Right is of no sex, Truth is of no color, God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren.
Frederick Douglass, The North Star

A CULTURE OF CONVERSATION


“What is the end sought?
All for a little conversation, high, clear, and spiritual!”

The wisdom we seek is a conversation. Our living conversation of Nature and Craft, Thought and Spirit, Society and Solitude has reached millions of people in over a hundred nations. All rests upon a fellowship of friends who voluntarily give their time, counsel, resources, and example to the vision of a practical idealism renewed at its roots. We believe in the inviolable sanctity and essential equality of all individual human souls.

 

DIRECTORS CIRCLE

“He gives what he hath, and all that he hath.”

 

Mr. John Gillis, in memoriam, served Innermost House as founding Chairman of the Board from 2012. He was principal and co-founder of Vision Systems, an industry leader in the design, engineering, fabrication, and installation of specialized architectural systems for clients ranging from museums and municipalities, to industrial organizations, to hospitals and universities, to the United States Dept. of Defense. He was a resolute captain in pursuit of his purpose for us to preserve and reinvigorate the inmost core of American culture for future generations. “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

Mr. Clint Wilson, in memoriam, served Innermost House as Director from 2010. Mr. Wilson was president and principal of TRIBECA Properties and past principal of Coldwell Banker North Properties. A civic leader in the California wine country, he served as president of the Sonoma County Alliance, the Redwood Empire Boy Scouts of America, and on many boards. He was instrumental in the creation of the Sonoma County Open Space District, preserving over 100,000 acres of undeveloped land. Clint was a greatly beloved friend and longtime host of the Innermost House Conversation.

Mr. Michael Frederick was educated at Harvard University and is retired from twenty years as Executive Director of the Thoreau Society in Concord, the oldest and largest literary society in America, and stewards of historical Transcendentalism. In 2013, he was the first person from the literary world to recognize Innermost House as a latter-day Walden, and now guides us in our speculative relation to the world’s wisdom traditions and in the prudential practice of literary nonprofit work. To Mr. Frederick, the Innermost House conversation represents the heart of current transcendental practice.

Mr. Miguel Gómez-Ibáñez is President Emeritus of North Bennet Street School in Boston, the oldest and most complete college of fine hand craft in America, featuring career programs in craft trades from fine bookbinding to furniture making to jewelry art to piano and violin building. Himself a distinguished architect and fine furniture craftsman, Mr. Gómez-Ibáñez is a national leader in the movement to renew the future of fine artisanship in the modern world, a central purpose of Innermost House. He represents our commitment to the Wisdom of Hands: “The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.”

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Dr. Ronald Kraft is president of Napa Valley College (Ret.), the central educational institution in the California wine country, a national center for viticultural studies and home to the Napa Valley Writer's Conference. A distinguished teacher of teachers, Dr. Kraft is a poet, author, speaker, and consultant to other colleges on institutional systems and leadership mechanisms that create momentum for productive change. He understands Innermost House as an “Islandia” of Reason and Integrity in an increasingly fragmented world, modeling his belief in the necessity of “leading yourself first.”

Prof. Melinda Levin is Professor and Director Emeritus of the graduate program in Documentary Production and Studies at the Univ. of North Texas. She has served the U.S. Department of State as an artist ambassador to Asia, and is the director, producer and cinematographer of many award-winning documentary films for PBS, MOMA and others, specializing in environmental and cultural subjects. In complement to Innermost House, Prof. Levin is also CEO/Founder of a media platform for Geo-storytelling and Place-revelation. “For there is no place that does not see you: You must change your life.”

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Mr. Michael Lorence is President of the Innermost House Foundation. He is a woodsman, craftsman, teacher, and independent scholar of classical wisdom literatures, and has for forty years provided original philosophical and architectural guidance to leaders in industry, state, and the professions. As director of the American Wisdom Project, his work focuses on the intersection of early American vernacular building, environmental philosophy, and humanistic scholarship. Mr. Lorence brings together practical, creative, and speculative thinkers seeking to reconstitute the Great Conversation of civilized life.

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Mr. Christopher Nelson is President Emeritus of St. John's College, one of the nation's oldest colleges and the leading example of the classical curriculum in America today. He has served as chair of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, and as founding president of the law firm, Kovar Nelson Brittain Sledz & Morris in Chicago. Mr. Nelson guides Innermost House in its centrally important aspiration of unifying knowledge through the liberal arts as a path to individual integrity, and modeling that unity to the world. “What a city admires will be cultivated there.”

