The New School at Commonweal

William Rosenzweig Food: Business, Movement, or Both? Join Michael Lerner for a conversation with William Rosenzweig about sustainable living and ethical business. William is the Republic of Tea’s founding CEO, and also co-author of the bestselling book The Republic of Tea: How an Idea Becomes a Business, recently named one of the 100 best business books of all time. William Rosenzweig William is...

Robert N Bellah Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age ~Co-presented with Point Reyes Books~ Join Michael Lerner for a conversation with Robert Bellah—a great sociologist of religion—about religion in human evolution. Robert N. Bella Robert is a renowned author, international speaker, and Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California at Berkele...

Michael Tilson Thomas in conversation with Eric Karpeles The New School at Commonweal is very pleased to present this conversation between San Francisco Symphony Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas and Commonweal Board Member Eric Karpeles. Informal and wide-ranging, the conversation will be accessible to music-lovers of all degrees, and in keeping with Commonweal’s ongoing commitment to explorin...

Kate Munger and the Threshold Choir Making Kindness Audible through the Gift of Song Threshold Choir is a network of a cappella choirs of primarily women’s voices: a community whose mission is to sing for and with those at the thresholds of living and dying. Founded in 2000 by Inverness resident Kate Munger, beauty and strength now bloom in the more than 100 choirs worldwide who provide singers at...

Brother David Steindl-Rast Spiritual Biography Brother David Steindl-Rast is an 86-year-old Benedictine monk who many consider the successor to Thomas Merton at the intersection of Christianity and Buddhism. Together with Merton, Brother David helped launch a renewal of religious life. From 1970 on, he became a leading figure in the House of Prayer movement, which affected some 200,000 members of...

Brother David Steindl-Rast Spiritual Biography Brother David Steindl-Rast is an 86-year-old Benedictine monk who many consider the successor to Thomas Merton at the intersection of Christianity and Buddhism. Together with Merton, Brother David helped launch a renewal of religious life. From 1970 on, he became a leading figure in the House of Prayer movement, which affected some 200,000 members of...

Brother David Steindl-Rast Spiritual Biography Brother David Steindl-Rast is an 86-year-old Benedictine monk who many consider the successor to Thomas Merton at the intersection of Christianity and Buddhism. Together with Merton, Brother David helped launch a renewal of religious life. From 1970 on, he became a leading figure in the House of Prayer movement, which affected some 200,000 members of...

Brother David Steindl-Rast Spiritual Biography Brother David Steindl-Rast is an 86-year-old Benedictine monk who many consider the successor to Thomas Merton at the intersection of Christianity and Buddhism. Together with Merton, Brother David helped launch a renewal of religious life. From 1970 on, he became a leading figure in the House of Prayer movement, which affected some 200,000 members of...

David Whyte A Pilgrimage of Identity ~Co-presented with the Institute of Art and Healing~ A captivating speaker with a compelling blend of profound poetry and insightful commentary, David Whyte is one of the few poets to take his perspectives on creativity into the field of organizational development. His life as a poet has created a readership and listenership in three normally mutually exclusive...

Christine Brandes and Eric Moe An Afternoon of Classical Music The New School at Commonweal presents Soprano Christine Brandes and pianist/composer Eric Moe, offering a recital of rich music-making. Two contemporary song cycles by Eric Moe (one set to poems by American poet May Swenson, the other to poems from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus cycle) will flank Joseph Haydn’s thrilling canta...

Terry Tempest Williams When Women Were Birds: A Reading Terry Tempest Williams has been called “a citizen writer,” a writer who speaks and speaks out eloquently on behalf of an ethical stance toward life. A naturalist and fierce advocate for freedom of speech, she has consistently shown us how environmental issues are social issues that ultimately become matters of justice. “So here is my question...

Tribute to Adrienne Rich Presentation by Eric Karpeles Adrienne Rich, who died at her home in Santa Cruz on March 27, 2012, was a writer and thinker of enormous stature. Her first book of poetry was singled out by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets series in 1951 and Rich continued publishing books of poems in every subsequent decade. She used her awareness of herself as a woman—full of passio...

Pauline Tesler Integrative Law: A Healing Approach for Resolving Divorce and Other Conflicts A divorce is the fate of about half of all marriages, and is the reason most Americans will encounter the legal system. In addition to the inherent stresses of divorce, many families experience serious and avoidable collateral damage as a consequence of handling complex and personal family systems breakdow...

