About Kinship Cafe
Seeking wisdom for living—together.
Kinship Cafe is a gathering place for people who want to understand what feels wrong in our lives and our world—and explore how we might live differently in response.
Our concern is wellbeing, both personal and social. We pursue it through careful study, honest conversation, shared experience, and community rather than through a creed, a prescribed program, or a promise of easy answers.
At the heart of our work is an ongoing engagement with the Daodejing—also known as the Tao Te Ching. We study the text in its historical context and place its insights into conversation with contemporary knowledge and the realities of life today.
We call the naturalistic reading that emerges from this dialogue—and its implications for how we understand and live—the Way of Kinship.
A voice from the past
Wisdom is always a dialogue with the past.
The Daodejing does not provide final answers for us to adopt. It helps redirect our attention.
The Daodejing emerged from a period of political disorder, social instability, and conflict over how human life should be organized. Its questions about control, status, certainty, desire, and accumulation remain surprisingly fruitful in our own context.
We do not treat the text as scripture, a final authority, or a collection of timeless answers. We study it carefully in its historical setting and then ask what its insights might help us notice about the world we inhabit today.
Why call Kinship Cafe Daoist?
Daoism has never been a single, uniform tradition. It includes religious communities, philosophical lineages, cultural practices, and many different interpretations of its foundational texts.
Kinship Cafe is not Daoist in a religious sense. Our orientation is closest to the philosophical traditions associated with Laozi and Zhuangzi, with the Daodejing currently serving as our central text.
We use “Daoist” because this relationship is essential rather than incidental. It allows people to understand where much of our inquiry begins without suggesting that we represent every form of Daoism.
Calling Kinship Cafe a center names both what it is and what we hope it can become: a gathering point for study, conversation, practice, and community.
Naturalism
Beginning with the world we share.
By Nature, we do not mean forests, mountains, and wildlife contrasted with people, cities, cultures, and technologies. We mean the whole reality within which all of these arise. Human beings and everything we create remain participants in Nature.
Our Naturalism begins with the world available to experience, investigation, and shared examination. It does not require certainty that nothing could exist beyond Nature; it simply does not depend upon another realm to explain this life or tell us how to live it.
Naturalism does not require reducing people to machines or dismissing meaning, value, beauty, spiritual experience, or the sacred. These are among the real possibilities of embodied, relational life. They can be explored without separating them from the natural world in which they occur.
Nature is not a ruler or moral authority. It does not command, reward, or punish, and calling something natural does not make it good. What Nature displays are patterns: conditions give rise to consequences, and our ways of living participate in what those conditions become.
This creates an important point of contact with the Daodejing. Both Naturalism and our reading of the text turn our attention from how we think the world ought to behave toward the patterns revealed in what it actually does.
The Way of Kinship
A contemporary reading, tested in life.
The Way of Kinship is not a separate philosophy placed alongside Daoism and Naturalism. It is the name we give to our naturalistic reading of the Daodejing and our developing understanding of its implications for life today.
We are distinct, but we are not separate. Every life arises through conditions it did not create, participates in relationships it does not fully control, and becomes part of the conditions from which other lives and actions emerge.
Other sources of knowledge—including science, philosophy, history, social inquiry, and lived experience—enter the conversation. They help us examine, test, correct, and develop our understanding rather than insulating it from questions or treating the Daodejing as infallible.
The Way of Kinship is therefore not a finished system to accept. It is a way of paying attention and an inquiry we continue together:
What are we participating in?
What consequences are emerging, and what relationships might allow more lives to flourish?
Meet your host
Hello, I’m Jim Jones.
I have spent much of my life studying the questions people use philosophy, religion, science, and culture to answer: What is real? What makes a life meaningful? Why do we suffer? How should we live together?
For more than twenty years, I have taught and facilitated conversations about Christianity, Daoism, and Naturalism. Moving among these different ways of understanding has made me attentive to both the possibilities and limitations of the language we use—especially words such as spiritual, sacred, Nature, and dao.
My role in Kinship Cafe is not to present myself as the person with the final answers. I am here to host the conversation: to bring historical context, ask questions, offer interpretations, and help create a space where people can examine ideas honestly and learn from one another.
The Way of Kinship reflects my own sustained engagement with the Daodejing, but it is not meant to remain the work of one person. Understanding develops through dialogue, experience, relationship, and the many perspectives members bring to the community.
Join the conversation
You do not have to agree in order to belong.
Kinship Cafe is for people willing to bring their questions, experiences, doubts, and insights into conversation with others. You are welcome to participate actively, explore the Classroom at your own pace, or simply listen for a while.
No prior knowledge of the Daodejing is required. There is no creed to affirm and no prescribed level of participation.
The community is private, approval-based, and completely free.