Call for Submissions

Current Calls for Submissions

Dreaming Reparations: Toward Building a Liberatory Future

What does global repair look like? How do we move beyond apology and compensation toward transformation, healing, and justice?

While discussions of reparations often focus on historical harms, material redress, and accountability, this special issue of The Arrow Journal seeks to broaden the conversation. We are interested not only in addressing past wrongs, but in imagining and building reparative futures. What values, philosophies, beliefs, relationships, institutions, and practices make a reparative world possible?

We invite contributions that explore reparations as a political vision, cultural practice, and lived experience. We welcome reflections on repair at all scales: between individuals, within communities, between nations, and in relation to the planet.

We particularly encourage submissions from Indigenous peoples, racialized communities, formerly colonized peoples, displaced communities, and others whose lives and histories have been shaped by dispossession, exploitation, genocide, conflict, and systemic injustice. We also welcome contributions from practitioners, organizers, community leaders, healers, elders, youth engaged in processes of repair and collective healing. We welcome reflections on how reparative frameworks can reshape the systems and world we inhabit —across diverse sectors including, but not limited to,  finance, health, technology, climate justice, community accountability, spirituality and global development. We invite analytical, personal, reflective, visionary, practice-based and interdisciplinary submissions that bridge theory, practice and lived experience. 

Ultimately, this issue asks not only what reparations require us to do, but who reparations call us to become. What new possibilities emerge when we understand reparations not as an endpoint, but as a stance – an ongoing practice of justice, healing, and collective transformation?

Questions this special issue seeks to explore:

  • What does a reparative world look like in practice? 
  • What futures become possible when we center apology and repair?  
  • What comes after resistance and liberation struggles?
  • What does healing require for communities that have carried the burden of survival and resistance?
  • How might reparative frameworks reshape health, finance, technology, philanthropy, education, media, and international development?
  • What skills, practices, and capacities are needed to live reparative values in everyday life?
  • How do spiritual, cultural, somatic, and community-based practices help us embody repair?
  • What does genuine repair require beyond apology and compensation?
  • How can healing and reparative practices scale from interpersonal relationships to global systems?

We invite contributions from practitioners, scholars, and activists that explore the following topics and related themes:

  • Decolonization and reparative justice
  • Economic and financial reparations
  • Indigenous and land-based approaches to repair
  • Healing, trauma, and collective recovery
  • Spiritual and faith-based perspectives
  • Reparative leadership and organizational culture
  • Reparatory frameworks for Global aid and development
  • Climate justice and ecological repair
  • Community accountability and restorative practice
  • Arts, storytelling, and cultural memory
  • Embodied and somatic approaches to healing

Please read our Submission Guidelines prior to submitting.  Please submit your submissions via this form: https://forms.gle/rY4dY2jHPUkPSp8T8. Submissions are due by January 21, 2027. Please direct inquiries to our editing team at editor@arrow-journal.org.

Buddha as Sangha

In a speech delivered at Spirit Rock during a Day of Mindfulness gathering in 1993, Thich Nhat Hanh told an audience of two thousand practitioners, “It is possible the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and lovingkindness, a community practicing mindful living.”

Buddhists take refuge in three jewels, the Buddha (understood as the historical individual who reached enlightenment, and the teacher), the Dharma (understood as the teachings), and the Sangha (understood as the community of practitioners). This call invites contributors to explore ideas and themes around how communities, cohorts, coalitions, and other collective bodies may serve as teacher, awakening, and source of liberation or enlightenment.

We invite contributions from practitioners, scholars, and activists that explore the following topics and related themes:

  • What do we mean when we talk about community? What would it mean to have community as the locus of awakening? Or community as teacher?
  • What might we be losing by foregoing the role of individual teachers? What are the shadows of community/sangha and how do we navigate them skillfully?
  • What are the roles of the different types of collective bodies? How are communities different from sanghas vs. cohorts vs. coalitions vs. organizations vs. families? How might we “right-size” the containers and expectations of the various groups we are part of to support our goals and visions?
  • Why would the next Buddha take the form of community? What about our current context demands a more communal or distributed transmission of the teaching?

Submissions for this special series are open through March 1, 2027.

Note: Please read our Submission Guidelines prior to submitting.  Please submit your submissions via this form: https://forms.gle/eJiSVh8tgjPv5Hnz7. Please direct inquiries to our editing team at editor@arrow-journal.org.

Elemental

Building upon our “Like Water” Special Issue (Winter 2026-2027) and our forthcoming Like Fire Special Issue (Winter 2026-2027), we are opening a new call for submissions for a special issue, “ELEMENTAL”, and related series “Like Earth”, “Like Air”, and “Like Space”.

