Born in 1939 in Chicago, Parker Palmer’s parents instilled in him a life-long commitment to social justice.

As a community organizer and educator, he carried this commitment with him in his efforts to reform and humanize systems that tend to perpetuate relational distance and communal harm. Writing to teachers in The Courage to Teach, he said:

“If we want to grow as teachers -- we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives -- risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract.”

In 1997, this work of infusing the personal into typically impersonal institutions and systems led him to co-found the Center for Courage & Renewal. The Center is a nonprofit focusing, to this day, on developing people’s personal and communal capacity to counter the societal forces of exhaustion, loneliness, violence, and injustice. While it started as simply a program of the Fetzer Institute, it now has twenty years of experience on its own supporting people and teams in the fields of education, healthcare, ministry, business, and activism.

Much of Parker Palmer’s legacy moves through the work of this community and space.

Influences + Teachers

• Quaker faith

• Thomas Merton

• Howard Thurman

• Mahatma Gandhi

Approach to Spirituality and Social Action

Embracing his Quaker faith and its core values of silence, simplicity, integrity, community, and reflection, Palmer works to help folks integrate their inner and outer lives – this is what he calls living an “undivided life” and others might refer to contemplation and action.

This teaching is rooted, for Palmer, in the Quaker belief that everyone has an “inner light,” or divine presence, at the core of who they are. In his work within education, spirituality and religion, and activism, this has served as a guiding principle in his commitment to helping people live with a sense of integrity and authenticity.

He writes,

“For me, the heart of the spiritual quest is to know 'the rapture of being alive,' and...to allow that knowledge to transform us into celebrants, advocates, defenders of life wherever we find it. The experience of aliveness must never degenerate into a narcissistic celebration of self — for if it does, it dies."

For Palmer, it is this “rapture of being alive” that emboldens us into engaging our communities in an embodied, holistic, and sustainable way.