Meet Jim Kenney

Jim Kenney has been recognized for decades as a leader in the global movement for intercultural understanding. Working to promote harmony and cooperative action among the world’s religious communities, he had a major role in the two largest interreligious gatherings ever held, the 1993 and 1999 Parliaments of the World’s Religions (Chicago and Cape Town). He was global director of the Parliament from 1995 to 2002; and, in 2002, he founded the Interreligious Engagement Project, helping global interreligious communities address critical planetary issues.

Kenney is the cofounder and executive director of Common Ground, an adult educational center offering a wide range of programs on the great cultural, religious, philosophical, and spiritual traditions and their implications for every di mension of human experience. He is also cofounder and coeditor of Interreligious Insight: A Journal of Dialogue and Engagement and, from 1988 to 2009, was consulting editor and a regular contributor to Conscious Choice, an alternative-living magazine based in Chicago.

For over thirty years, Jim has lectured widely on political, social, religious, and cultural issues. Over the past decade, his research and writing have focused on cultural evolution: how human societies adapt—sometimes dramatically—to a changing world. Thriving in the Crosscurrent is the pinnacle of that work.

“Here’s hoping we’re in for a sea change of the kind Jim Kenney describes. It will take real shifts if we’re to deal with the problems bearing down on us, climate change most of all. And those shifts will, as he says, have their roots in our understanding of who we are.”
—Bill McKibben, educator, environmentalist, and author of
Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future