbi at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco where she has served since 1997. Reb Syd is also the Founder of 13th Tribe, a non-profit focused on creating innovative Jewish experiences through nature, art and ritual for anyone who is searching for pathways into Judaism. Her one woman show: "You May Think I'm Funny, But It's Not" opened at the Marsh Theatre in San Francisco and is currently being workshopped for future shows. She serves on Reimagine’s advisory council and has appeared in numerous Reimagine events both in person and online.

https://www.rabbisydney.com

Drawing from their professional expertise and personal experiences as chaplains, caregivers, and spiritual leaders, Rev. Jen Bailey, Caitlin Breedlove, Sensei Chodo Robert Campbell, and Mati Esther Engel discuss how to create space for others to process grief while addressing larger systemic inequities that may impact one's bereavement journey. Additionally, they'll share insights on navigating personal grief when tasked with ministering to the needs of others. Discover the power of spiritual support and resilience in times of loss and transformation.

Rev. Jen Bailey

Reverend Jen Bailey is an ordained minister, public theologian, and a leader in the multi-faith movement for justice. She is the Founder and Executive Director of the Faith Matters Network, a Womanist-led organization focused on “healing the healers” by equipping community organizers, faith leaders, and activists with resources for connection, spiritual sustainability, and accompaniment.

Jen is Co-Founder of the People's Supper, a project that aims to repair the breach in our interpersonal relationships across political, ideological, and identity differences over shared meals. A sought-after commentator and public speaker on the intersection of religion and public life, she has spoken at the inaugural Obama Foundation Summit, Makers, TEDxSkoll, and the White House. Her work has been featured on OnBeing with Krista Tippett, CBS This Morning, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and dozens of other publications. She is the author of To My Beloveds: Letters on Faith, Race, Loss and Radical Hope (Chalice Press 2021). Rev. Bailey is ordained in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Follow her at @revjenbailey.

Caitlin Breedlove

Caitlin Breedlove is the Deputy Executive Director at the Women's March. She also serves as the Movement Strategist in Residence at Auburn Seminary. Since 2003, Caitlin has been organizing, writing and building movements in red states: working across race, class, culture, gender, sexuality and faith. She is the former Co-Director of Southerners On New Ground (SONG), where for almost a decade she co-led innovative intersectional movement building work in the LGBTQ sector. Under Caitlin’s co-leadership, SONG led campaigns, trained hundreds of new LGBTQ organizers in the South, built a membership of over 3,000, and became the largest grassroots LGBTQ organization in the South. She is also the former Campaign Director of Standing on the Side of Love at the Unitarian Universalist Association where she served as a bridge between grassroots social movements and the denomination. Caitlin began her work in the South doing popular education and organizer training at the historic Highlander Center in Tennessee. She is the former host of the podcast ‘Fortification‘, which interviewed movement leaders and organizers about their spiritual lives. She currently lives in Phoenix, Arizona with her five year old son. Her first book, All In: Cancer, Near Death, New Life. will be published by AK Press in February 2024.

Sensei Chodo Robert Campbell, GC-C

In 2007, Sensei Chodo Robert Campbell, co-founded the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care — a non-profit organization that focuses on the teaching of Zen and Buddhist practice with the goal to make them more accessible to people all around the world. The center delivers contemplative approaches to care through education, carepartnership, and meditation practice. To better expand the reach of the program, Chodo co-developed a carefully structured protocol: the Foundations in Contemplative Care Training Program. Today, New York Zen Center’s methodologies are internationally recognized — and have touched the lives of tens of thousands of individuals. Chodo is a dynamic, grounded, and visionary leader and teacher: he has traveled extensively throughout the U.S instructing in various institutions. He has also spent many hours dedicated to bearing witness to the suffering of HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Chodo's public programs have introduced thousands to the practices of mindful and compassionate care of the living and dying. Sixty-thousand people listen to his podcasts each year. His passion lies in bereavement counseling and advocating for change in the way our healthcare institutions work with the dying. Chodo is widely recognized as a trailblazer and authority on contemplative care; His work has been featured in the New York Times, PBS, Tricycle, Parabola and other media outlets. He is a recognized Soto Zen Teacher with the American Zen Teachers Association, White Plum Asanga, and Soto Zen Buddhist Association. Chodo is part of the core faculty for the Buddhist Track in the Master in Pastoral Care and Counseling at NYZC’s education partner, New York Theological Seminary. He is also on the faculty of the University of Arizona Medical School’s Center for Integrative Medicine’s Integrative Medicine Fellowship and the Academy of Integrative Health & Medicine in San Diego. https://zencare.org

