When Susan Maushart first told her three teenagers she was pulling the plug on their phones, laptops, TVs and games for six months, they were strangely silent. Then they uncorked their earbuds and actually heard her.

Since the posthumous publication of her poems in the 1890’s, Emily Dickinson has been portrayed as a virginal recluse, a mental case, and a victim of a broken heart. Susan Snively’s talk challenges these myths by discussing the poet’s letters to the powerful Judge Otis Phillips Lord, a widower who had been her late father’s best friend. Unpublished until 1954, the letters reveal a playful, tender, passionate Emily, happy in a mutual love that graced her middle age.

Judy Wicks will discuss her evolution as an entrepreneur and how she would not only change her neighborhood, but would also change her world – helping communities far and wide create local living economies that value people, nature and place more than money. Focusing on what it takes to marry social change and commerce, and doing business differently, Judy shows how entrepreneurs, as well as consumers, can follow both mind and heart, cultivate lasting relationships with each other and the planet, and build a new compassionate economy that will bring us greater security, as well as happ

Bluegrass music is close to America’s musical heart. Its recurring themes of love, loss, and longing for home resonate deeply with the American psyche. The sounds of bluegrass – beginning with the fiddle and banjo - draw on the contributions of America’s diverse immigrant communities, from Europe to Africa.

Created just 70 years ago by professional musicians, bluegrass first raged across the country in the 1940s. It was a driving, supercharged view of American folk roots, named for the style’s creator and his band: Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys.

Life is not a commodity, but a community.  Animals are not our possessions, but our elder siblings, guides and teachers in the larger family of which Homo sapiens is merely a junior member.  Reverend Gary Kowalski shares the journey that led him to appreciate nature as the primordial sacrament and to rediscover the ancient knowledge evident to indigenous people (reconfirmed by the findings of modern biology) that other species are not so different from ourselves, but share in the emotional depths and psychic capacities that make us most fully human.

Gar Alperovitz calls for an evolution, not a revolution, into a new system that would democratize the ownership of wealth, strengthen communities in diverse ways, and be governed by policies and institutions sophisticated enough to manage a large-scale, powerful economy.

What is the next system? It is not corporate capitalism, not state socialism, but something else— something entirely American, something building on our pragmatic American “can do” spirit that is also sophisticated about what it will ultimately take to alter our corporate dominated system over time.

In 1692 Salem, Massachusetts John Westgate overheard Alice Parker quarreling with and scolding her husband in a local tavern. Westgate thought Parker exhibited shameful behavior for a good Puritan woman, and he presented this damning evidence against Alice at her witchcraft trial. He claimed that immediately afterwards a black hog ran toward him, threatening to devour him. He realized that it wasn’t a real hog, and that it might have been the devil, most likely brought directly to him by Alice Parker, thus proving that she was a witch.

From the beginning of human history until today, there have always been botanical, psychosocial, and meditative practices involved in religious and spiritual experience, which Wildman posits as technologies. Projecting from existing techniques, we can expect neuropsychopharmacology, trans-cranial brain stimulation, brain scanning, and biofeedback to play ever greater roles in the religious lives of human beings. Whether we welcome it or fear it, the era in which we can induce, prevent, and effectively control many kinds of religious behaviors, beliefs, and experiences is fast approaching.

Taylor Mali is a poet from the New York poetry slam scene who is also a vocal advocate for teachers and of the nobility of teaching. Mr Mali has been walking the "road less traveled" since 2000, when he said goodbye to his last sixth-grade class at a school in New York City. Although he often says that’s the day he put his teaching career on hold, the truth is that you can never quite take the classroom out of the teacher even if you take the teacher out of the classroom.

It is simply unimaginable that American politics as we know it today will deliver major environmental and social gains for people and planet. Political reform and building a new progressive movement in America must be our number-one priority. Above all, we must build a government truly of, by, and for the people.