Monthly Archives: May 2019

Spring Letter From Commonweal

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Dear Commonweal Friends:

I hope this Spring Letter finds you well. I write you this personal letter twice a year.
Commonweal thrives in our 44th year.

You will soon receive the Commonweal News. This personal letter focuses on four projects I guide—the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, Healing Circles, Beyond Conventional Cancer Therapies, and the new Resilience Project.

Healing Circles in Our Fifth Year
In April, we held our 206th week-long Commonweal Cancer Help Program in 33 years. Janie Brown, the visionary founder of Callanish in Vancouver, BC, shadowed our senior co-leader, Stuart Horrance. Janie came to Commonweal for a training program shortly after watching the Bill Moyers PBS series Healing and the Mind in 1993. At the end of the training, she asked Rachel Naomi Remen how she should start her work. Janie recalls that Rachel said, “Well, you go home. You find your people. And then you start.” Janie did exactly that. Now Janie will return to lead her first Commonweal Cancer Help Program in October, having led more than 60 retreats at Callanish. Continue reading →

Can the Universe Story Bring Us Together?

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A New Biography of Thomas Berry

“The universe,” Thomas Berry wrote in his prescient Dream of the Earth, “is a single, gorgeous, celebratory event.”

Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grim, and Andrew Angyal recently published Thomas Berry—A Biography. It is the definitive biography of one of the most revolutionary thinkers of our time. Thomas Berry was a cultural historian who later called himself a “geologian.” I spoke with Mary Evelyn about this biography in an incandescent New School conversation (our third, including a wonderful spiritual biography).

Mary Evelyn is co-founder of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale with her husband, John Grim. They both worked intimately with Thomas Berry for more than 30 years. Continue reading →