The inspiration for this series and our forthcoming special issue, “ELEMENTAL”, draws from our study of the elements in Tibetan Buddhism. There are various elemental systems in diverse spiritual and medicinal systems, and our inquiry is not limited to one single system. 

We invite contributions from practitioners, scholars, and activists that explore the following topics and related themes:

  • Frameworks for understanding the elements and their interplay (physically, psychologically, and/or energetically) from diverse spiritual and medicinal systems
  • Practices for working with the elements (including contemplative and somatic practices, ritual practices, medicinal practices, etc.)
  • Timely pieces that engage dimensions of the climate crisis in relation to the elements
  • Thematic pieces that explore a dimension of one or more of the elements and their qualities, including, but not limited to: stability, groundedness, generosity (earth); competence, direction, breath, wind (air); and vastness, emptiness (space). We are interested also in pieces that work with the wisdom and distorted aspect of the elements, as well as the interplay between them in ourselves and in relationship. Though we have already held calls for submissions on the elements of water and fire, specifically, we are open to receiving further submissions on these themes.

We are also interested in artistic reflections on the elements, including art and poetry. We also accept book reviews on themes related to each special issue. 

Submissions are rolling; we may publish essays online in advance of the special issue. The final deadline for submissions for the 2028 special issue is June 1, 2027.

Note: Please read our Submission Guidelines prior to submitting.  Please submit your submissions via this form: https://forms.gle/P1NYwNEYLnQxEe5B9. Please direct inquiries to our editing team at editor@arrow-journal.org.

Movement Dharma: Towards a Buddhist Movement Chaplaincy | Volume Two

In light of the interest and engagement with Volume One of this special issue, we are reopening the call for a Volume Two, expected to be released in spring, 2027. Submissions for this call are due by January 15, 2027.

We are in urgent need of spiritual leadership and collective capacity to help us address the interlocking social, economic, and ecological crises of our time. In our view, these crises are fundamentally relational (dualistic) in nature, and therefore require nondual approaches. 

This moment requires politicized spiritual leaders and politicized facilitators who can not only help us bear witness to suffering, but who can also provide transformative vision to help us realize our collective potential for liberation.

We are interested in what the dharma might offer at this moment. While Buddhist chaplaincy has been variously conceptualized and practiced by a growing field of scholar-practitioners, the emerging field of Buddhist chaplaincy has predominantly focused on providing spiritual care or accompaniment to individuals in crisis. Given the richness and transformative vision of our various Buddhist lineages, we see an opportunity to consider how the dharma might not only support individuals and their families in times of acute suffering, but also how dharma might support our contemporary movements for justice and liberation.

While movement chaplaincy has been practiced arguably for generations—though may not have been named as such—no theorization of what Buddhism, per se, might offer our current movements for justice and liberation (beyond common, yet important, skills of accompaniment and bearing witness) have been, to our knowledge, thoroughly explored. 

We see an opportunity to theorize new ways of approaching the challenges of our time from a nondual Buddhist frame, and to put the dharma in dialogue with many other spiritual and political  movements with long traditions of liberatory work. 

In partnership with Union Theological Seminary’s Buddhist Studies Program, we are pleased to announce our call for submissions for a special issue second on Buddhist Movement Chaplaincy. This first issue was released in the fall of 2026, in concert with a suite of programs on Buddhist Movement Chaplaincy, or “Movement Dharma” and Buddhist Public and Liberationist Theology sponsored by Union. 

We invite contributions from practitioners, scholars, and activists that explore the following topics and related themes:

  • The history of movement chaplaincy in and from diverse lineages (not only Buddhist), 
  • Current challenges in our movements for justice and liberation and pathways forward
  • Advancements and learnings in the field of movement chaplaincy
  • Current developments and/or edges in the field of Buddhist chaplaincy
  • How non-dual ontological frameworks might support the possibility of radical, visionary transformation in our movements for liberation
  • Specific Buddhist traditions and practices (beyond mindfulness) that might help us build and strengthen radical culture in our organizations and movements
  • Visionary and prophetic dharmic practices and other traditions that may guide and inspire our liberatory work 
  • Case studies from the field
  • Interfaith and interdisciplinary pieces that help us understand what various movement lineages and traditions can learn from each other

We are open to considering other topics not listed here that advance our understanding of movement chaplaincy and Buddhist movement chaplaincy. We also accept book reviews on themes related to each special issue. 

We hope this work may provide a critical-constructive (re)frame to some challenges within our current movements for justice and liberation, drawing upon the dharma as support and inspiration.

Please read our Submission Guidelines prior to submitting.  Please submit your submissions via this form: https://forms.gle/BqV9F9sXLepTzfe56. Please direct inquiries to our editing team at brooke@courageofcare.org. 