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Dr. Marianne Patinelli-Dubay is philosopher and director at the Environmental Philosophy Program at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, the leading institution of its kind in the country. Dr. Patinelli-Dubay’s work is centered at the Huntington Wildlife Forest, a 15,000-acre research forest in Adirondack Park, where she focuses on the application of philosophical ethics to natural resource management. From her uniquely committed position of “life in the woods,” she guides us at the crossroads of philosophy, ecology, and spirituality. “In the woods we return to Reason and Faith.”

Dr. David Shi is President Emeritus of Furman University, where he founded the Shi Center for Sustainability. He is among America's leading historians and university presidents, and is past chairman of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. His many books include the best-selling America: A Narrative History and the classic, and The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture. Dr. Shi inspired the creation of The Innermost House Foundation in 2011 by connecting us with a recognizable lineage of philosophical simplicity.

Mr. Sean Skelley is President of Best Buy International (Ret.) where he developed the Geek Squad into an icon of the computer age, and is now a principal in winery and technology concerns in Virginia and the Far West. Mr. Skelley has been a regular participant in the Innermost House Conversation from before the beginning, and was involved in the development of its several prototypes. He speaks for the longevity of the project over decades, its durability and adaptability, and its proven capacity to liberate ordinary life with an extraordinary ideal.

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Mr. Bryce Engelbrecht lives in Florida and has served Innermost House as Treasurer since 2012. Mr. Engelbrecht began his career at the California Institute of Technology, and is now principal at Sigil, advising the nuclear industry and Department of Energy on safety. He formerly served as SVP of Data Solutions at iQor and as General Manager of QeyMetrics, international providers of data analytics solutions. Mr. Engelbrecht understands Innermost House as a geometric map of human nature, locating the solitary individual as a still point amidst the storm of data that constitutes the modern world.

 

FOUNDERS CIRCLE

“The beginning is half of all.”

 
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Mr. William Barker is associated with Monticello, Colonial Williamsburg, and Poplar Forest, where he is the nation's foremost scholar-interpreter of America's third president and Founding Father. Mr. Barker is one third professional actor, one third professional scholar, and one third Thomas Jefferson himself. He has created a unique career for himself, and embodies a rare and living knowledge of our founding ideals, challenges, contradictions, and possibilities. He has formed our understanding on all matters concerning Thomas Jefferson since 1998, before the beginning of it all.

Dr. Phyllis Cole is Professor Emerita of English, Women's Studies, and American Studies at Pennsylvania State University. Among other works, she is author of the beautiful book, Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism. She is past president of the Emerson Society and of the Margaret Fuller Society, and has guided Innermost House since 2013 in the broad field of American women in Transcendentalism, upon which she is a leading authority. Dr. Cole early recognized Innermost House as a undeclared agent of social justice, searching out the foundations of a just society in the individual soul.

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Dr. Olga Davidson is Chair and Executive Editor of the Ilex Foundation, promoting study of the humanistic traditions and civilizations of the Mediterranean and Near East. She serves on the faculty of the Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations at Boston University, and is past Chair of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis. Among her publications is the beautiful Poet and Hero in the Persian Book of Kings. Prof. Davidson has companioned Innermost House in its relation to Persian culture, Muslim civilization, and the modern Middle East since 2017.

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Dr. James Engell is Gurney Professor and chair of English at Harvard University, Professor and past chair of Comparative Literature, and faculty associate of the Harvard University Center for the Environment. Dr. Engell has published many books and articles, and is a great champion of liberal education. He has inspired and guided Innermost House since 2014 across the broad field of Enlightenment and Romantic literature and the environment. He is much beloved for his learning and largeness of soul, and his wonderful generosity early on made a path for Innermost House to grow into its maturity.

Dr. Charles Fracchia, in memoriam, was the Founder and Chairman of the San Francisco Historical Society and a Fellow of the California Historical Society. He published many books on the history of San Francisco over his long career, and taught at the City College of San Francisco, San Francisco State, and the University of San Francisco. Dr. Fracchia was a wise and generous guide to us on the lived meaning of California history. He understood the work of Innermost House as a concluding chapter in California's long search for “that new yet unapproachable America I have seen in the West.”

Dr. Robert Gross is Draper Professor of Early American History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut and past Director of American Studies at the College of William & Mary. He is author of the Bancroft Prize-winning classic, The Minutemen and their World, and its celebrated sequel, The Transcendentalists and their World. Dr. Gross advises us on the historical context of American Transcendentalism and the Republicanism of the founding generation. From the beginning to this day, he has answered our every call for aid and guidance. “The only gift is a portion of thyself.” No scholar has given us more.

