Making Waves and Riding the Currents: Activism and the Practice of Wisdom
Join us for a talk with Charles Halpern about his new book, Making Waves and Riding the Currents: Activism and the Practice of Wisdom. The book tells the inspiring story of his work for a more just, compassionate, and sustainable world, while cultivating the wisdom to support and deepen this work.
Charles Halpern – a public interest entrepreneur, innovator in legal education, and pioneer of the public interest law movement – is currently a Scholar in Residence at Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California at Berkeley. He was the Founding Dean of the City University of New York Law School at Queens College. Previously, he was a Professor at Stanford and Georgetown Law Schools, and a Senior Fellow at Yale Law School. He was the co-founder of the Center for Law and Social Policy (1969), the Mental Health Law Project (now the Bazelon Center for Law and Mental Health) (1971), and the Council for Public Interest Law (now the Alliance for Justice) (1976). After graduating with honors from Yale Law School and Harvard College, he practiced law at Arnold and Porter in Washington, D.C.
From 1989-2000, he served as the founding President of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, a $400 million grant-making foundation in New York City. He developed many innovative philanthropic initiatives, including Healing and the Mind with Bill Moyers and interfaith dialogue with the Dalai Lama and other religious leaders.
Halpern, who recently co-led a mindfulness meditation retreat for over 100 California state court judges, has practiced meditation for the past 20 years with a variety of Buddhist teachers and leads meditation workshops for lawyers, judges and law students. For the past four years, he has led the Boalt Hall Meditation Group, the oldest Law School meditation group. He serves as the chair of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society.
Refreshments provided.