Recent Past Calls for Submissions (closed)

Like Fire: Toward a Politics of Courage

 

“My students tell me, we don’t want to love! We’re tired of being loving! And I say to them, if you’re tired of being loving, then you haven’t really been loving, because when you are loving you have more strength.”

– bell hooks

As a community of spiritual practitioners, we at The Arrow and Courage of Care (our parent organization), believe that the more that we sense we are held in a field of care, or love, the more that empowers our courage and our capacity to act. This is the spirit with which we invite contributions to the next issue in our elemental series, Like Fire, on themes of love, compassion, community, and political action. 

While we remain committed to love as an engine and anchor of spiritual activism, we realize that love as practice can seem soft, naive, bypass-y, and even unobtainable. In the face of increasing state violence, ongoing genocide, and the collapse of life-sustaining systems, love may also seem insufficient for the task. Some might even say love, and compassion, simply lets people off the hook. 

We are interested in taking both of these lines of inquiry seriously. How is love an engine of spiritual activism and how do we deepen in it? What have we learned through being well loved? How do we learn to love without (and in spite of) wounding? How do we love through difference? How do we learn to love powerfully, transformatively, and confrontingly? And how do we bring our love to bear politically?

We invite contributions from practitioners, scholars, and activists that explore the following topics and related themes:

  • methods for deepening in love, compassion, and care and tools for working through blocks or distortions to love and compassion
  • the paradoxical nature of fire as an element that can be generative and sustaining or consumptive and destructive 
  • loving through and across difference by building mutuality and the ability to recover trust
  • cultural conditions contributing to loneliness, social disconnection, and relational avoidance and their political implications 
  • “social” media, AI, and social (dis)connection
  • love as a political practice and tool of social transformation
  • love, accountability, justice, and healing

We are also interested in artistic reflections on love and compassion, as well as timely political pieces on the politics of fire. We also accept book reviews on themes related to each special issue. 

Note: the inspiration for the title of this special issue, Like Fire—as in our forthcoming summer issue, Like Water—draws from our study of the elements in Tibetan Buddhism. In its wisdom, the element of fire is associated with the qualities of love and compassion.

Please read our Submission Guidelines prior to submitting.  Please submit your submissions via this form: https://forms.gle/zLrUhkzBmtCRhu376. Please direct inquiries to our editing team at brooke@courageofcare.org.

The Arrow Journal explores the relationship among contemplative practice, politics, and activism. The Arrow welcomes the insights of multiple contemplative lineages for achieving a kinder, healthier, and more compassionate world. We encourage dialogue on wisdom and knowledge arising from methods of contemplative inquiry, ways of embodied knowing, and intellectual disciplines. In doing so, The Arrow provides a critical and much needed space for investigating the meeting point of contemplative wisdom and pressing social, political, and environmental challenges.

Courage of Care’s mission is to nurture a field of relational facilitators working at the forefront of our racial, economic, climate, and land justice movements. We provide training in our relational culture framework (CourageRISE), mentoring in the art of facilitation, and group and 1:1 support for facilitators’ own personal healing and integration, which is critical to maintaining the depth and sustainability of the work itself. We also offer direct consulting and services to organizations and movements working to build alternatives to the status quo. 

MOVEment: Lineage-based physical and energetic practices for realizing liberation

The Arrow Journal, its host institution Courage of Care, and its partners Ocha Dharma and Movement Tapestries are excited to announce a forthcoming collaboration on lineage-based martial and subtle body practices as pathways to liberation. This collaboration will include a special invited journal issue—led by our guest editor Dr. Sheryl Petty—a podcast series, and a public symposium.

We are using this word “liberation” as it is used in Buddhism and other wisdom traditions to refer to our ultimate, unadulterated, liberated state; free of contortion, impediment and constraint; connected to but not bound or conditioned by time and place. 

While many may be familiar with the field of somatics and the growing interest in embodied practices within our movements for justice and liberation, we sense there is less collective awareness in these spaces of the vast and various transformative lineages of movement-based physical and energetic practice systems that exist within various spiritual, wisdom, and martial traditions. Such transformative practices allow one to be utterly present and responsive to the moment and any arising condition or set of circumstances with vigor, potent capacity, enthusiasm, presence, full commitment, love, and engagement for the liberation of everyone and everything. This collaboration, in part, aims to draw upon the wisdom and experience of skilled practitioners—many of whom are themselves grounded in movements for justice and equity—to make these lineages of practice more visible and accessible. 

Of course, many practitioners also engage in lineage-based physical and energetic systems in their everyday life. These practices can be pathways in themselves, and can also be engaged as accompaniments to sitting practices, as well as visionary approaches to spiritual practice. This collaboration also aims to support wider familiarity with a broader spectrum of practices of body, speech/energy, and heart-mind.

