The Fire Inside: Seeking Justice and Spiritual Grounding and Connection 

Sunday June 21, 2026
11:15 a.m. - 12:15 pm
Heaton Hall

Guest Speaker | Rima Vesely-Flad, author of The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde

To commemorate Juneteenth weekend this year, we are offering a special session of the Faith and Community Forum.

We will host social activist, pastor at Warren Wilson College and author Rima Vesely-Flad, who in 2026 published her third book: The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. She will share with us some of the painful experiences in her childhood, and how these shaped her younger years. She learned to self-silence to avoid rocking the family boat, and the ire of white people who did not like the fact that her black father had a baby with her white mother.

When Rima was 28, she found herself a cerebral, well-educated, and yet struggling black woman. Fiercely independent, she looked around at the many injustices and adversities she had lived through, both personally and collectively in American life. She had left a Christian faith which seemed hostile to her personally and to most of those she knew growing up. She encountered many self-professed Christians who did things that she could not reconcile with the teachings of Christ. Over time she came to the realization that she was intellectually accomplished, well-regarded as a social activist, and also searching for some deeper connection. She needed a spiritual way to help heal her wounds—for at this point, she was “full of hatred.”

She turned to Buddhism, and worked with mentors in this ancient tradition, and found a surprising number of black people practicing and learning its tenets. Today she works at the intersection of social activism, inner contemplation, Buddhist dharma, and teaching these precepts to others. In Christian terms, it might be said that she has experienced a metanoia since she was 28—a complete transformation of character and reorientation towards life.

She has extensively studied the lives of early civil rights icons James Baldwin and Audre Lourde and found deep connections to them and the personal sufferings they each went through and the parallels to her own sufferings. She learned from them how to be faithful calling out injustice and yet stay connected to the deep spiritual grounding of her inner experience and the rightness of her outer practice. Her connection with Baldwin and Lourde helped form her understanding of the role suffering plays in our theological and psychological growth as we seek to live more fully and with greater depth and meaning. Please join us as we welcome this scholar and teacher who has journeyed with the prophetic voices of James Baldwin and Audre Lourde and their luminous inner conversation with the wisdom of Buddhist and contemplative Christian teachings. When we honestly face our suffering, our lives too may be powerfully transformed by a deeper sense of well-being, authentic living, and self-empowerment. It is a way of living that calls us inward before sending us forth.