Valarie Kaur – Activist, lawyer, filmmaker
Valarie Kaur is a social justice activist, lawyer, filmmaker, innovator, mother and Sikh American thought leader who founded the Revolutionary Love Project — a movement that envisions a world where love is a public ethic.
Why you should listen
Valarie Kaur is a civil rights activist, award-winning filmmaker, lawyer, faith leader and founder of the Revolutionary Love Project. Her social justice campaigns have helped win policy change on hate crimes, racial profiling, immigration detention, solitary confinement, marriage equality and internet freedom. She founded Groundswell Movement, the Yale Visual Law Project and Faithful Internet, initiatives that equip new generations with tools for social change. During her work inside supermax prisons, on the military base at Guantanamo and at sites of mass shootings, she identified a surprising key element for social change: the ethic of love. She now leads the Revolutionary Love Project to champion love as a public ethic and wellspring for social change.
Kaur earned degrees at Stanford University, Harvard Divinity School and Yale Law School. She lives with her film partner and husband Sharat Raju and son Kavi in California, where her family settled as farmers a century ago. She is a member of the California Bar.
Sometimes people look for the quick fix–that one thing that will suddenly change their life. More times than not, the more we look for that one quick fix the less often we find it; or the quick fix turns out to be a traumatic life-changing event that is not what we had hoped for.
What would the result be if we were to lift our trajectory by just one degree? We did this 7-years ago when we started the Men’s Fellowship Network. Today, we have collectively invested over 20,000 man-hours in contemplative conversations on male spirituality and I would venture to say our lives are transforming.
Over time we have witnessed several transformations within our circle. One beautiful example is our brother, Kevin Wood, who has created and produced his first album in several years. It reflects his heartwarming journey of transformation.
This 30-minute talk is thought-provoking and worth pausing to watch.
Does a socially just society require a radical feminist overhaul of dominant patriarchal structures? Dr. Robert Jensenis a professor of journalism at The University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of many books, and he writes opinions and analytics on foreign policy, politics, and race for popular media. His work has appeared in papers and magazines across the United States.
“I’ve never done a thing I’ve wanted to do in all my life.” – Last line in the book: Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
Babbitt (1922), by Sinclair Lewis, is a satirical novel about American culture and society that critiques the vacuity of middle-class life and the social pressure toward conformity.
The word “Babbitt” entered the English language as a “person and especially a business or professional man who conforms unthinkingly to prevailing middle-class standards”.
Great advice from Joseph Campbell: “Follow your bliss. If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be. If you follow your bliss, doors will open for you that wouldn’t have opened for anyone else.”
I invite you to pause a few moments and let me share a little about our counter-intuitive approach to the men’s spiritual circles in the Men’s Fellowship Network.
I sat together with a friend one night within the dark night of his soul. I held for him a greater truth, the essence of which he could not see. I held it until he was eventually able to shed enough of what no longer served him, and was able to see the spark of light that had been within him all along. It was the spark of his true spirit; his goodness and his gifts. It gave me pause. I later realized that sitting with him was his gift to me and it inspired me to produce this short video about holding sacred space. After I finished making this video and put the music to it I realized the title of the guitar piece was “Diagonal” by Richard Crandell. Perhaps a touch of Divine order at play here… Clay Boykin
Valarie Kaur – Activist, lawyer, filmmaker
