Tom Shadyac is one of Hollywood’s all-time leading writer/directors with his films, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Nutty Professor, Liar, Liar, Patch Adams, Bruce Almighty, and Evan Almighty, grossing nearly 2 billion dollars at the box office. Tom also produced the documentary Happy, and wrote and directed the documentary, I AM, which explores two fundamental questions – What’s wrong with our world, and what can we do
Elizabeth L. Jemison is a professor, writer, and teacher who loves questions of how we encounter the past and why it matters for our present. She teaches American religious history as an associate professor of religion at Clemson University. Beyond academic settings, Jemison regularly speaks to congregations and community groups about how religion and history shape our worlds and
Elizabeth L. Jemison is a professor, writer, and teacher who loves questions of how we encounter the past and why it matters for our present. She teaches American religious history as an associate professor of religion at Clemson University. Beyond academic settings, Jemison regularly speaks to congregations and community groups about how religion and history shape our worlds and
Anwar Arafat is an Imam for the Islamic Association of Greater Memphis. In Memphis since 2014, he moved here from Salt Lake City, UT, where he was born and raised, and served as an imam for several years. Arafat has traveled and lived overseas, completing his religious education locally and abroad, earning a bachelor’s degree in Islamic Studies, and
The Rev. Dr. Peggy Jean Craig is a Cumberland Presbyterian minister, community development nerd, wannabe poet, and personal photographer for her two-year-old identical twin girls. Growing up in rural Alabama as the only Asian kid other than her brother shaped her curiosity about marginalized places, community, and belonging. She’s most at home in borderland spaces, whether that be leading
Cole Arthur Riley is a writer and poet. She is the author of the NYT bestseller This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us. Her writing has been featured in The Atlantic, Guernica, and The Washington Post. Cole is also the creator and writer of Black Liturgies, a project that integrates spiritual practice with Black emotion, Black literature, and the Black
The Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis uses her gifts as an author, activist, preacher, and public theologian to create an antiracist, just, gun violence-free, fully welcoming, gender-affirming society in which everyone has enough. The author of several books and articles, Lewis’s most recent book, Fierce Love, was published in 2021. Her Just Love Story Bible will be released in 2025.
The Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis uses her gifts as an author, activist, preacher, and public theologian to create an antiracist, just, gun violence-free, fully welcoming, gender-affirming society in which everyone has enough. Lewis has preached in pulpits and on stages in the U.S., South Africa, and France. She’s been serving as senior minister and public theologian at Middle Church
Joe Birch marks forty-six years of service to viewers of WMC-TV in 2024. His journey in journalism has opened pathways of community service. For example, Birch organizes the Mobile Food Pantries that provide a week’s worth of groceries to five hundred families monthly through the generosity of St. Patrick Community Outreach, Inc., and Memphis Rotary Club. He worships at
After reading Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be in his final year of college, Mark Muesse gave up his ambition to be a physician and decided to become a philosopher. His parents were not pleased. He began traveling the world to study its significant spiritual pathways and spent thirty years at Rhodes College sharing what he learned. Along with Tillich, his