Mati Esther Engel

Mati Esther Engel is a Spiritual Care strategist and consultant. She has extensive training in clinical hospital-based chaplaincy, specializing in treating palliative care patients and serving on transplant and addiction units. She is practiced in accompanying patients and families through important life transitions specifically, end-of-life care, goals of care decision-making, and trauma intervention. Mati uses her training in performance art to develop spiritual care techniques in the service of bringing spiritual care, grief counseling, and theological artistry to a public audience. Her research bridges the worlds of existentialist and humanist thought; utilizing poetics and ritual as mediums for facilitating conversations for our times. She received her Masters’ degree from The University of Chicago and in Jewish studies at the PAIDEIA Jewish Institute. She is currently serving as a Spiritual Consultant for a Spiritual Care startup that is driven to democratize and innovate chaplaincy education and best practices. She also offers psychedelic integration counseling to clients across the United States. You can find her chaplaincy work documented in the recently released U.S Documentary, A Still Small Voice, featured at The Sundance Film Festival in 2023. https://www.matiestherengel.com

About Reimagine and the series "From Suffering to Spiritual Growth"

Reimagine's mission is to help all people face adversity, loss, and mortality, and channel the hard parts of life into meaningful action and growth. www.letsreimagine.org

We all must process adversity, loss, and mortality.

But there are many pathways forward to transform life’s challenges into meaningful growth. This April, join us for the series “From Suffering to Spiritual Growth” to explore the key question: How might the hard things in life lead to a spiritual deepening?

This is for people of all faiths and no faith—and everyone in between. Together, we will learn about fundamental spiritual concepts and rituals to enhance our personal journeys; we will experience the inspiring stories of leaders who have found spirituality to navigate grief and loss; and, through participatory peer-led breakout sessions, we will be guided by a pastor, a Buddhist monk, and a rabbi to take action in our spiritual growth.

About Faith Matters Network

Faith Matters Network catalyzes personal and social change by equipping community organizers, faith leaders, and activists with resources for connection, spiritual sustainability, and accompaniment. https://www.faithmattersnetwork.org/ @faithmattersnetwork

About New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care

The New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care (NYZC) offers guidance for people interested in beginning meditation or continuing in their existing practice; we train people from all walks of life— including medical professionals, parents, lawyers, artist and bankers—in compassionate caregiving; we support people and their loved ones through serious illness and death, and assist family and friends during their grieving process. We also celebrate and honor many of life’s meaningful moments. https://zencare.org @newyorkzencenter

Reimagine has been hosting candlelight vigils throughout the pandemic in order to break down taboos and hold space for all that we've lost. Tonight's program will include a conversation between Rev. Dr. Emma Jordan-Simpson and Danté Stewart. Rev. Jordan-Simpson serves as president of Auburn, a leadership development and research institute that equips bold and resilient leaders of faith and moral courage to build communities, bridge divides, pursue justice, and heal the world. Danté Stewart is the award-winning author of the debut memoir Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle and a current student at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University.

The Rev. Dr. Emma Jordan-Simpson

The Rev. Dr. Emma Jordan-Simpson became the president of Auburn Seminary on October 1, 2021. Auburn is a leadership development and research institute that equips bold and resilient leaders of faith and moral courage to build communities, bridge divides, pursue justice, and heal the world. Founded more than 200 years ago by Presbyterians in upstate New York, Auburn is committed to right relationship with a truly multifaith, multiracial movement for justice.

Rev. Jordan-Simpson embraced her call to ministry and service early in life. She preached her first sermon at the age of 17 at House of Prayer Episcopal Church in Newark, NJ, and was ordained by The Concord Baptist Church of Christ, a historic freedom faith congregation in Brooklyn, NY. Her ministry has been grounded in the call to community. Her leadership of New York’s nonprofit organizations have addressed the sacred issues representative of her congregation’s convictions.

She is a graduate of Fisk University (BA); Union Theological Seminary (M.Div), and Drew Theological Seminary (D.Min). She is the President of the Board of American Baptist Churches of Metropolitan New York and serves on the Board of Directors of FPWA.

Rev. Jordan Simpson and her husband, the Rev. Dr. Gary V. Simpson, live in Brooklyn and are the proud parents of three amazing adult children.

Danté Stewart

Danté Stewart is the author of the debut memoir Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle, a stirring meditation on being Black and learning to love in a loveless, anti-Black world. The book won Stewart the Georgia Author of the Year award from the Georgia Writer’s Association in 2022. Throughout, Stewart uses his personal experiences as a vehicle to reclaim and reimagine spiritual virtues like rage, resilience, and remembrance—and explores how these virtues might function as a work of love against an unjust, unloving world. This sharply observed journey is an intimate meditation on coming of age in a time of terror. Stewart reveals the profound faith he discovered even after experiencing the violence of the American church: a faith that loves Blackness; speaks truth to pain and trauma; and pursues a truer, realer kind of love than the kind we’re taught, a love that sets us free.

