"Many people wait for members of a community to invite them in, and until that happens they are lonely. There may be something of the child here who expects to be taken care of by the family. But a community is not a family. It is a group of people held together by feelings of belonging, and those feelings are not a birthright. "Belonging" is an active verb, something we do positively." - Thomas Moore
Almost an exact year after our initial post to this area, we now invite readers to post observations about Thomas Moore's work and to share reflections with other readers. It is less a call against lonliness, and more a celebration of belonging. We'll experiment with an approach using this blog
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Thomas Moore's biography is an amalgam created from different published sources.
"Thomas Moore is an author, psychotherapist, musician and religious philosopher, who lectures and writes in the areas of archetypal psychology, mythology, spiritual ecology and the arts.
Moore grew up in Detroit, Michigan with his father who taught plumbing, his mother who cared for the family home and his younger brother, Jim. At the age of thirteen Moore entered a preparatory seminary for the Servite religious order and at nineteen travelled to Ireland where he studied philosophy for two years before returning to the Chicago area to focus on musical studies. Moore left the order shortly before being ordained as a priest, twelve years after entering the seminary. He spent several years studying music, religion and philosophy, eventually earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in music and philosophy from Chicago's DePaul University, a Master of Arts degree in musicology from the University of Michigan, a Master of Arts in theology degree from the University of Windsor, Ontario, and in 1975, a Doctor of Philosophy degree in religion from Syracuse University.
After teaching psychology for a year at Glassboro State College in New Jersey, his career has included stints as professor of religion at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, sixteen years in private psychotherapy practice and twenty years as a writer, lecturer and seminar leader. While in Dallas, Moore taught and studied with The Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture, where colleagues included James Hillman, Patricia Berry, Robert Sardello, Gail Thomas, Ivan Illich, and Rafael Lopez-Pedraza. In 1985, Moore left Texas to work in New England and taught part-time at Lesley College in Cambridge, Massechusetts. In 1987, he helped to create the Institute for the Study of Imagination in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, "to encourage study into the imaginal dimensions of individual and cultural life."
Moore published his best-selling book, Care of the Soul in 1992. Other books include The Planets Within, Dark Eros, Soul Mates, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, The Soul's Religion and most recently, Dark Nights of the Soul which was awarded Best Psychology Book last year at the Books for a Better Life ceremony in New York City. Moore has participated in television and video programming, CD recordings, and contributes to different publishing projects.
Some of the people who have influenced Moore include Lao Tzu, Heraclitus, Ovid, Marsilio Ficino, Rumi, Paracelsus, Nicolas of Cusa, Johann Sebastian Bach, the Marquis de Sade, William Blake, Oscar Wilde, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Igor Stravinsky, Samuel Beckett, Carl Jung, James Hillman, Anne Sexton, Norman O. Brown, Wallace Stevens, and Shunryu Suzuki.
Moore and his wife Joan Hanley, an artist, yoga teacher and part-time college instructor, raised two children, Abraham and Siobhán. Moore and Hanley created Green Table Productions to oversee their projects, a name echoing the esoteric alchemical teachings of "The Emerald Tablet." For pleasure, Moore writes fiction, reads detective mysteries, plays golf, watches odd or old movies, and composes at the piano. The family lives in New Hampshire.
This is a moderated forum guided by thoughfulness and conviviality. Welcome.
