4:00 p.m.
Registration opens

5:00 p.m.
Outdoor receptions with live music, conversation, and your first encounters with fellow guests on the Cathedral grounds

7:00 p.m.
An evening experience in the Cathedral nave to open the festival and orient the heart: a sequence of story, music, and provocation around the question animating this gathering: What, precisely, is struggling to be born in our time?

9:00 p.m.
Late-night light projection in the Cathedral nave

8:00 a.m.
Morning prayer and reflection

9:00 a.m.
Morning plenary sessions in the Cathedral nave asking: What is a human being? What is Christian humanism, and why might it be important to recover right now? Where is it already alive, across traditions and in places you might not expect?

11:00 a.m.
Coffee break

11:30 a.m.
A debate in the nave: Is this a time to build, or a time to re-found? Before the afternoon turns constructive, two seminal thinkers will press the hardest version of the question, surfacing the tensions between reform and reinvention, preservation and rupture, and whether the story we’re in bends toward redemption or tragedy.

12:30 p.m.
Picnic lunches in small groups in partnership with BreadCoin

2:00 p.m.
A Time to Build: Afternoon seminars, workshops, debates, and salons spread across the Cathedral’s crypt, outdoor gardens, and storied Virginia Mae Center. Sessions will confront the crisscrossing forces of dehumanization reshaping our institutions, our communities, and our inner lives, and ask what it looks like to build against them with imagination, moral seriousness, and joy.

3:30 p.m.
Explore & Encounter: Wander through curated exhibits of Christian humanist witness past and present, make something with your hands in one of the crypt and courtyard workshops, sit for a poetry reading, take a guided tour of the Cathedral’s architecture and glass, or find a quiet corner in one of the Nave Nooks near our onsite bookshop and simply be still. This hour is self-directed by design: there is no single path, only many doors opening into one larger house.

5:00 p.m.
Free time and supper with friends old and new at a string of restaurants we’ve reserved near the Cathedral. No agenda, no microphones, just a good meal and unhurried conversation. Our treat!

7:30 p.m.
Abundanza! A public variety show in the Cathedral nave, presented in partnership with the Washington National Cathedral. Music, theater, poetry, dialogue, and story, woven together into a single evening that asks what Christian humanism sounds like when you let it sing. Open to all.

10:00 p.m.
Late-night conversation and music in the Cathedral crypt

8:00 a.m.
Morning prayer and reflection

9:00 a.m.
Final workshops and seminars, turning from diagnosis toward commitment: What will you carry home? Who are we? What is the Understory and how can we nurture its health and its life?

11:00 a.m.
Closing nave session with a celebratory brunch

12:30 p.m.
Festival concludes