Healing and the Mind
In this article, Michael outlines his philosophy, evolution of thought, and history of healing at Commonweal.
A New Paradigm of Physics and Cosmology
Dear TNS Friends, I hope this finds you as well as possible. From the very inception of The New School (TNS), I sensed that the program would become Commonweal's best medium for communicating with the rest of the world. And so it has proven to be. And what a...
Fall Letter from Michael Lerner
November 2023 Dear Commonweal Friends: I hope this finds you well in these difficult times. We cannot know what will be happening happening in the Middle East, Ukraine, and elsewhere as you read this letter. Wars are unpredictable. The toll in lost lives and lost...
The Commonweal Way: Summer Letter from Michael Lerner
Dear Commonweal Friends, I hope this finds you well. This is my summer letter to the Commonweal community. It comes at a special point in our history. This year I turn 80. Our executive director, Oren Slozberg, turns 60. And it’s 50 years since I co-founded Full...
Navigating the Polycrisis–Life in Turbulent Times
Dear Friends: How can we explain the explosive emergence of global awareness of the polycrisis over the past year, 2022-2023? Three years ago, almost no one had heard of the polycrisis. What happened? What Is the Polycrisis? First, let’s roughly define the...
The Long View: the Launch of Our Omega Website
Dear TNS Friends, What a strange time. Awareness of the global polycrisis—whatever we choose to call it—is deepening across the country and around the world. We've formally launched our new website, omega.ngo. You can sign up to get Stanley Wu's highly regarded The...
The Year of the Polycrisis
Dear New School Friends: I want to thank each of you who contributed, or continued to contribute, to The New School in 2022. You've made a critical contribution to our work. It's never too late to add your support. So if you intended to contribute, or are moved to...
Fall Letter from Commonweal
Dear Commonweal Friends, I hope this letter finds each of you as well as you can be in these tumultuous times. Oren Slozberg: A Leader for Commonweal In September, I turned over the helm at Commonweal to my beloved friend and partner Oren Slozberg. Oren has worked...
Call the World “the Vale of Soul Making”
Dear New School Friends, Call the world, if you please, "the Vale of Soul Making," [wrote the poet John Keats to a friend.] Then you will understand the use of the world. I hope this finds you as well as you can be in troubled times. Truth is, times have been troubled...
And If Not Now, When?
Dear TNS Friends: These are the days of harvest blessings in many traditions. A good harvest was often a matter of life or death—of starvation or of plenty for the days and nights of dark and cold in the Northern Hemisphere. It is also a good time to turn inward...
Shed a Little Light
Dear New School Friends: Awareness of the global polycrisis is spreading everywhere now. Most often people tie the polycrisis to climate change. Fewer realize that the real challenge is the unpredictable interaction of all the global stressors—environmental, social,...
Embrace Fearlessly this Burning World
Dear New School Friends: The great writer and naturalist Barry Lopez participated in a Commonweal retreat a few years before he died. That is where I came to know him. On May 31, Ben Ehrenreich, himself a great writer and naturalist, published this New York Times...