Rev. Ulrich Haas (Sôshiki Seizen) is an ordained Japanese Zen priest and founder of the Rinzai Zen Temple Gen Rin Zen Kutsu in Germany. He is Europe's leading Tea Master representing the Urasenke Tankokai Federation of Kyoto to cultural organizations and universities on several continents. Rev. Haas has guided us from the perspective of classical Zen practice and Japanese Tea Ceremony since 2004. To him, Innermost House is a present-day Walden, a study “in praise of shadows,” and reincarnation of Hōjōki, the famous "Ten Foot Square Hut" of medieval Japan. “The world is in a bowl of tea.”

Mr. Allen Harding is a director and patron of the Thoreau Society, and son and steward to the literary legacy of Walter Harding, the 20th century's leading Thoreau scholar and founder of the Thoreau Society seventy-five years ago. He has guided us with his energy and support as a special project liaison to land conservation interests across the country. To Mr. Harding's generous conception, Innermost House is a kind of "New Walden," gathering together into a meaningful whole the several loci of American Wisdom and newly animating the inspiration of Henry David Thoreau for modern times.

Ms. Diana Lorence is the inspiration for the Innermost House experiment. Innermost House is her personal answer to Emerson’s prescription, “Build your own world.” Since her introduction to the Thoreau Society at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, Diana has appeared across the country as a speaker on her life in the woods, and her essays and photographs have gained an audience for Innermost House in every state in the nation and nearly every nation of the world, reaching now to millions of people with a message of simplicity, spirituality, and soul-reliance.

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Dr. Gregory Nagy is Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, and Director of the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC. He has served as Chair of the Harvard University Classics Department and as President of the American Philological Association. For half a century he been among Harvard’s most beloved teachers, and is this generation's leading authority on Homeric literature. To Dr. Nagy, Innermost House is a circle of present-day Idealists, constituting a kind of unconvened academy of Platonic Forms.

Dr. Nikita Pokrovsky is Chairman of General Sociology at HSE in Moscow, Russia’s leading university; President of the Society of Professional Sociologists; and Russia's leading scholar of Thomas Jefferson, Henry Thoreau, and American Transcendentalism. He champions Innermost House to his colleagues in Russia as a living model of philosophical simplicity and a universal archetype. He is creator of a parallel experiment in Thoreavian simplicity with a Walden replica cabin in the forests of Siberia. From half a world away, Innermost House is to him an independent embodiment of a universal ideal.

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Br. Michael Quinn, FSC, in memoriam, was President of St. Mary’s College in California, where he also served as Dean of the School of Science and Chair of the Graduate Department of Psychology. Brother Michael is warmly remembered as a bold and innovative leader who transformed St. Mary’s into a diverse, co-educational institution. In 2008, he was the first to urge on Innermost House a public career. He recognized in its hidden and inward story a spontaneous renewal of the spirit of the Desert Fathers, and called it forth to public life. “Go to your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”

​Dr. Robert Richardson, in memoriam, was our great biographer of the three thinkers at the heart of the American Wisdom Tradition: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James. His "intellectual biographies" of those brilliant souls grew out of his own beautiful nature. Dr. Richardson committed his support and guidance to Innermost House from its founding moment. We shall always remember him for his generous help and heroic gaze, holding headway to windward into the storm. "Depart upon thy endless cruise old Sailor."

Dr. John Stauffer is Professor of English and American Literature, African American Studies, and past chair of American Studies and of History & Literature at Harvard University. He is a leading authority on 19th century American culture, antislavery and the Civil War era. Dr. Stauffer is the author of twenty books and over 100 articles, including the stunning biography, Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. Among our earliest friends, he continues to advise us on the American Renaissance, photographic fine art, and the African American experience.

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Br. George Van Grieken, FSC, is President Emeritus of St. Joseph's Institution International, Singapore; Trustee of St. Mary's College and the Lasallian schools; and Secretary Director of Research at the Vatican. Brother George was the first to recognize Innermost House as an underivative, original American expression of the cosmopolitan monastic impulse, and guides us from his perspective as a professional religious and representative of one of the world's great spiritual traditions. He did for us what none other would do when it was needed most. “Fear nothing, thank God.”

Dr. Robert C. Wilburn has served as President and CEO of the National Medal of Honor Museum Foundation; director of Carnegie Mellon's Heinz College; CEO of the Gettysburg Foundation, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, and the Carnegie Institute; and president of Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Wilburn is among the nation's leading chief executives of cultural nonprofit institutions, with uniquely broad experience and special expertise in large-scale programs of institutional renewal. A friend of thirty years, he guides our solitary canoe across the broad seas of cultural philanthropy.

