Theodore Richards

Handprints on the Womb is Theodore Richards’ first collection of poetry. It was published in 2009 on Inkwater Press. It includes a forward by Brian Swimme, the cosmologist and philosopher, and the photography of the author, some of which you can see here. To purchase, click...
Confronted with global warming, economic injustice, and a profound sense of meaninglessness, many in the modern world have come to the conclusion that we are at a turning point in human history. Cosmosophia: Cosmology, Mysticism, and the Birth of a New Myth offers a fresh approach to the crisis of the modern industrial...
The Crucifixion is my first novel. It begins with a vision—“The Dream”—I had in a little bathroom where I spent a night on the beach in Mozambique in the 90s, seeking shelter from a storm. In writing it, I uncovered, to a certain extent, the personal mythology in which I was living as a young man seeking the diverse...
“Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Education is the subject of much public debate. Politicians and bureaucrats, educators and parents, students and concerned citizens all have an interest—and a stake—in the way we educate our children. But...

The pursuit of wisdom... is not really too different from the work of the quantum vacuum pulsing matter into being; or of matter coalescing into the star; or of the star giving birth to the elements of the living Earth; or of the Earth churning the elements into life; or of life co-creating the complex web of relations in the ecosystem; or of the African plain giving birth to the curious ape, who created worlds with the stories told beside the fire under the stars. The legacy of this entire process remains with us, in the depths of the womb of the human soul, pregnant with the mysterious and unknown future.

Theodore Richards is a poet, writer, and religious philosopher. He has received degrees from various institutions, including the University of Chicago and The California Institute of Integral Studies, but has learned just as much from practicing the martial art of Bagua; from traveling, working or studying all over the world; and from the youth he has worked with on the South Side of Chicago, Harlem, the South Bronx, and Oakland. He is the author of Handprints on the Womb, a collection of poetry; Cosmosophia: Cosmology, Mysticism, and the Birth of a New Myth, recipient of the Independent Publisher Awards Gold Medal in religion and the Nautilus Book Awards Gold Medal; the novel The Crucifixion, recipient of the Independent Publisher Awards bronze medal; and Creatively Maladjusted: The Wisdom Education Movement Manifesto, which radically re-imagines education. Theodore Richards is the founder of The Chicago Wisdom Project and teaches world religions at The New Seminary. He lives in Chicago with his wife and daughter.