Walking in Purpose:

2023 Spiritual Hero Shawn Ginwright, Ph.D.

Shawn Ginwright, Ph.D., says there's no reason he should be able to do what he does: youth advocate, Ivy League professor, bestselling author, culture transformer, social justice activist and pioneer in shifting how we treat ourselves and each other.

“I think what gratifies me is knowing I am where I am,” Ginwright says, “walking in purpose like I don't believe what I do is something of my choosing. I believe it chose me, and I've been obedient, faithful to that: serving young People of Color. We give them a sense of agency, educate other people so they can see the youth. God said, ‘Do this,' and opened up doors, created opportunities, and I just kept going. ‘God, that's a cliff right there. Are you sure I should take that step?’”

Ginwright credits Religious Science for contributing to a healthy foundation in his thinking and says leaning into our principles steadied him in his professional life. He is the author of four books, professor of education in the Africana Studies Department and senior research associate at San Francisco State University and, most recently, a professor at Harvard University.

Despite his impressive credentials, Ginwright grapples with insecurity, imposter syndrome, a relationship with oppression — all the material that fueled the concepts in his latest bestseller, “The Four Pivots.” “I don't call what I wrestle with ‘demons.’ I call them ‘flowers' that I have in my soul that just need to be tended to.”

Described as “an activist's roadmap to long-term social justice impact through four simple shifts,” the book is a vulnerable, soul-baring read, full of wisdom from mistakes and confessions of feelings of inadequacy we can all relate to.

The book’s subtitle — “Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves” — carries as much weight as the pivots themselves. “I'm not sure we've given ourselves spaces enough to reimagine who we are,” he says, “to heal from our wounds, to reconcile those relationships that are harmful, hurtful and toxic. We continue to move through and try to create a world of peace and justice when we may not have it ourselves.”

For Ginwright, imagining justice is about taking seriously our capacity to dream beyond the things that hurt us. It doesn't mean we withdraw from our ongoing engagement to achieve fairness. It means we devote time to recalibrating who we are in that journey.

As 2023's Science of Mind Spiritual Hero, Ginwright has three messages for our readers. His first is that most of this journey we call life is an inside job, “and the capacity for us to navigate and respond to those things on the outside is a function of who we are on the inside.”

We're all perfectly imperfect, and this is a practice, not a silver bullet. “And that's part of our journey,” he says, “being able to get up, brush yourself off and keep moving. So the second message I want folks to hear is be committed to a practice, and that means sometimes not doing it well.”

Ginwright's final message: Don't ever forget who you are. “We're born with shining copper, right? Then, over time, that copper tarnishes. And then we get used to being tarnished and think that's normal. It's a process of forgetting who we are. If we take time and space to clean off that tarnish, to reveal our copper, to really see ourselves shine — whatever that means for us — then that's a worthwhile endeavor and something we should all engage in.”

— In December, we honor a spiritual hero for the past year. The only requirements are this person cannot be part of Centers for Spiritual Living and must be doing impactful work in the world, aligned with the Science of Mind philosophy. Read the full feature about Ginwright in the December 2023 issue.

The Four Pivots

Shawn Ginwright says his work and devotion are inspired by Grace Lee Boggs, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Howard Thurman and Mahatma Gandhi. When writing “The Four Pivots,” he says he leaned into their examples, standing on their shoulders. From that vantage point, he clearly saw that the journey for true justice is an internal job first.

The four pivots he delves into in his book are:

1. Awareness: from lens to mirror
2. Connection: from transactional to transformative relationships
3. Vision: from problem-fixing to possibility-creating
4. Presence: from hustle to flow

Your endeavor is not so much to find God as it is to realize God's Presence and to understand that this Presence is always with you. Nothing can be nearer to you than
that which is the very essence of your being.

— Ernest Holmes, “A Holmes Reader on Practical Wisdom,”
page 18