 

ADVISORS CIRCLE

“When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.”

 
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Rev. Dr. Barry Andrews is Minister Emeritus at the Shelter Rock Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Manhasset, New York. He is the author of many books on Emerson, Thoreau, and American Transcendentalism as uniquely American paths of spiritual pursuit. Rev. Andrews works not as a theologian or academic but as a minister and spiritual seeker within the UU tradition. In Rev. Andrews' conception, Innermost House represents a latter-day incarnation of the spirit of New England Transcendentalism, and he features its example in his publications and talks.

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Dr. Thomas Constantinesco lives is Lecturer on 19th Century American Literature at the University of Paris, has previously taught at Oxford and Yale, and is a director of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society at Texas A&M University. His research interests lie particularly in the relation of Transcendentalism to the broader field of 19th century literature, philosophy and politics. He has advised Innermost House since 2016 on the study of Ralph Waldo Emerson and American Transcendentalism from a continental European perspective.

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Ms. Lisa Coscino lives in San Francisco and advises Innermost House since 2016 on the arts, art curatorship and nonprofit arts administration. Ms. Coscino is founder of PARTNERS, a visual and performing arts agency specializing in collaborations between artists and galleries, collectors, consultants, curators, and educators. She is past Director of the New Museum of Los Gatos, the Museum of Monterey, and Curator of Violins of Hope. Ms. Coscino's gift is for creating dynamic exhibition, marketing and fundraising programs for the arts, balancing conservation, social consciousness, art, and commerce.

Dr. J. Bradley Creed is President of Campbell University in North Carolina, and previously served as Dean at Baylor University and as Provost, Executive Vice President, and Professor of Religion at Samford University. He has guided Innermost House since 2000 at the complex intersection of Christian theology, higher education, and practical ethics in the modern world. Dr. Creed is a great believer in the limitless promise of young people, and is a lifelong champion of responsible leadership, curricular reform, and the classical liberal arts.

Ms. Kirsten Dirksen lives in Paris and Barcelona and advises Innermost House on world-wide simplicity culture. Ms. Dirksen studied economics at Harvard University and produced documentary films for Discovery, Sundance Channel, and MTV before founding Faircompanies as a “Whole Earth Catalog for the digital age” and the world's leading source of sustainability filmography. Her poetic 2012 short film on the Innermost House prototype introduced our work to millions of viewers, and her 2025 publication, Life-Changing Homes, identifies Innermost House as model of “houses that changed lives.”

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Ms. Karen Duffy lives in Missouri and has advised Innermost House since 2016 in 19th century material, domestic and social culture. Ms. Duffy is retired as Professor of History at St. Louis Christian College, and is presently Director of the 1820 Shapley Ross House in St. Louis and an FSA Scot fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. As a living historian, she practices and teaches a wide variety of traditional crafts, and pursues original research on the confluence of European, African-American, and American Indian cultures. To her, Innermost House represents an ideal of culturally inclusive solitude. 

Mr. Jordan Finch is owner of Finch Woodworks, specializing in the adaptation of ancient construction methods to modern circumstances. He served an apprenticeship with the Timber Framers Guild, and has taught as Professor of Timber Framing at the American College of Building Arts in Charleston, South Carolina. Mr. Finch was educated in the classical liberal arts at St. John's College, and brings a philosophical perspective to the historic architecture and material culture of Innermost House. He serves as our Special Advisor in timber frame carpentry.

Ms. Joanna Clyde Findley is a practicing psychotherapist and Adjunct Professor of Art at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She publishes widely on the neurobiology of art, and maintains an active practice in art therapy, with clients from preschool age to mature adults. She has guided us since 2014 from the academic and clinical crossroads of psychology, art and neuroscience. Ms. Findlay understands Innermost House as living myth, and our program of outreach as culturally therapeutic at a fundamental level of public experience.

Dr. Wilder Fulford lives in London and brings to Innermost House perspectives from the crossroads of life science and international commerce. After receiving his doctorate in Molecular Biology, Dr. Fulford served as head of Healthcare M&A at Salomon Brothers before heading European M&A and Healthcare at Merrill Lynch, BOA, and Deutsche Bank. Since 2016, The Fulford Group has provided strategic guidance to life science entrepreneurs seeking solutions to pressing health care problems. In his whirlwind life, Innermost House represents a shelter of stillness for pondering the human condition.

Mr. David Gordon is among the world's foremost operatic​ artists, and his preeminent position as a Bach tenor in particular has established him as "one of the greatest interpreters of our time." He has portrayed 60 major operatic roles across four continents, with a repertoire spanning eight centuries and eight languages. He has guided us across the vast territory of classical music since 1998. As a vocal artist, inspired interpreter, and master teacher, Mr. Gordon’s life in music may be understood as one continuous transcription of the Harmonies of the World.

