The emerging Occupy movement is constellating and engaging with dominant cultural complexes in US society.  This presentation will apply theorist Bill Moyer’s model of successful social movements to frame and illuminate the intersection of potential collective and individual transformation in the unfolding life-cycle of this movement.

Ken Butigan has a Ph.D. in the historical and cultural studies of religions, with an emphasis on nonviolence in five religious traditions.  His teaching, activism, and research have focused, among other things, on the spiritual practice of social change.  In this presentation he will engage with Tom Singer’s unpacking of dominant cultural complexes by exploring how the current Occupy movement may be bringing these complexes to the fore.  He will then present Bill Moyer’s “movement action plan” and its eight stages of social movements (“Doing Democracy,” New Society Publishers, 2001) and develop its psychological and existential implications for the emerging life-cycle of the Occupy movement and for our larger world..