Love Letters
to the Movement

Báyò Akómoláfé is rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea and Kyah, the grateful life-partner to EJ, son and brother. He is a widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, self-styled “trans-public” intellectual, essayist, and currently the Hubert Humphrey Distinguished Professor of American Studies in Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA (August 2025). Bayo is the host teacher at Dancing with Mountains, an educational consultation, and the visionary founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide networking project and inquiry at the edges of the Anthropocene.

Michelle Alexander is a civil rights lawyer, legal scholar, advocate, and author. Her 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness helped start a national debate about the crisis of mass incarceration in the United States. She is now at Union Theological Seminary, where she co-founded Spirit of Justice with Nyle Fort.

Lisa Anderson is a Black queer feminist theologian. She is the founding director of the Sojourner Truth Leadership Circle, a project that supports the lives and leadership of Black women who work at the intersection of faith and social justice. Lisa earned an M.Div and M.Phil at Union Theological Seminary and a BA in religion and philosophy at Vassar College. She has designed and facilitated workshops, retreats and conferences on intersectionality, living a movement life, and self and community care. Lisa has contributed to several publications including Wisdom of the Elders: Living in Spirit, Wisdom, Deep Mercy & Love (2024). She has worked at Auburn Seminary, the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church and Marble Collegiate Church. Lisa lives and works in Atlanta and New York City.

Rev. Jennifer Butler has spent the last three decades strengthening and rebuilding the progressive faith movement. In 2005, she founded Faith in Public Life to forge multiracial, multifaith and ideologically diverse faith coalitions to work for justice and the common good. She chaired President Obama's third White House Council on Faith and Neighborhood Partnerships and before that spent ten years representing the Presbyterian Church (USA) at the United Nations.

Claudia Horwitz has been working at the intersection of leadership, movement-building, and spiritual practice for three decades. She supports leaders as faculty for the Annie E. Casey Foundation and works with social movement organizations. She is a trained yoga teacher and lives on Ocracoke, an island in North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

Isaac Luria is a writer, organizer, and resource mobilizer for multifaith movements for justice. Rooted in the Jewish tradition, he has worked at the intersection of American faith and justice movements for two decades. He currently works at the Nathan Cummings Foundation.

Rev. Michael-Ray Mathews is a pastor, psalmist, and spiritual archivist whose work explores how ancestral memory generates courage for the present. Through his consultancy, Prophetic Foundry, LLC, he coaches and collaborates with faith-rooted leaders and movements seeking to reclaim spiritual power in a fragmented age. His creative and strategic work is shaped by the framework he calls Forging Sankofa—the sacred practice of retrieving wisdom from the past to animate a more just and loving future. He previously served as Deputy Director and Chief Faith Officer at Faith in Action.

Dr. Rami Nashashibi is a MacArthur Fellow, a Doctor of Sociology from the University of Chicago, and the Founding Executive Director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN), a non-profit organization incorporated in 1997 that fosters health, wellness, and healing in the inner city.

Rev. Hierald Osorto (he/él/they) serves as the lead pastor of Iglesia Luterana San Pablo-St. Paul's Lutheran Church, a bilingual, majority-immigrant, LGBTQIA-affirming congregation in the heart of South Minneapolis. His passion for stories hidden out of sight drives him to work collaboratively and creatively to bring those stories to light.

Alexie Torres is an award-winning activist and public speaker. Her work lives at the intersections of spirituality, money, and social movements. She is the founder of the Soul of the Movement Fund and a co-creator of Jubilee Gift Galaxy. She founded Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice in Bronx, New York, and co-founded the Bronx River Alliance and the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance. Alexie served as an Obama administration appointee to the White House Office of Faith and Neighborhood Partnerships and was also a 2014 Harvard Loeb Fellow.

Uma Viswanathan is a mission-driven leader dedicated to fostering belonging, healing and transformation in people, communities, institutions, and culture. Currently serving as President of the Samuel S. Fels Fund, she has stewarded over $200 million in philanthropic investments toward racial equity and healing, civic engagement, pluralism, and cultural transformation, through her leadership at New Pluralists, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Uma has been practicing and teaching meditation for two decades, and earned a BA in psychology and an MA in the history of science from Harvard University.