We hope that this special issue, accompanying podcast series and fall symposium, introduce readers to a range of lineage-based approaches for engaging our physical, emotional, spiritual and energetic well-being, in order to help untangle the knots in ourselves, our social systems and communities, so that the full range of capacity, gifts, joy, and benefit can be experienced by all.

 

Like Water: Practices for Maneuvering with Strength, Suppleness, and Clarity

“Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.” – Lao Tzu

As many in the US and other parts of the world face the increasing threat and rise of fascism and authoritarianism, we at The Arrow and Courage of Care are seeking submissions for a special issue and podcast series that help our community grapple with how best to maneuver with strength, suppleness, and clarity in these times. Specifically, we are interested in embodied practices, philosophical reflections, and movement-based case studies or “notes from the field” that help deepen our contemplative practice, sharpen our political clarity, and sustain our spiritual activism. 

We invite contributions from practitioners, scholars, and activists that explore the following topics and related themes:

  • Wu wei, or effortless action, and social engagement 
  • The paradoxical nature of water as an element as well as its relationship to other elements
  • Embodied practices of self- and community-defense (martial arts, survival arts) and their relation to the element of water and/or social and political power and praxis
  • Contemplative and somatic practices for working with paradox; embracing complexity; and contradiction; as well as practices for transforming anger and increasing clarity

We are also interested in poetry and other artistic reflections on water, as well as timely pieces related to the politics of water. We also accept book reviews on themes related to each special issue. 

 

The Power of the Pluriverse: Visionary practice for sustaining our movements for justice and liberation

“Many words are walked in the world. Many worlds are made. Many worlds make us. There are words and worlds that are lies and injustices. There are words and worlds that are truthful and true. In the world of the powerful there is room only for the big and their helpers. In the world we want, everybody fits. The world we want is a world in which many worlds fit.”

Spiritual activists dance on the growing edge. They hospice the colonial, imperialistic, extractive, oppressive worlds, while also midwifing, birthing, and nurturing liberatory worlds. Where many people may encounter hopelessness regarding the state of the world, spiritually grounded folks, activists, organizers, writers and artists, are visionaries, who can imagine and uncover alternatives, seek justice, and build anew in the face of collapse and even their own despair. 

Drawing from their spiritual practices, cultural and community traditions, personal insights, creative capacities, and internal and external resourcing, these visionaries work within and between worlds to keep portals of possibility open and point toward the many paths of justice and liberation. 

In this call we are interested in two things: 

  1. the sensed alternatives, and/or 
  2. the practices that sustain visionary power in times of chaos and despair. 

First, what is the source material for sensing alternatives and holding complexities? How do we shift from colonial, extractivist, white supremecist ways of being to liberatory ways of being? How do we embody alternatives to the status quo? Who has done this in the past? Who is currently doing this work? And what can we learn from both the successes and failures of the models we have? 

Second, in this sensing work, what are the practices that help us to realize our visions for the alternatives so that we can live them into being? How do we ensure that the work of building alternatives is sustainable? 

This call for papers begins with the assumption that multiple worlds are not only possible but already exist. We are inviting submissions that shine light on these complexities, the and/but/also of it all, and explore and uncover how embracing multiple realities can strengthen and fortify our movements and organizations in the work of justice and liberation. We welcome a variety of formats, including scholarly articles, reflective essays, and book reviews. We are eager to review new or previously unpublished work reflective of these themes and The Arrow‘s and Courage of Care’s mission. 

Sumud: Steadfastness

Sumud,“ steadfastness” in Arabic, is a Palestinian practice of perseverance in the context of settler colonialism, occupation, apartheid, and genocide. It is a practice grounded in deep reverence and connection to the land, culture, and traditions as well as collective identity, family, community care and solidarity, political resistance, and spirituality. The silence and neutral positioning by many prominent Western spiritual teachers and communities regarding the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people has been experienced as an ethical failure by many. Despite commitments to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, this ethical failure brings into question the lack of representation of Arab and SWANA-heritage people in dharma spaces, and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim biases within contemplative and spiritual communities.

This special issue of The Arrow Journal is inspired by the transformative and liberatory power of sumud and the intersection between political resistance, solidarity, spirituality, and liberation as practiced by those of SWANA heritage. One of the objectives of this special issue is to celebrate the voices, practices, teachings, and ancestral wisdom of SWANA-heritage teachers, guides, healers, scholars, activists, and practitioners. It also seeks to center SWANA people’s stories, wisdom, experiences, and critical inquiry related to the moral crisis of silence and “neutrality” during genocide alongside Buddhism, the Dharma, and contemplative practices. These inquiries need not only be written down but also spoken, read, heard, and archived. 

