The Forum with Maggi Dawn

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco

Author, professor, and priest Maggi Dawn has written two guides to the church year: Beginnings and Endings (and what happens in between): Daily Bible readings from Advent to Epiphany and Giving It Up: Daily Bible Readings from Ash Wednesday to Easter Day.

Our everyday lives are full of small-scale beginnings and endings – births, deaths, marriages, careers, house moves and so on. How do the grand-scale beginnings and endings of Advent help to guide us as we seek to follow Jesus in the 21st century?

The idea of 'giving something up for Lent' is widely known, but how many know that the ancient discipline of the Lenten fast had several purposes? – a reminder of our daily dependence on God for all our needs, to draw us closer to God in prayer, to reconnect with the idea of community, and to help us follow Christ's journey through the wilderness and on to Jerusalem.

Join Malcolm Clemens Young, Dean of Grace Cathedral, for a conversation with Dawn about how Lent can be a time for exploring a different kind of 'giving up' – one that can transform our lives – and how ancient wisdom informs the human experience that happens inbetween beginnings and endings, grand and small scale.

Recorded at Grace Cathedral on February 8, 2026.

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About the Guest

The Rev. Dr. Maggi Dawn is an author, songwriter, professor, and priest in the Episcopal Church, currently serving as Diocesan Theologian in the Episcopal Diocese of Rhode Island. Maggi travels widely throughout the USA, leading clergy and parish retreats, and giving sermons and lectures. After a first career as a writer and performer in the music business, Maggi studied theology at the University of Cambridge (UK), and since then has taught and researched at the Universities of Cambridge and Durham in the UK, and at Yale University, where she was Associate Dean and Professor at the Divinity School.

About the Moderator

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young is the dean of Grace Cathedral. He is the author of The Spiritual Journal of Henry David Thoreau and The Invisible Hand in Wilderness: Economics, Ecology, and God, and is a regular contributor on religion to the Huffington Post and San Francisco Examiner.

About The Forum

The Forum is a series of stimulating conversations about faith and ethics in relation to the important issues of our day. We invite inspiring and illustrious people to sit down for a real conversation with the Forum's host and with you. Our guests range from artists, inventors and philosophers to pop culturists and elected officials, but the point of The Forum is singular: civil, sophisticated discourse that engages minds and hearts to think in new ways about the world. Learn more about The Forum here:

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