Part of a Second Renaissance Movement
Second Renaissance Conference
Transformation in a Time of Metacrisis
After Harvard in May 2025, We Continue the Journey
We are confronting a metacrisis — a series of deepening, interconnected challenges such as social division, ecological collapse, increasing inequality, and a widespread crisis of meaning. At the heart of these issues are the foundational beliefs and values of our civilization.
Addressing them requires both personal transformation and a renewal of society as a whole — a civilizational "renaissance". Learn more about the metacrisis in this white paper.
Increasing number of people from academia, activism, politics, the arts, technology, and spirituality recognize that lasting solutions call for both systemic shifts and the cultivation of heartfulness and wisdom — a "second renaissance" dedicated to transformative change at every level (learn more about the second renaissance vision).
Our questions include:
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How does 'being', wisdom and compassion help build the resilience and resistance necessary in this time?
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What are the root causes of societal and ecological breakdown?
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What does compassion and wisdom look like when facing complex collective challenges?
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What does science have to offer, and what are its limitations when dealing with the contemporary metacrisis?
This online event brings together thought leaders and agents of change from diverse backgrounds to inspire dialogue and collaboration, paving the way for a wiser, healthier, and more compassionate world.
From Diagnosis to Renewal
We begin with lucid seeing — naming the crisis beneath the crises. Together we descend to the roots (systems, meanings, ways of being), then re-emerge with clarified vision to reweave culture and institutions.
Descent: Facing the Metacrisis
Honest diagnosis across ecological, cultural, psychological dimensions; courage without despair
Ascent: The Second Renaissance
Renewal of wisdom, creativity, and moral imagination in practice — systems that sustain life.
Honest diagnosis across ecological, cultural, psychological dimensions; courage without despair
Keynotes
Rebecca Henderson
Professor, Harvard Business School
Rebecca Henderson is a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a fellow of both the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She also has more than twenty-five years of major public board experience. Rebecca’s research explores the degree to which the private sector can play a major role in building a more sustainable economy. She is an author of a number of publications, including Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire. Rebecca is currently researching how inner capacities lead to climate action in education, in business and politics.
Friday 5th December 11:30am- 12:50pm EST/ 4:30-5:50pm GMT/ 5:30-6:50pm CET
Thomas Hübl
Founder of the Academy of Inner Science
Thomas Hübl, PhD, is a renowned teacher, author, and international facilitator known for integrating wisdom traditions with science to address personal and collective trauma. He has taught over 100,000 people worldwide and authored Attuned and Healing Collective Trauma. Hübl developed the Collective Trauma Integration Process and has led programs fostering healing and dialogue around historical wounds, notably those following the Holocaust. He is a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Wyss Institute and co-founded The Pocket Project, an NGO dedicated to global trauma integration. Hübl holds a PhD focused on collective trauma healing.
Sathurday 6th December 11:30am- 12:50pm EST/ 4:30-5:50pm GMT/ 5:30-6:50pm CET
John Vervaeke
Professor, University of Toronto
John Vervaeke, Ph.D., is an award-winning professor at the University of Toronto, specializing in psychology, cognitive science, and Buddhist psychology. He is director of the Cognitive Science program and leads the Consciousness and Wisdom Studies Laboratory. Vervaeke’s teaching and research emphasize insight, consciousness, intelligence, rationality, mindfulness, and the 4E model of cognition. He is widely recognized for his acclaimed YouTube series “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis,” "After Socrates," and authorship of “Zombies in Western Culture.”
Sunday 7th December 11:15am- 12:20pm EST/ 4:15-5:20pm GMT/ 5:15-6:20pm CET
Ritual Artist & Co-Founder, Life Itself
Writer & Artist, The Art of Emergence
Transversal designer, Personal Website
Process Consultant, Personal Website
Art of the Second Renaissance Collective
The Prophecy of the Many-faced Goddess, An Oracular Ritual of Death and Rebirth
A Culture of Aliveness longs to be born. Birth calls us to remember our ancestral and animal bodies—the body that sings and moves through aliveness. We are invited to return to the magical, mythical dance where the “village” gathers to hold the passage through death into rebirth.
The Art of the Second Renaissance is an alchemical field and oracular portal held by four women—artists, philosophers, witches, and truth-tellers—who embody the Many-faced Goddess through art, ritual, poetry, silence, and movement. Each carries a prophecy of the world-to-birth through her living body as temple and artwork.
To enter this ritual field is to cross a threshold of sensitivity and heart clarity. What unfolds depends on your availability—how deeply you can feel the world’s cry, how far your heart can reach—as we move from the tragic through metamorphosis toward the Cosmic Potential seeking birth through us all.
