Theodore Richards
Theodore Richards, PhD, is a poet, writer, and religious philosopher. He is a long time student of the Taoist martial art of Bagua and hatha yoga and has traveled, worked or studied in 25 different countries, including the South Pacific, the Far East, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Theodore has received degrees from the University of Chicago, The California Institute of Integral Studies, Wisdom University, and the New Seminary where he was ordained. He has worked with inner city youth on the South Side of Chicago, Harlem, the South Bronx, and Oakland, where he was the director of YELLAWE, an innovative program for teens in Oakland created by Matthew Fox. He is the author of Handprints on the Womb, a collection of poetry; Cosmosophia: Cosmology, Mysticism, and the Birth of a New Myth, recipient of the Independent Publisher Awards Gold Medal in religion; the novel The Crucifixion; and the forthcoming Creatively Maladjusted: The Wisdom Education Movement Manifesto, which radically re-imagines education. Theodore Richards is the founder and executive director of The Chicago Wisdom Project and a dean and lecturer on world religions at The New Seminary. He lives in Chicago with his wife and daughter.
Theodore’s Titles
Featured Works
Creatively Maladjusted Finalist in the USA Book Award!
Creatively Maladjusted by Theodore Richards has been named a finalist in the 2013 USA Book Award in the “Education/Academic” category! Congratulations Theodore! Theodore is also the author of the award-winning title, Cosmosophia and The Crucifixion. Visit our bookstore today to add a copy to your home library » A little about the book: “Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Education is the subject of much public debate. Politicians and bureaucrats, educators and parents, students and concerned citizens all have an interest—and...
The Embedded Revelation in the Poetry of Leonore Wilson
This year we have chosen to look back on all the authors that make up the Hiraeth Press circle. Each month we will focus on one Hiraeth author and revisit their works. In May we are celebrating Leonore Wilson, author of Western Solstice and poet laureate of Napa Valley. This week, author Theodore Richards reflects on the theme of “embedded revelation” in Leonore’s poetry. Stay tuned int he coming weeks as we share more thoughts and reflections on Leonore’s work from our authors. Western Solstice is available for purchase...
Hiraeth Press Win Nautilus Gold!
We are very proud to announce that Cosmosophia: Cosmology, Mysticism and the Birth of a New Myth by Theodore Richards has won a Nautilus Gold Medal. This is the second award for Cosmosophia. The book previously won an IPPY Gold Medal. The Nautilus Award has been won by such authors as Deepak Chopra, Barbara Kingsolver, Mathew Fox, Eckhart Tolle and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Cosmosophia as well as Theodore’s new book, Creatively Maladjusted: The Wisdom Education Movement Manifesto are now available wherever books are sold, including right here...
Consequences of our Current Educational System | An Excerpt from Creatively Maladjusted by Theodore Richards
We can talk about “greening” our schools and tell our youth to recycle all we want, but if we continue to instill in them the notion that the world is a machine, they will unthinkingly relate to it as a resource to be used and manipulated. They will not value it.
Creatively Maladjusted by Theodore Richards | Now Available!
Today we announce the release of our first offering of 2013: Creatively Maladjusted: The Wisdom Education Movement Manifesto by Theodore Richards, author of the award-winning book, Cosmosophia: Cosmology, Mysticism, and the Birth of a New Myth! Creatively Maladjusted is available in paperback wherever books are sold as well as Kindle. Also, in honor of this release, for the first time we are offering Cosmosophia in Kindle edition!
Human Salvation Lies in the Hands of the Creatively Maladjusted | An Excerpt from Creatively Maladjusted by Theodore Richards
Dr. King believed that “unmerited suffering is redemptive” because his worldview was based upon the notion of the “Beloved Community”, an interconnected web of relationships that defines us. Our redemption is found not in some abstract doctrine about the suffering of a man millennia ago, but of the insight that our own suffering allows us to have compassion for another’s.
Itinerant Professional Vandals | An Excerpt from Creatively Maladjusted by Theodore Richards
The work of education, of course, is not to make better schools, but to make a better world. Too often, I believe, educators forget this obvious and simple truth. Discussions about education seldom reflect the kind of world we might imagine is possible; rather, they focus on achievement and success within a given paradigm. Educators seem not to realize that the way we educate our children creates, reinforces, or shatters the paradigm. For example, when we assume that the purpose of education is to help students find a job...
The Evolution of Wisdom | An Excerpt from Creatively Maladjusted by Theodore Richards
We evolved into humans not because all apes evolved into humans, but because of the actions of a few at the margins. This is how novelty emerges. There is a wisdom at the margins that those in power, because they are so immersed in the worldview that supports their power, cannot possess. “There will be some fundamental assumptions,” warned the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, “which adherents of all the variant systems within each epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are...
The Educational System in Crisis | An Excerpt from Creatively Maladjusted by Theodore Richards
There seems to be near-universal agreement that there is a crisis in education today. In the United States, this tends to take the form of our failure to “compete” with the rest of the world. During the last presidential election this was a common theme; and it will be again in the next one. This dualistic vision of education as a battle in the global marketplace generally assumes that there is nothing wrong with the goals of modern education, but that we simply are not doing it well enough.