Mr. Kody Grant (Pueblo of Isleta and Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians) guides the us in our relation to Native American history and present-day Indian nations. Mr. Grant is Tribal Liaison at the University of Virginia. ​He has served as cultural ambassador​ ​through a variety of Native institutions, including the Museum of the Cherokee People and Cherokee Historical Association, and most recently as​ Nation Builder and supervisor of the American Indian Initiative at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation​, where for eight years he co-​led American Indian programming.

Mr. Kent Griswold is the owner and editor of the Tiny House Blog, the world's leading source of information on simple living in small spaces. Mr. Griswold has championed Innermost House through all dimensions of the small house movement since 2011. He was the first publisher to solicit an article about Innermost House, which was subsequently read by over a million people in a hundred nations of the world. He has continued to support us in our mission of outreach to a wide audience with a message of simplicity, small spaces, and mature spirituality.

Dr. Gregg Henriques is Professor of Graduate Psychology at James Madison University, serves as president of the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration, and is founder of the academic society for the Theory of Knowledge. His scholarly work is widely published in the professional journals, and he has a popular weblog on Psychology Today. He is the author of A New Unified Theory of Psychology and A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology. Dr. Henriques guides us in our speculative work at the crossroads of psychology and knowledge theory.

Dr. Peter Henriques is Professor Emeritus of History from George Mason University. He is a leading authority on Washington and has published many books and articles on him, most recently the inspiring First and Always: A New Portrait of George Washington. He has served on the Editorial Board for the George Washington Papers, on the Mount Vernon Committee of George Washington Scholars, and as a Distinguished Lecturer at Colonial Williamsburg. Prof. Henriques advises us on the defining role of George Washington in developing a prototypical American wisdom.

Rev. James Ingram, Jr is a Nation Builder at Colonial Williamsburg, where he has since 1998 researched, portrayed, and championed the first ordained Black minister in the United States, the Rev. Gowan Pamphlet. He represents the Christian spirituality of the American “Great Awakenings” of the 18th century in relation to Innermost House’s inward culture of the soul. In his own person, Rev. Ingram is Associate Minister at Gowan Pamphlet’s Historic First Baptist Church in Williamsburg, uniting the two ages as poles of one great spiritual tradition.

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Dr. Jeffrey Klee is the Shirley and Richard Roberts Architectural Historian at Colonial Williamsburg (Ret.), where he lectures and writes on architecture, pursues field research, and designs the reconstruction of historic buildings. He serves as lecturer at William & Mary, as executive and editorial board member of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, and as Editor in Chief with the Society of Architectural Historians. Dr. Klee advises Innermost House from his special expertise in early American architecture. He is the designer of our historically accurate, culturally interpretive Virginia House Frame.

Mr. Edmond Krafchow is Chairman of Mason McDuffie Real Estate (Ret.), the longest-established privately held real estate concern in the American West, and historic patron of Ansel Adams and the Sierra Club. Mr. Krafchow is a lifelong student of ancient Middle Eastern languages and culture and of the anthropology of religion, and has been an intimate of the Innermost House experiment since 2005. He has a deep understanding of our promise and challenges, and guides us at the spiritual margins of practical possibility.

Dr. Michael Luchs is the J.S. Mack Professor and Chair of the Marketing Department at William & Mary's Mason School of Business, and the W. Taylor Reveley, III Interdisciplinary Faculty Fellow. Dr. Luchs is a beloved and honored teacher. He publishes in the pioneering field of consumer wisdom and sustainability, and is co-founder with Innermost House of the William & Mary Wisdom Collective, an initiative to cultivate practical wisdom equal to the challenges and opportunities of the times. He guides us across the broad field of consumer culture in relation to practical wisdom.

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Dr. James Mathew is past Chairman of the Division of Adult Cardiology at the Cook County Hospital in Chicago, and is now Interventional Cardiologist with the Order of Saint Francis. Raised in Kerala, India, he is also curator of the TGM Rare Book Museum, representing the cosmopolitan spirituality of the Indian sages Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, and the American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. He recognizes and supports Innermost House as an ongoing experiment at the intersection of modern science, cosmopolitan spirituality, and Transcendentalist ideals.