We are seeking essays, interviews, book reviews, poetry and other writing or art that foregrounds Palestinian, Arab, and people of SWANA indigeneity in spiritual practice and communities. We seek to contribute to the growing body of intellectual, spiritual, and communal work by SWANA heritage folks, and especially invite Palestinian, Arab, other people descended from the SWANA region, and allies of color to take up space in this issue. We invite explorations of spirituality, resistance, and solidarity; the rich ancestral healing wisdoms and traditions of people of SWANA heritage; and dreams of a liberated Palestine and/or SWANA region.

Possible topics include but are not limited to: 

  • Spirituality of resistance, for e.g.,  sumud and embodied practices of resistance (e.g. song, dance, poetry, spiritual practice, etc)
  • Ancestral and land-based healing wisdom and practices
  • Collective care, power and solidarity (e.g., aoun, community during the intifadas, volunteerism, etc)
  • Collective grieving practices
  • Intersectional solidarity for Palestine and the global struggle for liberation for all
  • Islam, Sufism and Buddhism
  • The moral crises in Western spirituality – silence, neutrality and equanimity in the face of genocide
  • Decolonizing the Dharma
  • Experiences of SWANA-heritage people in Western spiritual communities
  • Settler Colonialism and Dharma
  • Dreams of liberation: Palestine, SWANA region, beyond

This special issue is co-curated in partnership with the Sacred Justice Coalition, a global decolonial community of practitioners helping to weave a Buddhist response to the grave moral crisis unfolding in Palestine.

 

Power, Precision, and Protection

The Challenge and Response: We are collectively facing the intensifying and brutalizing force of Empire’s violence within the United States and globally, and its impact on the intersecting social and ecological crises of our time. The root cause of this violence often hinges on a dualistic logic of separation, and manifests viciously via exploitation, extraction, and genocide. In other words, the crises of our times require relational solutions, including both a non dual frame of spiritual practice and a capacity to build collective power for effective action. 

While calls for a relational paradigm shift have been growing over the past few years, we still require skills and tools to affect transformative and systemic liberatory change. We are not simply trying to recalibrate our bodies, minds, and hearts towards a new normal in this time of crisis. We are rather called to, as relational beings, develop skills to address the separation deeply rooted in the intersecting crises of our time and leverage our power to envision, create, and embody new, liberatory ways of being. 

The Call for Papers and Conversations: We are eager to explore how we, as spiritual communities in service of collective action and liberation for all, might step into our power in the face of these ongoing crises, to actively create new and liberatory paradigms. At this urgent and challenging time, The Arrow and Courage of Care are seeking contributions for a special journal issue and conversation series that explore themes of collective and personal power, protection, and precision. The objective of this special issue and conversation series is to, from a grounded, nondual practice, investigate how questions of power, precision, and protection can propel us from calls for a relationship paradigm shift to the reality of a relational future.  Specifically, we ask:

  1. How do we work with our attachment and aversion to power to deepen our collective and nuanced understanding of power as a tool of liberation and not domination? 
  2. How can we call forth embodied spiritual teachings within our lineages to help guide us in wielding personal and collective power with precision in service of creating new, liberated worlds? 
  3. How do we wield power precisely and effectively while simultaneously attuning to the need for protection of ourselves–and ultimately all others–on this path?

We do not take on these themes lightly–much is at stake. Spiritual activists have resisted for generations, and such resistance has been met with crushing violence at times. We are therefore committed to rooting these reflections within our community of practice in ways that help us not only deepen our collective understanding of power, but also help us strengthen our relational networks. As part of this commitment, this special issue will be curated alongside a conversation series and in-person summer workshop that authors will have the option to participate in.

We invite contributions from practitioners, scholars, and activists that explore these topics:

  • Relations of power: power with vs power over
  • Self-defense and the rhetoric of non-violence 
  • Embodied practices of self-defense (martial arts, survival arts) and spirituality
  • Strategies for endurance: thinking sustainably for 7 generations
  • Practices–somatic, contemplative, collective–to metabolize and transmute anger and grief
  • Self-love, revolutionary love, & staying tender under empire
  • Archetypes and new models of sacred/divine warriorship
  • Examples of Buddhist or spiritual communities responding to the crises of our time through effective collective power-building action
  • Tools to develop our capacities for risk-taking in solidarity

In all of these topics we encourage an awareness of the multilayered ways in which race, gender, class, and other dimensions of social identity and oppression intersect. We invite the work of authors from diverse traditions, and we welcome a variety of formats, including scholarly articles, essays, and poetry for the special fall issue. 

