About
- What is Ivory Bakery?
- Where did the name of Ivory Bakery and the idea behind it come from?
- Why a bakery?
- Who runs the bakery?
- How can I help?
1. What is Ivory Bakery?
Ivory Bakery is an educational research and media company that is dedicated to making the highest and tastiest wisdom of the world’s religions helpful and enjoyable to you in your daily life and beyond.
It has 3 primary goals:
- To create a framework for religious education by going back into the religions themselves and opening them up and connecting them together from the inside;
- To educate and support people from a traditional religious background who are starting to ask questions regarding how to enlarge the way they think and speak and feel about religion;
- To draw out the most intelligent and compassionate words, ideas, and practices from the world’s religions and recast them in ways we can all understand, use, and enjoy in our daily lives today.
Through the Religion 2.0 blog + podcast as well as forthcoming books, CDs, DVDs, one-on-one coaching, talks, workshops, and retreats, Ivory Bakery brings the highest ideas from the ivory tower down to the corner bakery where everyday people can enjoy them.
2. Where did the name of Ivory Bakery and the idea behind it come from?
You’ve heard of the ivory tower? A long tower made of ivory that stretches toward the sky, rooms filled with the learning of the ages in books, and an ascending staircase? Scholars go up into the tower, lose themselves in their work, only to emerge days or months later, hardly able to communicate the findings of their solitary study to the people they meet on the street?
I spent more than a few years in the ivory tower myself. When I finally came down, I wanted to talk about all the things I had learned with my family and friends—and I found that I couldn’t. It was like we spoke two different languages. For all the years of my learning, I found that it did not include how to make ideas practical and how to communicate them to a wider audience.
For some time, I was quite disappointed by all this and I wanted to metaphorically-speaking burn down my ivory tower by abandoning all that I had learned there. If my education couldn’t help anyone else, what was the point? After a few years of brooding over this situation, I decided to do something very different.
Instead of burning the ivory tower down, why don’t I build a bakery on the first floor? Even the scholar, the artist, the specialist who locks himself or herself in the ivory tower gets hungry and might want to come down to the bakery for a bite to eat. The gardeners working in the courtyard outside get hungry too and they might want to come in for a bite as well.
In the bakery at the foot of the ivory tower, the scholar and the gardener can meet and sit at the same table and talk about their work. The scholar has something to teach the gardener and the gardener has something to teach the scholar. For example, the scholar might teach the gardener about what is possible. The gardener might teach the scholar about what is practical. Though their work is different, they enrich each other. From many meals together by the fireside, friendship, warmth, and a new shared language of possibilities and practicalities can emerge.
So Ivory Bakery is where the ivory tower meets the corner bakery.
3. Why a bakery?
Cakes, pastries, croissants, muffins, breads, sandwiches. The study and practice of religion has been for me a very tasty and nourishing and comforting affair, so why not a bakery?
4. Who runs the bakery?
My name is Rahim Taliesin Snow and I am the baker-in-chief. You can find out more about me here.
5. How can I help?
You can help in 2 very important ways:
- Subscribe to Religion 2.0, read the blog, listen to the podcast, do the exercises, upgrade your religion. In other words, participate and take full advantage of the religious education we are offering so that it actually helps you grow in your understanding of yourself and others, and thereby contribute to creating a more fun and peaceful world.
- Tell your friends, family, colleagues, even students you might know about what we’re doing and invite them to participate.
Bon Appétit!