Mr. Luke Mayes has practiced Japanese martial arts for over forty years and is a sixth degree black-belt in Seido Karate, “the School of the Sincere Way.” Mr. Mayes began his career as a pilot in the Royal New Zealand Air Force and Officer in the Territorial Force of the Royal New Zealand Army. “Jun Shihan” Luke now lives in California where he continues to teach Seido Karate while providing self-defense training at the Jody House Brain Injury Support Center and at the Braille Institute of Santa Barbara. "Benevolence to the weak, the downtrodden or vanquished, was ever extolled as becoming to a Samurai."

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Ms. Laura Mays is Program Director of The Krenov School of Fine Woodworking at Mendocino College, the leading creative woodworking program in the country. She advises us with her knowledge and passion for the art of fine furniture making. Ms. Mays holds a degree in architecture from University College Dublin, and is principal in the design firm of Yaffe Mays. She is also founding president of The Krenov Foundation, a non-profit organization whose mission is to teach and support the craft and art of fine woodworking. “This natural, unforced beauty is the result of a kind of unknowing grace.”

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Mr. Todd McFadden, in memoriam, lived in Wilmington, North Carolina and guided us toward our ideal of cultural unity in authentic diversity. Mr. McFadden was Founder and President of Higher Ed Diversity Consulting Group, representing decades of leadership in pioneering diversity among American institutions of higher learning. He served as Director of the Upperman African American Cultural Center at the University of North Carolina, Director of the Center for Black Culture at the University of West Virginia, and Director of the Africana Center at Tufts University. Farewell forever, dear friend.

Mr. Gavin Miller is retired from a career with the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, DC, where he oversaw Risk Metrics in the Division of Consumer and Community Affairs. Mr. Miller was educated at Vanderbilt and George Washington University, where he pursued parallel studies in Religion, Clinical Psychology, and Finance. His abiding focus lies at the intersection of material and spiritual interests, particularly as they are pursued through American notions of rights and freedoms. “The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, that he may spend in spiritual creation.”

Ms. Kathleen Moeller-Peiffer is State Librarian of New Mexico (Ret.). She also served as Deputy State Librarian for Lifelong Learning at the Library of New Jersey, where she was honored with the Cathleen Bourdon Service Award by the American Library Association for exceptional leadership. She now offers her love of books to literacy programs for disadvantaged children, spanning over the course of her distinguished career the whole range of readership from childhood to adulthood to maturity. Our Classick Pages Project represents to her an epitome of what books in the hand can do for the human mind.

Chief Mike and Ms. Tara Myers understand Innermost House as a living model of spiritual marriage. Chief Myers is retired from 40 years of public service as one of this country’s most distinguished safety officers, directing departments of police, fire, emergency services, wilderness rescue, and homelessness in major US cities. Ms. Myers has successively served as communications director of such public institutions as the University of Nevada, the United Way, and the YMCA/USA. “We do not care for, or go for help to, those who have no head for risks, or sense for living on the perilous edge."

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Dr. Glenn Aparicio Parry is president of the Jean Gebser Society, a faculty member of the California Institute of Integral Studies, and director of the grass-roots think tank and podcast, the Circle for Original Thinking. Dr. Parry organized the groundbreaking Language of Spirit conferences from 1999-2011, bringing Native leaders and Western scientists together in dialogue. He is the author of the award-winning books, Original Thinking, Original Politics, and Original Love. Dr. Parry values in our work the aspiration toward origins. “Why should not we also have an original relation to the universe?”

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Mr. Edwin Pease is co-founder of Stemann Pease Architecture, and Visiting Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the College of William & Mary. He has guided Innermost House at the meeting of architectural theory, traditional building design, and modern construction methods since 2012. Mr. Pease's work ranges from civic buildings and museums to educational and religious institutions to residential structures, across the whole spectrum from modern works to historical reconstruction. He was the first to support Innermost House in its growing partnership with William & Mary.

Dr. Robert Peiffer is Professor Emeritus of Ophthalmology and Pathology and Director of Research at the Univ. of North Carolina Chapel Hill; Senior Researcher in Ocular Pathology at the Scheie Eye Institute; and Ocular toxicologist at the Merck Research Laboratories. Dr. Peiffer’s great love of animals led to his distinguished career of research and treatment of ocular diseases, while his lifelong passion for classic literature led to his wide and insightful view of poetry. He was among the first to recognize in the American Wisdom Tradition a way to see into the deeps and distances of American life.

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Dr. Phillip Pirages is among the world's leading rare booksellers, whose book catalogs alone are collector's items. He specializes in providing medieval illuminated manuscripts, incunabula, fine bindings, private press books, fore-edge paintings, botanicals, and printed leaves to museums, universities and major private collectors. Among other volumes over thirty years, Dr. Pirages provided the 1632 King James Folio Bible that forms the core of the Innermost House Library. He lives as nearly as anyone among us in a kaleidoscopic wonderland of bejeweled and magical books.

