Sunday, September 10, 2006

An open forum for readers to share comments

"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 Barque: Thomas Moore Forum for the various Barque: Thomas Moore areas. If you have difficulty sending a comment to be moderated, please 1)Click an appropriate radio button. Anonymous comments are accepted. 2)Write your comment. 3)Complete the word verification. 4)Hit return. A message should then say that your comment will appear when approved by a moderator. If problems persist, please send an email message.

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.

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sometimes loneliness is caused by not being able to identify and access one's tribe. I think of the feeling of tribal belonging as different than a sense of community, which in my experience is a phrase that's become a bit worn. There's something fierce about a tribe, that is watered down and overly polite in a community. I certainly appreciate civility! But I also seek that fierce feeling of belonging to one's own. When I think of my own type of people, they are fiercely forgiving in a manner similar to what Thomas Moore conveys through his works.

Thanks for taking on this blog and for enabling comments, Deborah. You've done such great work with Barque!

11:12 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Many thanks, Laura for your inaugural comment. Welcome! Perhaps it's a supportive indicator that we renamed the blog to drop the word community. What characteristics do your type of people or tribe share?

11:38 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

In my mind I think more of the metaphors by which people live, rather than their characteristics. My tribe lives by a storied metaphor of life. I don't mean fictionalized, but a life that is centered around narratives. The richest narratives are full of many characters/characteristics.

Moore frequently writes about his previous profession as a psychotherapist and the focus of enriching personal narratives in that work. His work, for me, often serves as a procedure manual of sorts for a life lived as story.

10:48 AM  
Blogger Editor said...

We've established a new area at ning.com for discussing Thomas Moore's ideas: thomasmoore.ning.com. If you're interested, please register with ning.com and join the Barque: Thomas Moore on that site.

9:59 PM  

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