Episodi

  • Jenkin Lloyd Jones and the Parliament of Religions

    Jenkin Lloyd Jones and the Parliament of Religions
    Feb 22 2026
    In 1893, a Welsh-born Unitarian minister named Jenkin Lloyd Jones helped build something remarkable --- a gathering where the world's religions would meet as equals for the first time on American soil. But Jones wasn't just an idealist. He was a man who knew what it felt like to stand on the outside of a door that should have been open. That experience gave his pluralism roots. In this episode, Harmonia explores how Jones came to understand that religious freedom is indivisible --- that you cannot protect it selectively without eventually losing it entirely --- and how the Parliament he helped create planted a seed whose consequences we are still living with today. Transcript available at: https://harmonia.email/podcast-episode/jenkin-lloyd-jones-and-parliament-religions View comments on this podcast: https://harmonia.email/podcast-comments?field_podcast_feed_value=the_golden_thread&from_node=236
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    17 min
  • The Seed and the Crossing

    The Seed and the Crossing
    Feb 21 2026
    In 1893 a twenty-nine year old Jain lawyer from Gujarat faced an almost insurmountable problem --- the monks of his tradition could not cross the ocean, yet the Parliament of World Religions was calling. Virchand Gandhi spent six months preparing himself to carry an entire tradition on his shoulders, crossed the water, and introduced the Western world to ahimsa --- the ancient principle of non-violence that would quietly reshape the moral imagination of the twentieth century. From Chicago to Gandhi's Salt March to the streets of Montgomery, the seed he planted grew into a garden that changed everything. This week, as we remember Reverend Jesse Jackson, we pause to recognize the gardeners who came before and the rich soil they left behind. Transcript available at: https://harmonia.email/podcast-episode/seed-and-crossing View comments on this podcast: https://harmonia.email/podcast-comments?field_podcast_feed_value=the_golden_thread&from_node=235
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    22 min
  • Sisters and Brothers of America

    Sisters and Brothers of America
    Feb 20 2026
    In September 1893, a young wandering monk from Bengal stood before thousands in Chicago and spoke four words that stopped a room cold. Swami Vivekananda hadn't come to argue or convert --- he had come to share, openly and without condition, a wisdom tradition that America had never encountered as an equal. What happened next surprised everyone, including him. His thunderous reception at the Parliament of World Religions was only the beginning. What followed --- city by city, lecture hall by lecture hall --- quietly built the infrastructure through which Eastern wisdom would flow into Western life for generations to come. Transcript available at: https://harmonia.email/podcast-episode/sisters-and-brothers-america View comments on this podcast: https://harmonia.email/podcast-comments?field_podcast_feed_value=the_golden_thread&from_node=234
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    21 min
  • Rev. John Henry Barrows: The Door He Opened

    Rev. John Henry Barrows: The Door He Opened
    Feb 19 2026
    In 1893, Presbyterian minister John Henry Barrows organized the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago, believing it would demonstrate Christianity's superiority through friendly dialogue. He spent two years sending ten thousand invitations worldwide, overcoming fierce opposition from his own church and religious leaders who feared granting other faiths equal platform. But when speakers from Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Muslim, and other traditions addressed thousands of Americans not as primitives seeking wisdom but as teachers offering it, something unprecedented happened. The Parliament didn't confirm Barrows' assumptions---it shattered them, creating the social permission structure that allows religious diversity to flourish in America today. Barrows wanted to prove a point. He accidentally changed a culture. Transcript available at: https://harmonia.email/podcast-episode/rev-john-henry-barrows-door-he-opened View comments on this podcast: https://harmonia.email/podcast-comments?field_podcast_feed_value=the_golden_thread&from_node=238
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    25 min
  • John Amos Comenius

    John Amos Comenius
    Feb 17 2026
    In the midst of the Thirty Years' War, a Czech refugee named John Amos Comenius lost everything---his family, his home, his country. Yet he spent the rest of his life insisting on something that seemed impossible: that every child, everywhere, rich or poor, boy or girl, deserved an education. He created the first illustrated textbook, rejected corporal punishment, and mapped out a system of schools from kindergarten through university. He died largely unrecognized in 1670, but his seeds grew into the modern education system we now take for granted. Today, as digital infrastructure connects learners across every border, we're living in the harvest Comenius never saw---with the tools to fulfill his vision of universal wisdom and global harmony. Transcript available at: https://harmonia.email/podcast-episode/john-amos-comenius View comments on this podcast: https://harmonia.email/podcast-comments?field_podcast_feed_value=the_golden_thread&from_node=231
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    21 min
  • Bartolom Carranza

    Bartolom Carranza
    Feb 16 2026
    In 1559, the Archbishop of Toledo was arrested for a radical idea: that ordinary people should read Scripture in their own language. Bartolom Carranza spent seventeen years imprisoned, not in chains but in bureaucratic limbo, waiting for a trial that moved slower than justice. His crime was suggesting that sacred truth belongs to everyone. But he was living in the age of cheap paper---an infrastructure that would make his dream inevitable, even as he died before seeing it. Today, we live in our own inflection point, where silicon and fiber optics have already decided we're building a global society. The question isn't whether we'll be connected, but what we'll do with that connection. Transcript available at: https://harmonia.email/podcast-episode/bartolom-carranza View comments on this podcast: https://harmonia.email/podcast-comments?field_podcast_feed_value=the_golden_thread&from_node=230
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    21 min
  • Ibn Khaldun

    Ibn Khaldun
    Feb 15 2026
    In 1401, 69-year-old scholar Ibn Khaldun lowered himself down Damascus's walls in a basket to meet the conquering Tamerlane face-to-face---a living test of his revolutionary theories about how civilizations rise and fall. Writing in 1375, Ibn Khaldun invented sociology by identifying asabiyyah (social cohesion) as the fundamental force in history, describing how prosperity weakens the bonds that hold societies together in predictable cycles. His framework helps us understand today's polarization and fragmentation not as civilizational collapse, but as the birth pangs of something unprecedented: humanity learning to build social cohesion at global scale, where justice becomes the organizing principle and our interconnection becomes undeniable. Transcript available at: https://harmonia.email/podcast-episode/ibn-khaldun View comments on this podcast: https://harmonia.email/podcast-comments?field_podcast_feed_value=the_golden_thread&from_node=229
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    37 min
  • John Woolman

    John Woolman
    Feb 14 2026
    In 1772, Quaker tailor John Woolman chose to sleep in a ship's steerage among enslaved people rather than accept comfort built on their suffering. His gentle witness against slavery---expressed through how he dressed, traveled, and conducted business---helped transform the Quakers into America's first religious denomination to oppose slavery. This episode explores how one person's moral clarity can shift an entire community, and asks: whose suffering makes our comfort possible? Though legal slavery no longer exists anywhere on Earth, forced labor still hides in global supply chains. Woolman's question remains urgent: how do we stay awake to our connection with distant others whose labor shapes our lives? Transcript available at: https://harmonia.email/podcast-episode/john-woolman View comments on this podcast: https://harmonia.email/podcast-comments?field_podcast_feed_value=the_golden_thread&from_node=228
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    23 min