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Dr. Michael Puett is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Among his many publications is the best-selling book, The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us about the Good Life. He is among the Harvard’s most popular teachers. He models to us a harmony of connections between anthropology, history, religion, and philosophy, particularly as constellated in the diverse cultures of Classical China.

Mr. Shax Riegler is Executive Editor at Architectural Digest magazine, and publishes widely in the field of design, travel and food, and collecting. Before Architectural Digest, he was executive editor of House Beautiful, and has held like editorial positions at House & Garden, Travel & Leisure, and Vogue. Mr. Riegler published the first article about the Innermost House project to appear in a national magazine, comparing it to Thoreau’s Walden. To his sensitive perceptions, Innermost House is a call from the buried roots of architectural form, longing for deliverance.

Dr. Michael Rutherford is Head of Molecular Genetic Pathology at the nonprofit EORLA Laboratories in Eastern Ontario. He holds doctoral and medical degrees from the University of Toronto, Queens University, and the University of Chicago, all founded upon his study of the classical liberal arts at St. John's College in Maryland. He meets us at the intersection of modern genetic science, religious spirituality, and classical literature. With his eyes focused on the genetic substrate of all life, Dr. Rutherford sees Innermost House as a humanizing light in a darkening technological world.

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Rev. Dr. James Sherblom has served as founding president of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, CEO of TSI Corporation, and CFO of Genzyme Corporation (Ret.). Raised in humble circumstances, he earned scholarships to Yale and Harvard, he was called to the ministry after retiring from corporate life, and served as senior minister at First Parish in Brookline for eleven years. He is the author of two books of spiritual history and biography, Spiritual Audacity and Spiritual Pilgrim. He recognizes in Innermost House a mirror of his own experience of cosmopolitan spirituality.

Mr. Richard Smith is associated with the Walden Pond Reservation, the Thoreau Society, and the Walden Woods Project, where he has for three decades distinguished himself as America’s foremost scholar-interpreter of Henry Thoreau, with a special interest in abolition and Native American spirituality. As a public historian and living history interpreter, Mr. Smith embodies to us a rare, living knowledge of the nation’s beloved mystic, philosopher, and transcendentalist. “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.”

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Mr. Daniel Springer is CEO of Ironclad and formerly CEO of Docusign, the world leader in the field of electronic signature technology. He also serves as Chairman of the Board of Ansira, a data-driven marketing agency, and of Heighten, a computer software firm, as well as Chief Operating Partner of Advent International. In addition, Mr. Springer serves on the Board of Trustees of the Urban School of San Francisco. He guides us across the broad sphere of prudential relations, particularly in forming our message to the business and technology communities.

Mr. Robert Stephens is founder of the Geek Squad, a renegade concept he built into an international icon in partnership with Best Buy. His originality and insight make him much in demand as an inspiring speaker across the country, particularly as a consultant to promising new ventures. Mr. Stephen's passion for the authentic touches everything he does, and since 2008 he has understood Innermost House as a touchstone of living authenticity in a false, fragmented, and reconstituted world. He guides us in matters of communicable authenticity and virtual outreach.

Dr. William Swagerty is Professor of History and Co-Director of the John Muir Center at the University of the Pacific. He has served as visiting scientist at the National Museum of Natural History and fellow at the Ford Foundation and the National Park Service, and is currently a Fulbright Senior Specialist. Prof. Swagerty represents to us the literary and environmental legacy of John Muir. His specialties include John Muir and the native peoples, the prehistory of North America, and the economic dynamics of human subsistence—all subjects of fundamental importance to our work.

Dr. Roger Thompson is Associate Professor and Program Chair of Writing and Rhetoric at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He also serves as Program Chair of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, and as Senior Editor for Don't Take Pictures, a leading professional magazine of fine art photography. Dr. Thompson guides us in our association with academic, literary, and artistic institutions which variously explore our transcendental inheritance. He understands the work of the Innermost House as a woodland experiment in the larger tradition of Humane Letters. 

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Ms. Yuiko Tokugawa lives in Kyoto, Japan and guides us from her native perspective of classical Japanese culture. Ms. Tokugawa began her study of the ancient art of Chanoyu in Japan when she was eight years old. She later continued her studies in Europe with the leading tea master, Rev. Ulrich Haas, before returning to Kyoto to enter the Urasenke lineage of practice, descended directly from Sen no Rikyu in the 16th century. To Ms. Tokugawa, Innermost House represents the Buddhist ideal of nothingness or "Mu," which to her means, "to meet the heart of Buddha."