Of Stewart’s debut, Imani Perry laudes, “Standing in a centuries old tradition of spiritual autobiography, Shoutin’ in the Fire is at once a coming of age story and a conversion narrative. From Pentecostal origins, he travels through institutions that hold onto an idea of ‘white Jesus,’ and finally to a spiritual reckoning in which he recognizes Black life to be not only valuable but holy.” While Deesha Philyaw notes, “Some of us joke about Jesus needing better PR than what today’s evangelical church provides. Enter Danté Stewart. With unparalleled candor, vulnerability, and love, Stewart takes us along his personal journey to understanding what it is to be Black, Christian, and American. The church is long overdue for a reckoning with white supremacy, and Stewart has written a brilliant blueprint.”

Stewart’s voice has been featured on CNN, The Washington Post, Christianity Today, Sojourners, The Witness: A Black Christian Collective, Comment Magazine, and more. He received his B.A. in Sociology from Clemson University. He is currently studying at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, GA.

Mangda Sengvanhpheng

Mangda Sengvanhpheng is an artist, contemplative care practitioner, and the Founder of BACII. She is devoted to creating a deeper culture of care, transcending our circumstances, and expanding our experiences through the wisdom of impermanence. Mangda offers supportive services, regenerative programming, and intentional products for individuals, communities, and organizations alike. Her life and death work is guided by her Laotian last name, which means “the light of the full moon.”

BACII is inspired by all of her experiences with loss and life, and specifically the loss of her mother. This life-changing experience of helping her mother through the dying process included being with her in the final moments, washing and dressing her body, arranging a funeral service, and managing a household of tasks that come with death. This experience revealed to her how difficult and isolating grief and loss can be. This led her to reimagine our society’s relationship to the end-of-life as a healthier and more supportive experience.

Driven by these experiences, Mangda became a certified death doula through Going with Grace and an end-of-life volunteer. She then launched BACII as a platform to integrate death into our lives so that we can better support ourselves and those we love.

Additionally she has been immersed in the mystical, creative, and healing arts for over 15 years and is certified and trained in pranayama, asanas, and meditation with Bhooma Chaitanya and Swami Yogeshananda through Aarasha Yoga Vidya Peetham in Kerala, India, Reiki 2 accreditation by Joanna Crespo, NYC, 13th Octave LaHoChi accreditation from Soul Healing, CT, Grief Literacy from Be Here, and Contemplative Care from New York Zen Center.

Mangda was an awarded recipient of Reclamation Ventures grant for under-represented leaders making pathways to addressing grief and loss.

Her work has been featured in publications such as Vogue, NY Mag’s Curbed, Brydie, Chacruna Institute, Svenska Dagbladet (Swedish Wall Street Journal) and more.

Jonathan Lipps

Jonathan is a software engineer and entrepreneur who’s worked primarily on open source software over the course of his career. He studied philosophy and linguistics at Stanford and Oxford, and is currently working on a third master’s degree in theology. Jonathan lives with his son in Vancouver, Canada, and in addition to spending time with his little boy, enjoys writing and producing music, getting outside for all kinds of adventures, and playing nerdy games like D&D with friends. You can find out more about Jonathan at https://jlipps.com.

About Reimagine and the series "From Suffering to Spiritual Growth"

Reimagine's mission is to help all people face adversity, loss, and mortality, and channel the hard parts of life into meaningful action and growth. www.letsreimagine.org

We all must process adversity, loss, and mortality.

But there are many pathways forward to transform life’s challenges into meaningful growth. This April, join us for the series “Suffering Into Spirituality” to explore the key question: How might the hard things in life lead to a spiritual deepening?

This is for people of all faiths and no faith—and everyone in between. Together, we will learn about fundamental spiritual concepts and rituals to enhance our personal journeys; we will experience the inspiring stories of leaders who have found spirituality to navigate grief and loss; and, through participatory peer-led breakout sessions, we will be guided by a pastor, a Buddhist monk, and a rabbi to take action in our spiritual growth.

About Auburn

Auburn equips leaders with the organizational skills and spiritual resilience required to create lasting, positive impact in local communities, on the national stage, and around the world. We amplify voices and visions of faith and moral courage. We convene diverse leaders and cross-sector organizations for generative collaboration and multifaith understanding. And we research what’s working — and not — in theological education and social change-making.