Dreaming and Black Geographies

Dreaming emerges again and again in Black expressive culture and social movements. Dreams surface in the biographies and testimonies of Black artists, medicine-makers, and visionaries. Dreams circulate in affirmations: I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams!

This special issue of The Arrow Journal is inspired by the transformative possibilities of Black dreaming in many senses of the word. An expansive understanding of dreams, along with insights from the field of Black geographies, inspires this call for submissions – which attends to the connections between dreaming, liberation, and spiritual practice.

This issue takes dream-inspired art, scholarship, and activism as its point of departure. The celebrated play A Raisin in the Sun (1958) by Lorraine Hansberry is thick with dreams in the shape of personal aspirations and dreams of freedom. Robin D.G. Kelley (2003) traces “freedom dreams,” or how Black artists and intellectuals have imagined freedom in art, manifestos, and movement. Cara Page (2010) writes how collective memories, dreams, and imagination can inspire “new models of healing and justice” within movements. adrienne marie brown references dreams in the title of her latest book, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice; her call to reframe cancel culture is grounded in a Black, queer, and feminist framework made possible through radical, collective dreaming. 

In most of these examples, dream is synonymous with imagination or aspiration. Often, these dreams are invoked or co-created, while literally and figuratively awake. Still other modes of Black dreaming are less-charted, like dreams received while sleeping or prophetic dreams. We remember how Harriet Tubman, George Washington Carver, and other ancestors traced their dreams to God or the Divine. How Tubman mobilized her prophetic dreams to both map out and carry out the Underground Railroad is perhaps most well-known in Black/African-American context. Alexis Pauline Gumbs (2014) invites us to consider what remembering Tubman’s prophetic dreams means for how freedom, dreaming, and the relationship between them are understood. Attending to dreams sourced to the Divine, ancestors, or the metaphysical, opens up Black cosmologies or philosophies of the Universe, leading to other epistemologies or ways of knowing. 

Along with these works, this issue builds on a previously-published piece called “Prologue: On Black Dream Geographies” (2021) by the Guest Editor, Naya Jones. This piece meditates on the highly-publicized police murder of Breonna Taylor while considering geographies of Black dream and sleep.] As an expansive field of study, Black geographies offers vital assumptions for work with Black dreaming. Among these, oppressive legacies are spatial and Black space-making persists. Legacies of colonialism and white supremacy, among others, shape present-day power dynamics in ways that are profoundly spatialized, from uneven access to resources across neighborhoods, to mass incarceration, to the inordinate impact of intersecting crises like climate change, environmental injustice, and COVID-19 on Black communities worldwide. At the same time, Black space- and world-making has involved marronage and movements; expressive culture; social and cultural institutions; and more. These have been sites of resistance and thriving.

At its heart, this Special Issue is about how dreaming has been integral to Black thriving. What is Black dreaming made of, and how does this dreaming matter now? For this peer-reviewed issue, we seek essays, including photo essays and descriptions of practices; scholarly articles; book reviews; and poetry. We welcome works that defy – or refuse! – genre.  Activists, scholars, artists, practitioners, and those who blur the lines between these, we invite your contributions. The Guest Editor especially seeks pieces on less-charted Black dreaming, such as sleeping dreams, prophecy, dreams invoked by contemplative or spiritual practice, or how these relate to activism and movement work. And while the field of Black geographies inspires this call, we welcome work from across and beyond disciplines. 

Furthermore, this Special Issue seeks to contribute to the collective archiving and analysis of Black dreaming, by centering the work of Black contributors. The Guest Editor especially invites Black, African, and Black diaspora contributors to submit their work, including but not limited to  Black folks living outside of the Americas and contributors who identify as Afro-Latinx, Afro-Indigenous, Afro-Asian, and/or Afro-Arab. 

Possible topics include but are not limited to: 

  • Black dreaming and spiritual or contemplative practice  
  • Landscapes of Black dreaming: literal, figurative, imaginative
  • Black dream rituals 
  • Dreaming and movements, e.g. the global Black Lives Matter Movement, Tricia Hersey’s The Nap Ministry and Black rest, Healing Justice, Restorative Justice
  • Dreaming in Black Indigenous and African Traditional Religions 
  • Rootwork, conjure, and Black dreaming
  • Nature and Black dreaming
  • Black feminism, womanism, and dreaming
  • Lives of dream-inspired activists, artists, scholars, cultural workers
  • Black herbalism and dreaming
  • Collective healing, recovery, and Black dreaming
  • Dreams in Afrofuturism, Black Sci-Fi, and/or Black Fantasy
  • Reflections on writing, teaching, and/or researching Black dreaming

Engaged Buddhism: The Teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh

Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh passed away on January 22, 2022. The global response to his death was immediate and vast, with thousands of people watching live online or attending in person the ceremonies honoring his life and transition. Those who had benefited from his teachings–from world leaders to citizens of nearly every nation–expressed an outpouring of gratitude and love for his life’s offerings.