Ms. Teresa Weisz is Vice President (Ret.) of Global Internal Communications for Marriott International, Inc., where she was responsible for imparting the company's cultural and business objectives to its 300,000 associates worldwide. Ms. Weisz represents us as Cultural Ambassador to the civic, cultural, and educational communities in the National Capital and Virginia Historic Triangle regions. To one of her professional experience, Innermost House is a global project in communicating the incommunicable, in developing a language for “the deeps of absolute and inextinguishable being.”

Dr. William White is Visiting Scholar in American History at Christopher Newport University and retired as Royce R. and Kathryn M. Baker Vice President of Productions, Publications and Learning Ventures at Colonial Williamsburg, where he headed website production, journal and book publishing, photography, audio and video production, the national teacher initiative, the Emmy-winning electronic field trip series, and all activities for K-16 classrooms. To Dr. White, Innermost House is inseparably linked to the major institutions of the Virginia Historic Triangle where he has spent his distinguished career.

Ms. Terry Tempest Williams is Writer-in-Residence at the Harvard Divinity School. She is the author of many books, weaving together strands of autobiography, poetry, ecology, and wilderness. Ms. Williams has been honored with the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western American Literature Association, the Robert Marshall Award from the Wilderness Society, the John Muir Award from the Sierra Club, and the Thoreau Prize for Nature Writing. As a lifelong seeker of environmental wisdom, she models to us a living commitment to healing the meeting places of nature, human culture, and spirit.

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Mr. Garland Wood is Master Carpenter (Ret.) in the Historic Trades at Colonial Williamsburg, the world's largest living history museum. Mr. Wood holds degrees from the University of Virginia and the College of William & Mary, but maintains that his real education began when he apprenticed under Master Woodwright Roy Underhill forty years ago. Today he leads the country's preeminent program of thoroughgoing historical reconstruction. As our Master Builder, he championed and personally oversaw the construction of our earthfast Virginia Frame as the crowning work of his long career.

Mr. Robert Yagid is Editor in Chief of Fine Homebuilding Magazine and Green Building Advisor, the leading journals on fine building craft, environmentally responsible construction, and outdoorsmanship in this country. He guides us as Chief Building Advisor. Mr. Yagid champions the traditional building trades as repositories of a culturally important but largely lost knowledge, and as a source of responsible employment and practical wisdom. To him, Innermost House represents a coming together of wilderness and fine craft to a high purpose, for the benefit of all. 

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Dr. J. William Youngs is Professor and Chair (Ret.) of History at Eastern Washington University, where his distinguished career has included many publications, lectures, appointments, grants, and awards for teaching and research. A dedicated and beloved teacher, his special gift lies in communicating the warmth and life of history as a “conversation around the fire.” Dr. Youngs guides us across the broad field of American history from the Founding through the Transcendentalists to the champions of the wilderness West. “The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.”

 
 
 


IN MEMORIAM
“He is attended as by a visible escort of angels.”

Dedicated to the Memory of those Beloved and Beautiful Souls
without whom
There would be no Innermost House Foundation

 
 

Mr. Ansel Adams
American Photographer
Carmel, California

Dr. Mortimer Adler
Editor in Chief
Encyclopaedia Britannica

Mr. Christopher Alexander
Architect and Design Theorist
University of California, Berkeley

Dr. William Theodore de Bary
Director, Center for the Humanities
Columbia University

Mr. Robert Burns
Founder, Regent International Hotels
Hong Kong

Dr. Charles Fracchia
Founder and Chair
San Francisco Historical Society

Mr. William Garry
Editor in Chief
Bon Appetit Magazine

Mr. John Gillis
Co-Founder and Principal
Vision Systems

Mr. Pasi Hamalainen
Director, Investment Committee
PIMCO Investment Management

Ms. Emily James
Nation Builder
Colonial Williamsburg

The Honorable James Leach
Chair, Nat. Endowment for the Humanities
United States House of Representatives

Mr. Todd McFadden
Founder and President
Higher Ed Diversity Consulting Group

Mr. Jack O’Neill
Founder and Principal
O’Neill Surf & Sea Odyssey

Mr. Charles Powell
Director and First Vice President
Academy of Motion Picture A&S

Br. Michael Quinn
President Emeritus
St. Mary’s College

Dr. Robert Richardson
Professor and American Biographer
Thoreau, Emerson, and James

Dr. Kevin Starr
Historian and State Librarian
State of California

Mr. Clint Wilson
President & Principal
TRIBECA Properties