Talk today in New York is about consumerism

If you’re in New York City today, check out the Globesity Festival featuring Thomas Moore at 6:30 p.m. He will unearth the "Roots of Modern Consumerism" at The Community Theatre,
155 1st Ave.

According to festival organizers, "Globesity is the over consumption of all natural elements that create and sustain life on Earth – some of the most vital and visible being water, minerals, oil, and food. Our approach to food and sustenance is destroying our personal and social health. Our Earth and our Bodies cannot sustain the beastly grind of consumption. This beast is Globesity. It has been named. Now is the hour of confrontation. The Globesity Festival is razor sharp performance, comedy, education, celebration and collaboration. With Theatre as our laboratory, we are cooking & cutting up ingredients for solutions." Entertainer, performance artist, and comic Zero Boy is also on stage. Festival events are free and continue until Oct. 28, 2007.

If you attend Moore's talk and want to write a summary for Barque readers, please email the Editor.

Thomas Moore to speak about violence in April

Thomas Moore is scheduled to be a keynote speaker at the second annual academic conference of The Foundation for Mythological Studies, to be held April 4-6, 2008 in Santa Barbara, California. The 2008 conference theme is Nature and Human Nature: The Mythology of Violence. This event is co-sponsored by Pacifica Graduate Institute and Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture. The conference description says,

"With the roots of violence clearly so deeply imbedded in our biology and psychology, the crisis of violence has in our time issued in an ecological and psychological disaster, one that requires personal and cultural transformation, a shift of paradigms in how we understand violence, power, authority, force. Do we need a new world-view, a more comprehensive mythology?

This conference will discuss the possibility that violence may have a necessary function psychologically, socially or even biologically, that we may not know what violence is, and that we may not know (yet) its relation to myth."

Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture will publish selected conference papers in its Spring 2009 issue: Psychology of Violence. The initial conference announcement will be updated as the program is confirmed.

New cover for A Life's Work is on display

A new look for a new book - the cover for Thomas Moore's next book, A Life's Work: The Joy of Discovering What You were Born to Do, is circulating on the web. The book will be distributed in February 2008 by Random House's Broadway division.

Moore talks about soul-full living tonight in Erie

Thomas Moore visits Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pennsylvania tonight, to share his insights about Living a Soul-full Life in a Soul-full World. His talk begins at 8 p.m. in the Mary D’Angelo Performing Arts Center. It is free and open to the public. A book-signing will follow. Click on the link in the Barque: Thomas Moore post directly below for more information about this event.

Thomas Moore refreshes careofthesoul.net

Thomas Moore's web site, careofthesoul.net has been relaunched with new layouts, photographs, and information. The Home page features art by his wife, Joan Hanley and the Events page provides a link if you would like Moore as a guest speaker.

The new site announces that Moore will be speaking in Erie, Pennsylvania on October 9, 2007 at Mercyhurst College, Living a Soul-full Life in a Soul-full World. His free talk begins at 8 p.m. in the Mary D’Angelo Performing Arts Center and it is open to the public, to be followed by a book-signing. Attendees will also enjoy live jazz by the Jim Madden Trio.

The college release explains: "Moore’s presentation is sponsored by Mercyhurst’s Distinguished Speakers Series, with support from the Dr. Martha Haley Lecture Series, the Louis Tullio Society Lecture Fund, Mrs. Audrey Hirt and the college’s departments of psychology and religious studies."

On September 29, 2007, Thomas Moore spoke at the Unitarian Church in Peterborough NH as part of the Monadnock Rotary Wellness Festival. Sponsored by Monadnock Community Hospital, his talk was called "The Secret of Eternal Youth."

How do you know you're on the right path?

For the October 2007 issue of Whole Life Times, Jamie Friddle asks contemporary thinkers, "How do we know when we’re on the right path"? According to Friddle, Thomas Moore responds:

"You know you’re on the right track when you don’t have a kind of pressing desire to go somewhere else. I think desire is really the key to know where you are. If your desires are throwing you off and making you dissatisfied with where you are, and you’re daydreaming about being somewhere else, not present to what you’re doing, that would be a good sign [you’re not on the right path]."
— Thomas Moore, PhD, “depth theologian” and author of Care of the Soul, and Soul Mates.

Other respondents include Cheri Huber, Po Bronson, James Hollis, and Gary Zukav.

Moore was quoted previously in the December 2006 Whole Life Times article, "Embracing Darkness" in which Laine Bergeson writes, "Perhaps our greatest task in our work toward a more peaceful world is to learn to accept ourselves as we are, and not as we want ourselves to be. We must tend to and cultivate the soul of our humanity, not with the wish to exclude the darkness and the shadows, but with the desire to embrace them." Appreciation for the soulful personality is recommended, described by Thomas Moore in Care of the Soul as "complicated, multifaceted and shaped by both pain and pleasure, success and failure. Life lived soulfully is not without its moments of darkness and periods of foolishness."