Sarah Jane Bradley
Hi.
Always peeping the horizon. (This is from an old photo shoot where I was helping a friend start her jewelry-making business — turquoise is my stone and I just like the photo. Photo credit: Rachel Heydemann)
I’m Sarah. I’m a popular educator, community organizer, renegade monk, and listener/dreamer/writer committed to reading “the signs of the times” and nurturing a Just Transition and what my elder and teacher Pat McCabe (Woman Stands Shining) calls a “thriving life paradigm.”
With my soul sister Brittany Koteles, I co-founded Land Justice Futures (formally the Nuns & Nones Land Justice Project), a national organization focused on organizing religious communities toward rematriation and reparations. I am especially focused on weaving together prophetic education and praxis for a nascent movement in collaboration with Haudenosaunee elders and the emerging collective: Mother Law & Complicit No More. On a local level, I organize in the Palestinian solidarity movement and am learning to grow food and build cadre grounded in a revolutionary, liberatory politic.
My work has brought me into relationship and shared life with a rich, diverse community to whom I feel accountable and grateful for kinship — from women religious in their 80s living in monasteries and convents, to anarchists and artists living in sheds, to queer and trans activists organizing kink and sex work communities, to nomads saving seeds. It’s a strange and beautiful weave.
Forever a student and provocateur of adjacent possible ways of being, living, working, and learning, I seek to live into new forms — new forms of community, of relating with time, place, and a primacy of spirit. In these new forms, I seek to to interrupt, deconstruct, hospice and compost dominant systems and old, toxic ways of being AND and to remember, midwife, and co-create emergent-and-ancient systems and medicinal ways of being our world needs. My work has increasingly focused on bridging and translating for unlikely alliances across generations and wisdom transmission across traditions, imagining new forms of religious/communal life and sacred space stewardship, and finding ways to support the ecosystem of spiritual activists, new contemplatives, and community responders .
Previously, I’ve co-founded or been on founding teams of: Nuns & Nones, bringing together Catholic Women Religious and spiritually diverse Millennials for shared contemplation, social action, and wisdom exchange; the Open Master’s, an initiative supporting lifelong learners in the emancipatory tradition of popular education; and Alt*Div, a 3 year learning laboratory and grassroots alternative to divinity school for activists, artists, and community builders from diverse lineages, traditions, and modalities. Before all that, I worked for a number of organizations at the intersection of new livelihoods/economic empowerment, social entrepreneurship, and systems change—Ashoka, IDEO, Samasource. Current and previous collaborators and supporters in her work include the On Being Project, Movement Generation, NDN Collective, the New Economy Coalition, the International Youth Initiative Program, How We Gather and The Formation Project (now Sacred Design Lab), among others.
Sarah lives in Northern New Mexico, on traditional Tewa Pueblo lands.
What are your “9 things”?
People tend to have 8 things they end up talking about. Here are 9.
You can also see my favorites page and sacred texts library.
