EILEEN FLANAGAN brings a forty-year commitment to justice to her speaking, writing, and climate leadership. From a working-class Irish American family, she has confronted corporate CEOs, prayed in their lobbies, and been arrested alongside Indigenous water protectors, Black preachers, and fellow Quakers. Nationally known for helping people to make their activism more effective and spiritually-grounded, she shepherded a scrappy group of Quakers to pressure a $4 billion-a-year bank to stop financing mountaintop removal coal mining. She earned a BA from Duke and an MA from Yale as a first-generation college student, focusing on resistance to colonialism, which she taught on the college level. The Dalai Lama endorsed her award-winning book The Wisdom to Know the Difference, and some of the best-known climate activists in the world endorsed her memoir Renewable. She lives with her husband on Lenape land in Philadelphia.
“With a capacious heart, an unerring moral compass, and consummate evidence-based research, Eileen Flanagan shows that, together, we have the power to rescue the planet from a path of greed and self-destruction, and, in the process, come to know ourselves and each other. Flanagan has given us both a history of and a blueprint for our mutual liberation.” —Sarah Willie-LeBreton, President of Smith College “Eileen Flanagan puts into words what history reveals as a powerful truth. When people of faith and spirit get up and get organized, and go into the streets and halls of power calling for change, transformation becomes possible. There's no message more vital right now.” —Rev. Fletcher Harper, Executive Director of GreenFaith ""If you like heartening books by positive, engaged people who act out of deep conviction, Eileen Flanagan’s book is for you. You’ll be encouraged by comrades whose work she describes—diverse movers and shakers elsewhere in the U.S. and as far away as India."" —George Lakey, author of How We Win: A Guide to Nonviolent Direct Action Campaigning ""In Common Ground, Eileen Flanagan guides us toward the longview, helping to illuminate our deep interconnectedness and the very real capacity that we have to harness people-power. She does so by reminding us that separation is an illusion and that we have the collective ability to actively co-create the future we most want to inhabit."" —Sherri Mitchell (Weh'na Ha'mu Kwasset), Executive Director of the Land Peace Foundation ""Eileen Flanagan has both the breadth of campaigning experience and the depth of heart required to be a reliable colleague, guide, and teacher—this is the right book for a moment when our government is trying to divide us, and when we must respond with real and meaningful unity."" —Bill McKibben, author of Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization