Richard Whittaker

About the Author

Richard Whittaker is the West Coast Editor of Parabola and is the founding editor of works & conversations. A collection of his interviews, The Conversations, Interviews with Sixteen Contemprary Artists, is available from the University of Nebraska Press.

Author Archive Page

On Hopelessness and Hope: A Conversation with Deep Psychologist Michael Penn

October 27, 2018By Richard Whittaker

A conversation with deep psychologist Michael Penn

To Try To Have Some Healing, A Conversation with Silas Hagerty

November 22, 2016By Richard Whittaker

Silas Hagerty was a young filmmaker in his twenties when I met him at a Servicespace retreat. […]

Stephen Weiss, MD, portrait of Brother David Steindl-Rast, Mt. Saviour Monastery, Elmira, NY

Learning to Die, by Brother David Steindl-Rast

The only point where one can start to talk about anything, including death, is where one finds oneself. And for me this is as a Benedictine monk. In the rule of St. Benedict, the momenta […]

The Art of Cleaning, by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee and Hilary Hart

Housework as spiritual practice, from a Sufi master

Marion Woodman and the Search for the Conscious Feminine, by Patty de Llosa

“The true feminine is the receptacle of love. The true masculine is the spirit that goes into the eternal unknown in search of meaning. The great container, the Self, is paradoxically both male and female […]

Hearing the Cries of the World, by Mark Nepo

This story is so old we don’t know who told it or who it’s about, except that it speaks to all of us. We no longer know if it was a “he” or “she” at the center of the story. […]

To Go Beyond Thought, an Interview with Karen Armstrong

One bright spring day, Parabola met with Karen Armstrong in her suite at the Parker Meridian hotel in Manhattan. The petite, friendly 62-year-old British ex-nun, arguably the most influential commentator on religion in the English-speaking […]