Thich Nhat Hanh founded the school of Engaged Buddhism, whose philosophical roots grew out of his early anti-war activism during the Vietnam War. Today, his teachings on Engaged Buddhism encompass the many threats to our social, economic, and existential health, including racial and environmental justice as well as continued peace activism. These teachings are reflective of The Arrow’s mission to more explicitly draw out the connections between contemplative practice and working toward a more socially just world.

Thay—as he was known to his students—taught us that a cloud never dies. His students have embodied this teaching in the wake of his death as they continue his legacy through spiritual practice and social activism. The Arrow Journal is seeking submissions for a special issue on Engaged Buddhism that will examine the legacy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s life and teachings. Prompts you may consider for a submission include (but are not limited to):

How can Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching and activism serve as a model for transforming systemic suffering in our world? What insights from his life’s work are most needed now?

Where is Thich Nhat Hanh’s message showing up “off the meditation cushion” and in society? How can scholars, activists, and practitioners take inspiration from his influence as we work to address social, ecological, and political challenges?

How does your practice of Engaged Buddhism affect your activism? How do you connect your own contemplative practices with your work to create a more peaceful, healthy, and inclusive world?

We invite the work of authors from multiple traditions, representative especially of Thich Nhat Hanh’s diverse lay and monastic student body. We also welcome a variety of formats, including scholarly articles, essays, and book reviews. We are eager to review new or previously unpublished work reflective of these themes and The Arrow’s mission.

Forum on Rest and Creativity

The Arrow welcomes submissions for a forum on rest, creativity, and suppleness in our Winter 2022 General Issue. We seek reflective short essay submissions that address how contemplative practice can support creativity and resilience in confronting systemic injustices and preventing burnout. As we move into winter in the Northern Hemisphere and welcome the accompanying energy of rest, reflection, and retreat, we are inspired to ask contributors to consider:

What insights arise when you rest, reflect, and recuperate? What wisdom bubbles to the surface when you slow down?

How do practices like non-doing, or simply being, help you re-imagine the world, your work, or your role in transforming systemic suffering?

What forms of being or engaging the world arise naturally in the space in between the demands of capitalist production, academic “publish-or-perish” culture, or burnout-inducing approaches to activism? (Or, if such in-between spaces don’t appear accessible in your experience, what would it take to create them? What is your vision for such space?)

 

Blackness/Afrikanness & Meditation, Dharma, Buddhism

In the last three decades, Black voices from across the African diaspora have begun to take up prominent space in both Western and Eastern Buddhist, Dharma, and Meditation spaces and communities. Though Black/Afrikan practitioners, teachers, and scholars are a small percentage of the global Buddhist populations, their influence and integration of mindfulness and meditation has invigorated many communities and peoples who have felt left out of or turned off from mainstream meditation communities and teachers.

From early Black Buddhist pioneers like Dr. Jan Willis, Dr. Larry Ward, Ralph Steele, Gina Sharp, Dr. Gaylon Ferguson, Dr. Rev. Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, and many others to current dynamic Black Buddhist and meditation teachers like Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens, Bhante Buddharakkhita, Sebene Selassie, Dr. Vimalasara Mason-John, and many others, Black Buddhists and meditation teachers are infusing dharma with cutting-edge scholarship, while addressing social movements, decolonization, anti-Black racism, community healing, sustainability, harmful hierarchies, and infusing Buddhist practice with traditional Black Indigenous cultural truthways.

This special issue of The Arrow Journal turns its attention to thinking critically, creatively, historically, and speculatively about the relation between Blackness, Afrikanness, and Meditation, Dharma, and Buddhism. In part inspired by the 2018 panel “Radical Black Dharma Strategies: Black Femmes and Black Queers on Living in the Dark Age,” featuring Black Buddhist practitioners across traditions and lineages, this peer-reviewed special issue of The Arrow seeks scholarly articles, long-form essays, interviews, book reviews, and other writing that foregrounds blackness, Afrikanness, and Black indigeneity in contemplative practice and contemplative communities.

Additionally, Black people’s stories, wisdom, experiences, and critical inquiry related to Buddhism, Dharma, meditation, mindfulness, and contemplative practices need to be spoken, read, heard, and archived. This special issue is part of a growing body of Black intellectual, spiritual, and communal work inside of Buddhist meditation practices and communities. The Special Issue Editor especially invites Black, Afrikan, Afrikan-descended, and other Black diasporic people to take up space in this issue. This invite is also doubly welcoming of Black voices from African countries, Caribbean nations, Asian/Pacific countries, and indigenous lands.

