Rainn Wilson, actor and author of Soul Boom; Parker Palmer, educator and founder of the Center for Courage and Renewal; Rabbi Laura Geller, Jewish leader and author; and spiritual innovators from around the world explore what this platform offers and why it matters.
Developed by Sacred Design Lab with support from Templeton World Charity Foundation, the platform includes more than 350 resources — books, podcasts, organizations, and tools — so that spiritual innovators everywhere can find the guidance, inspiration, and connections they need on their path.
Watch video with the below player
The platform’s goal is to strengthen that shared work by connecting practitioners across traditions and time zones, and by offering both inspiration and practical tools for building communities of belonging, creativity, and care. Leading the launch are Casper ter Kuile, Angie Thurston, and Ben Poretzky of Sacred Design Lab, who have spent over a decade studying how people today find meaning, connection, and belonging outside traditional religious institutions
“New technologies, new cultural encounters, and economic forces are transforming how people connect and make meaning and experience transcendence,” said Casper ter Kuile. “The work of spiritual innovation is to build the world that our hearts know is possible,” he noted. This is “important work in a time when it’s really needed.”
For Sacred Design Lab, “spiritual innovation” is both a description and a practice. As Angie Thurston explained,
“Spiritual innovation is novel ways to address spiritual longings that contribute to the flourishing of individuals, communities, and the ecosystems of which we’re part.”
She added that this creativity can happen anywhere: within established faiths, at their edges, or in secular contexts. It is “the courageous work of meeting the soul needs of our time.”
To illustrate, the team shared reflections from global collaborators featured on the platform. Edina Leković, a Muslim spiritual innovator in the U.S., described innovation as using “the technologies and cultural currency of the day” to reach spiritual transcendence. Noosim Naimasiah, Pan-African scholar-activist in Kenya, called it “the practice of recreating our relationship with our ancestry and our shared divinity.” And Cristine Takuá, Maxakali Indigenous philosopher and educator of Brazil, noted that “perhaps innovation isn’t the word”— it could be more accurate to talk about it as “transformation.”
Three innovators shared how this work takes shape in their own contexts.
From Switzerland, Claudia Kohli, co-founder of École de Silence, a center dedicated to fostering contemporary spiritual formation in secular contexts which brings spiritual formation into everyday spaces, from restaurants to hospital partnerships, said: “We need to enjoy working together, to feel a spark together. It has to be fun to collaborate. Joy and diversity and curiosity. For me these are the key aspects.”
From Saudi Arabia, Raghad Fathaddin founded Sangha, a regenerative innovation hub grounded in Islamic principles and influenced by Buddhist mindfulness. She shared: “Walking meditation made me realize that sometimes the solutions are so simple… In every step there’s healing, coming back to yourself and to Mother Earth.”
And from California, King David Walker described co-founding Blackfulness, a mindfulness app designed to reduce stress in the Black community by reducing stress in Black women FIRST. He said: “We saw the need for leveraging spiritual innovation — bringing together mindfulness and cultural nuance for stress reduction.”
Each story shares similar challenges that the new Spiritual Innovation platform aims to meet: building sustainable models, forming partnerships, and finding language that bridges sacred and secular worlds.
As Ben Poretzky explained, the platform grew out of three years of research and community-building:
“We wanted to share the research, the learnings, the resources, a way to catalyze the field in an ongoing way.”
The result is an interactive site that invites exploration through three main features:
The intention is to “keep growing a user-generated toolbox that supports spiritual innovators in every context,” said ter Kuile.
Two pioneering faith leaders reflected on what it means to sustain this work across decades.
Parker J. Palmer, author, educator, and activist who focuses on issues in education, community, leadership, spirituality and social change observed that “the world is in a spiritual crisis… the human yearning to be connected with something larger than one’s own ego.” He urged participants to begin small: “We earned our stripes by doing this work on the ground — not just in a book.”
Rabbi Laura Geller, Jewish leader and author of Getting Good at Getting Older shared how Judaism itself has evolved through centuries of reinvention.
“If there’s no blessing or ritual for an important moment in life, we need to create one.”
She emphasized that thoughtful ritual innovation, grounded in history yet responsive to lived experience, can renew both personal and communal life.
“Forty percent of young people do not believe that change is possible… That’s the most insidious pandemic of all.”
But his message, drawn from his book Soul Boom, was ultimately one of courage and purpose:
“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
This project was made possible through the support of a Templeton World Charity Foundation
grant. View the research project description here.
