WHAT IS ENGAGED BUDDHISM?

Ethan Nichtern

Ethan is a Senior Buddhist teacher, author, and lecturer. For the past 19 years, Ethan has taught meditation and Buddhist psychology classes and workshops around New York City, North America and Europe, along with working with students privately.

He was formerly on the part-time faculty at Eugene Lang College at New School University and has lectured at Brown, Wesleyan, Yale, NYU, FIT, Antioch and other universities, and as well at many other meditation/yoga centers and conferences around the country and world.

Ethan is the author of the acclaimed books The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path and The Dharma of The Princess Bride: What The Coolest Fairy Tale of Our Time Can Teach Us About Buddhism and Relationships. He is also the author of One City: A Declaration of Interdependence, and the Novella/poetry collection, Your Emoticons Won’t Save You, and his most recent book Confidence: Holding Your Seat Through Life’s Eight Worldly Winds. 

He founded and served as executive director (2007-11) of the Interdependence Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to secular Buddhist practice and transformational activism and arts.

Ethan primarily studied in Shambhala and Tibetan traditions, as well as Theravadan and Soto Zen Buddhism. Ethan is an avid yoga practitioner. He served as Shastri, or Senior Teacher-In-Residence, for the Shambhala Meditation Center of New York from 2010-18.

In 2018, Ethan launched his podcast, The Road Home, available on iTunes, Spotify and wherever you listen to podcasts.

Ethan has been featured on CNN, NPR, ABC/Yahoo News, The New York Times, Vogue.com, Business Insider, Nautilus, and Vice to discuss Buddhism and meditation in the 21st Century. His articles have been featured on The Huffington Post, Beliefnet, Shambhala Sun, Tricycle Magazine, BuddhaDharma Magazine, and Reality Sandwich as well as other online publications.

Shannon Watts

Shannon Watts, widely known as the “summoner of women’s audacity,” is the founder of Moms Demand Action, the nation’s largest grassroots group fighting against gun violence. She was named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People, a Forbes 50 over 50 Changemaker, and a Glamour Woman of the Year. 

The day after the Sandy Hook School mass shooting tragedy in 2012, she started a Facebook group to unite women against the gun lobby as Mothers Against Drunk Driving united mothers against the alcohol lobby in the 1980s. Under her leadership, Moms Demand Action became the nation’s largest grassroots group fighting against gun violence. The organization has a chapter in every state and over 10 million supporters, making it twice as large as the National Rifle Association. Over the past decade, Moms Demand Action volunteers passed over 500 gun safety laws; stopped the gun industry’s agenda in statehouses 90 percent of the time; elected thousands of gun sense candidates to office, including its own volunteers; and passed the first federal gun legislation in a generation.

Prior to founding Moms Demand Action, Watts – a mother of five – was a communications executive at public relations firms and Fortune 100 companies. She is an active board member of Emerge America, one of the nation’s leading organizations for recruiting and training women to run for office. Her book, Fight Like a Mother: How a Grassroots Movement Took on the Gun Lobby and Why Women Will Change the World, was released in May of 2019. She has a significant social media platform with a regular reach of over 10 million highly engaged supporters.