Friday 5th December 2:30pm- 3:45pm EST/ 7:30-8:45pm GMT/ 8:30-9:45pm CET
John Vervaeke
Professor, University of Toronto
John Vervaeke, Ph.D., is an award-winning professor at the University of Toronto, specializing in psychology, cognitive science, and Buddhist psychology. He is director of the Cognitive Science program and leads the Consciousness and Wisdom Studies Laboratory. Vervaeke’s teaching and research emphasize insight, consciousness, intelligence, rationality, mindfulness, and the 4E model of cognition. He is widely recognized for his acclaimed YouTube series “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis,” "After Socrates," and authorship of “Zombies in Western Culture.”
Sunday 7th December 11:15am- 12:20pm EST/ 4:15-5:20pm GMT/ 5:15-6:20pm CET
Themes
Four lenses that hold the descent–ascent arc — rigorous analysis, moral imagination, embodied practice, and institutional design.
Crisis of Meaning & Meta-diagnosis
Seeing the roots beneath symptoms — culture, psyche, technology, economy.
Paths of Renewal
Practices that cultivate wisdom, compassion, and coherence.
Reweaving Knowledge & Art
Uniting science, humanities, and the arts for a fuller seeing
Institutions that Sustain Life
Governance, economy, and design that embody renewed values.
Who it’s for
A bridge across worlds — rigorous systems thinkers, tradition-oriented leaders, activists and policymakers, artists and embodied practitioners.
Changemakers
Artists & Embodied
Practitioners
From policymakers and activists to impact funders and civic designers. Those focused on transforming societal systems, economics, and governance toward a wiser, weller future.
From meditators and therapists to coaches and artists. Those cultivating the inner and cultural foundations of transformation through healing, creativity, and presence.
Sensemakers
From academics and systems theorists to complexity scholars and futurists. Those clarifying the interconnected crises of our time and building frameworks for understanding and action.
Stewards & Leaders
Including elders, youth, community weavers, and indigenous knowledge holders. Those sustaining cultural coherence and guiding transformation through service, relationship, and lineage.
Panels and Offerings
Metacrisis & Renaissance
From crises in the foundations to paths of renewal
This panel explores what lies at the root of our contemporary unraveling and how moments “between worlds” can open the possibility for renewal. We will look both at diagnosis of today’s intersecting crises, looking for the deeper structures beneath, and at potential pathways of regeneration. How have societies done this in the past, what concrete practices or forms of action are essential. Overall we will invite a shared inquiry into how the very forces driving the metacrisis may also point toward the seeds of a wiser, more life-affirming future.
6th December
Author, developmental psychologist & co-founder of Evolve World, Emergent Dialogues
Entrepreneur & Founder Ekskäret Foundation
Co-director Climate Majority Project,
Co-founder Life Itself
Author & Podcaster Metamodern Spirituality Labs, Integral Stage
Academic Director, The Divinity School, Founder, Alderlore Insight Center
Researcher, Builder &
Co-founder of Life Itself
The embodied researcher: Science in the age of interbeing
Reclaiming Wonder
This panel explores the emergence of the embodied researcher—one who integrates analytical precision with lived experience. At a time when knowledge must address both systemic and inner complexity, these researchers engage mind, body, and community to generate insight that is both rigorous and relational. Bringing together four perspectives—developmental psychology and education, complex systems and cooperative governance, Indigenous ecology and kinship rhythms, and aesthetic knowing through social arts—the discussion invites us to imagine research as a transformative practice of awareness and responsibility, where understanding and transformation unfold together.
6th December
Founder/Translational Consultant | Kinray Hub - Indigenous R&D Think-Do Tank
Industry Professor
McMaster University.
aesthetic knowing | processfacilitator, processdesign and artwork
Professor
University of California Davis
Associate Researcher, Learning Planet Institute
AI and Wisdom
Pathways and challenges in augmenting collective decision-making
In the context of deepening, interconnected global challenges, increasingly advanced AI offers both risk and opportunity. In this session we’ll ask how AI could create major societal risks or accentuate current crises - and also how it could help us respond to these risks and build wiser societies. We’ll talk to thought leaders whose work covers the technical challenges - and in principle difficulties - in making AI not only intelligent but wise, and participants will also learn about cutting edge projects and practices to enhance collective wisdom through human-AI collaboration.
6th December
Creator of the Cynefin framework
Director of Research, Future HOW
Director, Wisdom and Culture Lab
Life Itself Research
Co-Lead
Emerging Future
Educating the Next Generation of World Builders
Otto Scharmer writes, “Small islands of coherence are microcosms of the future that is trying to emerge.” As the systems around us collapse, these islands of coherence hold the promise that a higher order can be created. In this session, we’ll talk with educators who are working with young adults to create microcosms of the future. Drawing attention to worldview literacy, we’ll explore the tools these educators use–self-governance, communal living, participatory action research–to support students in the practice of world building. Participants should leave inspired by the work being done by these innovative educators, and with tools to practice world building in their own communities.
