Free Web Hosting Provider - Web Hosting - E-commerce - High Speed Internet - Free Web Page
Search the Web

William Irwin Thompson was born in 1938 in Chicago Illinois, the son of Irish-American parents, a Roman Catholic mother, Lillian Fahey Thompson, a native of Chicago, and a Presbyterian father, Chester Andrew Thompson, born on a farm in Indiana. The family moved to Southern California at the end of World War II. After graduating from Los Angeles High School in 1957, he went on to earn the B.A. at Pomona College in 1962. His formal education continued at Cornell University, where he held a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship (M.A. [1964]; Ph.D. [1966]). He became a member of the faculty in Humanities at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1965 and remained until 1968, when he left MIT to teach at York University in Toronto (1968-1973).

Although he has held various other visiting appointments--at Syracuse University, the University of Hawaii, University of Toronto, Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, and the California Institute of Integral Studies--Thompson has since remained outside of academe. In Passage About Earth (31), Thompson writes about individuals from the ‘60s--among them Ralph Nader, Buckminster Fuller, Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, John Lilly--who "left institutions behind to become institutions in their own right." In over thirty years of sustained intellectual brilliance, Thompson himself has become such an institution.

In 1972, Thompson founded The Lindisfarne Association, originally based in New York, later to find a permanent home in Crestone, Colorado, home of the Lindisfarne Fellows House and the Lindisfarne Chapel. For 25 years, under the sponsorship of its Dean--and chair of the Association--James Park Morton, Lindisfarne was head quartered in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.

A kind of counter-cultural think-tank, an international community of scholars, students and artists named after an Irish monastery that existed off the coast of England in the seventh century as a bastion against the coming Dark Ages, The Lindisfarne Association has, over almost three decades of imaginative work and interdisciplinary networking, brought together such individuals as Ralph Abraham, Mathematician; Richard Baker-roshi, Director, Crestone Mountain Zen Center; Christopher Bamford, Author and Publisher; Lois Cammack Bateson, Psychotherapist, Mary Catherine Bateson, Anthropologist; Wendell Berry, Poet and Farmer; Stewart Brand, Author and Publisher; Keith Critchlow, Art Historian; Richard Falk, Prof. of International Law; Hazel Henderson, Author & Economist; Wes Jackson, Botanist; Stuart Kauffman, Biologist; James Lovelock, Chemist; Amory Lovins, Physicist; Lynn Margulis, Prof. of Biology; Robert McDermott, Author, President, California Institute of Integral Studies; Michael Murphy, Author & Founder of Esalen Institute; Elaine Pagels, Prof. of Religion; Kathleen Raine, Poet & Editor; Russell Schweickart, Astronaut & Scientific Consultant; Gary Snyder, Poet; Paolo Soleri, Architect David Spangler, Author; Brother David Steindl-Rast, Author, & Benedictine Monk; Robert Thurman, Professor of Religion; John Todd, Co-Founder of New Alchemy & Ocean Arks, Falmouth Massachusetts; Sim Van der Ryn, Architect; Francisco Varela, Neuroscientist; Paul Winter, Musician; Arthur Zajonc, physicist; E.F. Schumacher, economist; Gregory Bateson, anthropologist; Nancy Wilson Ross, writer, Buddhist. The  Association also gave rise the Lindisfarne Press, which, though no longer an independent house, still publishes under its own imprint for The Anthroposophical Press:

Still active, Lindisfarne describes itself today as

an association of creative individuals devoted to the study and realization of a new planetary culture. Whether one chooses to call this new world view "planetary" or "post-modernist," there is a shared recognition that the industrial as well as the pre- industrial images of nature, self, and society no longer serve as adequate descriptions of our contemporary cultural reality and that the imagination is now being challenged to re-envision, re-think, and re-create the delicate balance of life that is poised between the nature of the past and the culture of the future. (from the Association website)

Thompson is the author/editor of The Imagination of an Insurrection, Dublin, Easter 1916: A Study of an Ideological Movement (1967); At the Edge of History: Speculations on the Transformation of Culture (1971); The Edge of History: Speculations on the Transformation of Culture (1971); Passages about Earth: An Exploration of the New Planetary Culture (1974); Evil and World Order (1976); Darkness and Scattered Light: Four Talks on the Future (1978); The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Sexuality, and the Origins of Culture (1981); Blue Jade from the Morning Star: An Essay and a Cycle of Poems on Quetzalcoatl (1983); Pacific Shift (1985; Gaia, A Way of Knowing: Political Implications of the New Biology (1987); Imaginary Worlds: Making Worlds of Myth and Science (1989); Gaia 2: Emergence, The New Science of Becoming (1991); The American Replacement of Nature: The Everyday Acts and Outrageous Evolution of Economic Life (1992); Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness (1996); Worlds Interpenetrating and Apart (1997).

Thompson is the father of three children, Evan, Hilary, and Andrew. He currently divides his time between Zurich, Switzerland and New York, where he serves as a curriculum designer and consultant to the Ross School in East Hampton.