Cornelia Channing. Photo courtesy of The New York Times.
Presented by The Peter Matthiessen Center & Guild Hall
We live in a culture that rarely questions growth. Expansion—of markets, wealth, productivity, even the self—is often treated not only as an economic goal, but as a moral good. But what happens when growth begins to function as a belief system? What, in this framework, do we worship—and what do we lose?
Moderated by writer and editor Nina Channing, this conversation brings together three acclaimed thinkers whose work examines the values shaping contemporary life. Journalist and author Audrea Lim, whose writing explores climate change, labor, migration, and movements for social and environmental justice, considers how communities imagine more equitable and sustainable futures. Novelist and cultural critic Tara Isabella Burton, author of Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, investigates the new forms of belief, identity, ritual, and belonging that emerge in an increasingly secular and consumer-driven culture. Psychoanalyst and author Jamieson Webster brings a psychoanalytic lens to questions of desire, freedom, anxiety, and the psychological underpinnings of modern life.
Drawing on the work of writer, social justice advocate, and Zen priest Peter Matthiessen, the discussion explores alternatives to a culture organized around accumulation and endless expansion, asking how literature, environmental thought, and psychoanalysis might help us imagine different ways of living.
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Nina Channing
Nina Channing is a writer and editor from Bridgehampton, New York. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Paris Review, The East Hampton Star, and Slate.
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Audrea Lim
Audrea Lim is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and journalist whose work focuses on land, energy, and the environment. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, the Guardian, the New Republic, and The Nation. Lim is the editor of “The World We Need” and the author of “Free The Land”. She is a visiting scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University and was a 2022 MacDowell fellow.
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Tara Isabella Burton
Tara Isabella Burton is the author of the novels Social Creature, The World Cannot Give, and Here in Avalon, as well as the nonfiction books Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless Worldand Self-Made: Curating Our Image from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. She is currently working on a history of magic and modernity, to be published by Forum in 2027. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic, Granta, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and more. She blogs about theology, writing, technology, art, language, and enchantment at The Lost Word. Tara received her doctorate in theology from Oxford in 2017. She is a Lecturer and Visiting Research Fellow at the Catholic University of America, where she is Co-Director of the "Can Beauty Save the World?" project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation.
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Jamieson Webster
Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City and part-time faculty at The New School for Social Research. She is the author, most recently, of On Breathing (Peninusula Press, UK; Catapult, US), as well as, Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis (Columbia, 2018) and, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (Vintage Random House, 2013). She has written regularly for Artforum, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, as well as, many psychoanalytic publications.
Sponsors
Performing Arts programs are supported by 2026 season sponsors Galia Meiri-Stawski and Axel Stawski, with additional lead support from Henry and Peggy Schleiff, The Melville Straus Family Endowment, Monica and Peter Tessler, and Vital Projects Fund.
Guild Hall’s Performing Arts programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
Additional support provided by Friends of the Theater: Natascia Ayers and Jim Ciquera, Bonnie and Joel Bergstein, Gene Bernstein and Kathy Walsh, Amy Cooney and Marty Feinman, John and Joan D’Addario, Suzanne and John Golden, Hilarie and Mitchell Morgan, Steve and Susan Pesner and Peace, in memory of Michéle Pesner, whose entire life was devoted to all aspects of culture, The Schaffner Family Foundation, Lisa Schultz and Ezriel Kornel, Stacey and Oliver Stanton, and Susi and Peter Wunsch.