The series closes with the book's culminating vision: what it takes to build genuinely resilient, awe-based communities. Kirk draws on the stories of what he calls "resilient luminaries," figures including Viktor Frankl, Nelson Mandela, Maya Angelou, Simone de Beauvoir, and Thich Nhat Hanh, who found and sustained meaning against extraordinary odds. He'll also introduce the Corps of Depth Healers, a grassroots effort to seed this consciousness more widely. Kirk returns to host this final session personally, drawing together threads from the previous three gatherings into a shared conversation about turning awe into action. A fitting close to the series, open to anyone who has joined any, or none, of the earlier sessions.

In The Vibrant Center: A New Consciousness for Our Broken Age, Kirk makes an urgent case: that the extremism and polarisation fracturing our politics, our workplaces and our closest relationships can't be healed from the top down alone. It has to be built from the ground up, in how we parent, how we teach, how we work, worship, and govern. Wendy Smith, author of Both/And Thinking, has called it 'one of the most important calls to awareness I have encountered in years.' Rather than a call to a mundane middle ground, Kirk's 'vibrant center' is dynamic and alive to complexity: a practical, hopeful vision for shifting from a fear-based world to an awe-based one.

This autumn, Kirk joins us for a four-part online reading group to explore that vision together. Across four sessions, spanning parenting and education, work and spirituality, government and politics, and a closing vision of an awe-based world, Kirk offers a brief framing of each part of the book before opening the floor to discussion and questions. Although it is recommended, there is no requirement to have read the book in advance, and no need to attend every session: each stands alone, though together they trace the full arc of his argument. Sessions run fortnightly on Thursdays at 6pm UK / 10am Pacific, and are open to the public on a pay-what-you-can basis, with a recording ticket also available for anyone who can't join live.

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