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Edited by Ken Chitwood (Bloomsbury, 2026)

While our exemplars are extremely different, and they draw on different spiritual tools working in radically different contexts, this same paradox emerges in so many of them that it cannot be ignored. It is the coexistence of radical resistance and radical surrender. 

William James was the inspiration for our project on “spiritual exemplars” at the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture. James, a philosopher and psychologist, believed that one learns more from what he called “religious geniuses” than from surveys of ordinary people.

After being immersed in the material for five years, Megan Sweas didn’t need a script as she led small groups on tours of the ambitious multimedia exhibit Stories of Social Change: Spirituality in Action on Tuesday evening.

There is a great boom in psychotherapy these days. Especially among a younger generation, people are lonely, anxious about the environment, insecure financially—fearful they will not achieve the same standard as their parents—and burdened with choice, about their gender, vocation and life commitments.

Even if de-occupying the entire state of Hawaii is a nearly impossible dream, inklings of what a more Hawaiian Hawai'i might look like help to keep the dream alive. Wong-Kalu smiles when we tell her we are going to Molokai to interview Ritte, whom she calls Uncle Walter.

“When you go to Molokai,” she says, “it’s a very Hawaiian place.”

Communality shapes how they organize their lives together, without political parties or a central authority. Martínez Luna and his fellow intellectuals talk about four pillars of communality: connection to the land, general assemblies, collective work and celebrations.

Santiago Alonso, a lay Catholic missionary who championed the culture of Oaxaca’s half a million Indigenous Zapotecs by demanding water rights for their farmers, was both a guardian of ancient rituals and agricultural practices and a model for the Catholic Church’s future in this region: local, lay-led and concerned with the most vulnerable.

Goldtooth, 67, is a big-picture thinker who makes connections between the negative fallout of capitalist-driven resource development and the ways that communities of color are frequently forced to pay for profits from these projects with their health, land and cultures.