Reflections on nature, culture & the inner life
Dear New School Friends: I hope this finds you well. I've been thinking about sources of hope in the face of COVID and the polycrisis. **** COVID COVID isn't going away any time soon. In fact COVID will be with us for the foreseeable future. I've started a little...
Dear New School Friends, First of all, I want to thank all of you for staying with The New School through the past year of extraordinary turmoil. The pandemic, the politics, the disruption of our lives, and all the rest. I want you to know that The New School is...
Dear Commonweal Friends: I hope this finds each of you as well as you can be. What a year this has been. While the whole world wallowed in the anguish of the pandemic, the Forbes list of millionaires increased their net worth from $8 trillion to $13 trillion. There...
We founded Commonweal 44 years ago. Our vision was to support healing ourselves and healing the earth. We have worked toward that end ever since. Healing differs from curing. A cure ends a disease. Healing is a movement toward wholeness. Healing can take place when we...
Dear New School Friends: Many of you know that just over six months ago I had a life-saving surgery for an abdominal aortic aneurysm at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center. The six-month recovery was often arduous. The whole experience catapulted...
Dear New School Friends: I hope the new year finds you as well as you can be. As many of you know, I had a lifesaving five-hour surgery for an abdominal aortic aneurysm at University of California San Francisco Medical Center at the end of August. The surgery and the...
November 2020 Dear Commonweal Friends: I hope this personal letter finds you well. Writing weeks before you receive this letter is an almost impossible task. The Republic is at risk. Our world is changing in ways we can scarcely imagine. But Commonweal rises to meet...
Dear Commonweal Friends: I hope this letter finds you well. This time has been unlike anything we have ever seen. This brave new world has all of us hard at work bringing our programs online, building our resilience infrastructure, and adapting our work to the fierce...
Dear Friends, When older people greet each other from six feet away, I’ve heard them say: "I'd like a younger person to get the ventilator." But ventilators are no panacea for COVID-19, reports National Public Radio: Most coronavirus patients who end up on ventilators...
Loneliness, Mother Teresa said, is the poverty of the West. Never has that been more true. We are urged to "shelter in place," away from our work, schools, friends, family, lovers, and all the places we love. Not everyone listens. The young are in the streets enjoying...