Paul Hawken An Uprising: The Global Crisis and Our Response Paul is a truly visionary thought and action leader. He is among the great contributors to the global effort to re-imagine our place in nature and how we may live balanced and creative lives together. In these recordings, Paul talks with Michael Lerner about the interlocking global environmental, financial, and human crises we face and th...

Paul Hawken An Uprising: The Global Crisis and Our Response Paul is a truly visionary thought and action leader. He is among the great contributors to the global effort to re-imagine our place in nature and how we may live balanced and creative lives together. In these recordings, Paul talks with Michael Lerner about the interlocking global environmental, financial, and human crises we face and th...

Emilie Conrad Moving Medicine: Continuum, Movement, and Enlivening Health Visionary somatics pioneer, Emilie Conrad, shares with us the “medicine” of movement, from the cellular to the global, as it relates to health, thriving and the limitless possibilities of what it means to be human. In this conversation, she discusses the work of Continuum as a way to uncover our birthright as part of an ongo...

Irene Borger Ten Thousand Joys and Ten Thousand Sorrows ~Co-presented with the Institute for Art and Healing~ Attention Listeners: You may want to do some writing while you listen along with the participants of this event. If so, have a pen and some paper handy and use the pause or start/stop buttons of your audio player to pause the audio while you reflect and write. The sources of our writing li...

Stephen Parker, PhD Jung, Art, and Healing I have been struggling with this never-ending wound for more than a year, and still it haunts me by the hour. A heart attack is also a deeply isolating event. Others act as if their lives will go on forever, but how can I participate in this charade, knowing deeply and irrevocably that any moment could be my last one? I identify much more with people who...

Donald Abrams, MD, and Clint Werner Marijuana: Is It Medicine Yet? Please join us for a science-based talk and conversation with Donald Abrams and Clint Werner on the medicinal uses of this ancient herbal remedy. Donald Abrams, MD Don is one of the world’s foremost experts on the medicinal uses of marijuana, especially for cancer. He is professor of clinical medicine at the University of Californi...

Tom Nash Our Particular Universe: Understanding What We Know, What We Don't Know (Yet) See article about the event on Michael Lerner’s blog. Join Michael Lerner in a conversation with physicist Tom Nash in a combination physics tutorial and cosmology exploration… pondering questions such as whether there is one universe or many, whether the universe is alive or inert, and whether life is an accide...

Eric Karpeles The Last Threshold: Artists and Mortality Bolinas painter and writer Eric Karpeles will talk about the role that artists have played in helping to imaginatively frame and comprehend the idea of how we cease to be. How is it that artists, engaged in the most willful need to express their very beings, seem to overcome the fear of the loss of self? Focusing on three distinct art forms—p...

Cam Trowbridge West Marin County and Marconi's Dream Around-the-World Wireless Network This presentation—followed by a conversation with The New School’s Kyra Epstein—held at the Point Reyes National Seashore’s Red Barn, focused on Guglielmo Marconi’s construction and operation of two wireless radio stations in Bolinas and Marshall between 1912 and 1919. Marconi’s ambitions and business acumen, th...

Rebecca Katz and Jeanne Wallace, PhD The Cancer-Fighting Kitchen A cancer diagnosis is shocking, disorienting, and capable of scrambling anybody’s mental GPS—not to mention their culinary compass. To find a stabilizing force, a grounding activity such as cooking and eating well can provide more than nourishment; it can offer a huge psychological boost. Join Rebecca, Jeanne, and Michael Lerner for...

Robert Hass, Eric Karpeles, and Others Community Reading of Walt Whitman's 'Song of Myself' In 1855, Whitman published 795 copies of his book Leaves of Grass, paying for publication himself. “Song of Myself,” as it came to be known, was the first experiment in long, free-verse poetry—a poem that former U.S. poet laureate and Whitman scholar Robert Hass calls, “the most unprecedented poem in the En...

David Spangler Apprenticed to Spirit Michael Lerner talks with David Spangler about his life and his recent book, Apprenticed to Spirit. Apprenticed is a memoir of David’s journey to understanding how we can learn to lead lives of greater blessing and to be sources of blessing and service for the world as a whole. In the book, David documents his encounter in 1965 with an extraordinary presence, w...