The following topics, themes, and prompts are exemplary, though not exhaustive, of potential essay topics:

  • Black Buddhist/Dharma/meditation spaces
  • Decolonizing practices
  • Practicing in white-dominated spaces
  • Black-Asian relations in dharma/meditation spaces
  • Dharma and carcerality (prisons, jails, probation, other forms of State surveillance)
  • Book reviews (new or old works)
  • Personal critical essays
  • Leaving dharma communities
  • Remixing practices, liturgies, and lineages
  • Black ancestors
  • Ordination and training
  • Blackness, Buddhism, and chattel slavery
  • Blackness, Buddhism, and colonialism
  • Blackness and Karma
  • Patriarchy and misogyny
  • Black Feminism and Womanism
  • Racial justice
  • Black queer, trans, and non-binary practices
  • Black embodiment
  • Forming communities
  • Black traditional religions and Buddhism/meditation
  • Anti-blackness and Dharma
  • Western Buddhism and Blackness
  • The Black Radical Tradition
  • Black men and masculinities
  • Black women and femininities
  • Black rage
  • Black economies
  • Africa and dharma
  • Lineages, traditions, and communities

Healing Social and Ecological Rifts

The social and environmental crises we face today are unprecedented: climate change, biodiversity loss, species extinction, deforestation, and air, water, and soil contamination. These material crises threaten the very basis of life and are indicative of what many believe to be a deeper spiritual crisis, rooted in misperceptions of our fundamental interconnectedness.

At this urgent and challenging time, The Arrow is seeking contributions for a special issue that explores this disconnection between nature and humanity, and among human beings themselves. The provocation is that ecological crisis and societal polarization emerge from a shared foundation: a dualistic logic of domination and exploitation. The objective of this special issue is to penetrate obstacles to our collective self-understanding in ways that could allow us to act with greater care toward one another and the planet.

The speed, atomization, and callous materialism of the modern world are grounded in systems of thinking and acting characterized by domination of nature and other human beings. These include colonialism and imperialism, with their logic of supremacy over land and “others;” capitalism, with its logic of materialism, selfishness, class superiority, and boundless exploitation of human and natural resources; racism, with its logic of white supremacy; patriarchy, with its logic of male superiority; and speciesism, with its anthropocentric logic of human superiority.

Though these may appear to be separate forms of domination and exploitation, they share an ontological root from which emerges a multitude of social and ecological crises. Living in the shadow of these systems, we adopt a narrow world view that foregrounds a sense of entitlement to take what is not offered, take more than one’s fair share, take more than can be replenished, and take until it causes hurt. These “takings” create vast inequities and threaten our collective ability for resilience, empathy, and interdependent flourishing.

We invite contributions from practitioners, scholars, and activists that explore these dynamics, as well as potential pathways toward healing and authentic community based on shared sentience. We particularly welcome work that advances inclusive dialogue on questions such as:

  • How do dualistic perceptions of self/other enable domination and exploitation in our society? How does domination manifest in our bodies, lives, and communities? What are the personal, social, and environmental consequences of rewarding callous individualism, selfishness, or narcissism? How can we honestly examine and reject abusive relations when they are entrenched in our history, culture, politics, and economic systems?
  • What guidance, practices, and experiences would lead us toward more sustainable collective forms of social and economic reproduction? How can we support human autonomy while valuing difference, building community, and enabling coexistence?
  • How can we develop internal capacities to work with grief, powerlessness, fear, and other emotions as they arise in our efforts to confront ecological and/or social crises? What possibilities exist for collective action and imagination to overcome isolation and individual powerlessness?
  • What can we learn from communities that refrain from exploitation, or from contemplative practices that work to dispel dualistic thinking? How can we create the conditions for empathy, connection, and acting from a deep understanding of interconnectedness? How might subaltern worldviews inform potential restorative and systemic transformations?
  • How can we champion scientific and socioecological priorities based on more holistic perspectives?

In all of these topics we encourage an awareness of the multilayered ways in which race, gender, class, and other dimensions of social identity and oppression intersect.

 

The Arrow Journal explores the relationship among contemplative practice, politics, and activism. Inspired in its founding by the teaching and social vision of meditation master Chögyam Trungpa, The Arrow welcomes the insights of multiple contemplative lineages for achieving a kinder, healthier, and more compassionate world. We encourage dialogue on wisdom and knowledge arising from methods of contemplative inquiry, ways of embodied knowing, and intellectual disciplines. In doing so, The Arrow provides a critical and much needed space for investigating the meeting point of contemplative wisdom and pressing social, political, and environmental challenges.