5th December
Director, Springboard Foundation for Whole Person Learning
Kathy Chau Rohn
Assistant Professor, University of New Hampshire
Jan C. Goeschel
President, Camphill Academy
Laura Marcus
Co-Executive Director, Tidelines Institute
Health-seeing Interdepend(a)nce
Planetary Health as a Pathway for Transformation
Health is more than the absence of disease. The western biomedical healthcare response to disease management generally reflects the fragmented worldview at the core of the metacrisis. In this panel, we'll explore a holistic mindset shift to the interdependence of individual, community and planetary health through integrative health frameworks. Attendees will learn about integrative health values, practices and lifestyle choices that have reciprocal and transformative benefits for both human wellbeing and planetary health, including mindful eco-wellness, nature connection and ‘Earth prescriptions,’ and green healthcare options.
5th December
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Aterah Nusrat
Program Director, Osher Center for Integrative Health (Harvard)
David Victorson
Director of the Flourishing in Society & Health Lab, Northwestern University
Bruce Barrett
Family Physician, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Christine Vatovec
Environmental Health Social Scientist, University of Vermont
The Next Political Generation
From disillusion to collective agency
Today’s youth are the most disillusioned generation in living memory. Everything feels too relative or absolute to imagine real change. Young bodies and souls in a self-terminating system have lost touch with what makes life worth living, with where and whom we belong to. But how we live together as humanity in this world is what real politics is about. Beyond electoral politics, beyond parties that are two sides of the same coin... It is time for those of us who haven’t given up to embrace political economy and the culture, cultivation of our togetherness as a key to collective agency. For if we dont, we give up on living, together.
6th December
Jadzia Tedeschi
Co-Founder, The Raft
JJ Akinlade
Multi-medium creative
Samantha Weil
Harvard Graduate - Joint History of Science and History & Literature
Cameron Najafi
Collaborator with Civilization Research Institute
Michael Matania
Founder of Mycellium
Reclaiming Community
Cultivating nourishing and meaningful connections in our atomized world
The word "community" has been watered down by corporate capitalism seeking to co-opt human connection for marketing purposes. But the social and developmental benefits of belonging, togetherness, and collaboration are vast, and we hunger for real and authentic connection where we can be mutually seen, known, and encouraged. Come meet community-builders creating self-aware spaces for deeply meaningful relationships, hear lessons from their experiences and walk away with some sparks for your own connection- and community-building efforts.
6th December
Founder, Intentional Society
Core Steward of COhere Boulder & Earthwards
Metamodern Spirituality Labs
Core Steward of COhere Boulder
Psychotherapist and founder of Wisdom Exchange
Jean Robertson
Founder and Steward | Liminal Space Agency
Founder and steward of Denizen
David Yu
Steward | Liminal Space Agency
Schedule
Note: Schedule is still under revision. Below is indicative and subject to change.
Friday Dec 5th 2025 - Building Resilience
@ 11am-4pm EST / 5pm-10pm CET /4pm-9pm GMT
Introduction & Community Groups
Keynote #1: Rebecca Henderson -Harvard Business School- (This section involves a keynote presentation, a short interaction to explore insights and questions, and a live Q&A period with the speaker.)
Panels: Attend either of the panels of Education or Health
Ritual Workshop: Art of the Second Renaissance Collective
Community Group & Closing (This is a time of integration, discussion and meditation to harvest the insights from the day.)
Sat Dec 6th 2025 - Cultivating Wisdom
@ 11am-4pm EST / 5pm-10pm CET /4pm-9pm GMT
Introduction & Community Groups
Keynote #2: Thomas Hübl (Pocket Project Founder) School- (This section involves a keynote presentation, a short interaction to explore insights and questions, and a live Q&A period with the speaker.)
Panels: Attend either of the panels of Political Generation, Community, AI or Research
Panel: Metacrisis & Renaissance
Community Group & Closing (This is a time of integration, discussion and meditation to harvest the insights from the day.)
Sun Dec 7th 2025 - Unconference
@ 11am-4pm EST / 5pm-10pm CET /4pm-9pm GMT
Introduction & Community Groups
Keynote #3: John Vervaeke (This section involves a keynote presentation, a short interaction to explore insights and questions, and a live Q&A period with the speaker.)
Unconference Workshop Streams #1 - 4: Participant-Led Sessions (Topics TBD)
Unconference Closing Ritual ( A collective opportunity to integrate the insights and blessings of the conference.)
Our Partners
Lead Organizer
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Resiliency Circle Facilitation
Partners & Supporters
