by Michael Lerner
“If you want social change, throw a better party,” says my friend Rick Ingrasci. The New School is Commonweal’s way of throwing a better party. The topics are often serious. But the experience of getting together to explore great questions of nature, culture, and the inner life is just a whole lot of fun. Jacquie Mallegni is a brilliant coordinator of all the pieces of The New School.
On March 14 we attracted the West Marin farm and garden crowd with John Wick and Peggy Rathman who described the work on their ranch co-creating the Marin Carbon Project:
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is not enough to reverse global warming: we must also reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The Marin Carbon Project is investigating the potential for specific land management practices to enhance sequestration of atmospheric carbon dioxide as organic matter in rangeland and agricultural soils in California.
On March 7, beloved Bolinas physician Sadja Greenwood, MD, MPH, gave a great presentation on evidence-based nutritional supplementation. Sadja and I both knew that any recommendations on supplements would be controversial, but we wanted to establish a starting place for a shared appraisal of a reasonable supplementation program. We also hoped to create recommendations that health practitioners in the Coastal Health Alliance, our West Marin community clinics, could share with their 6000 patients. (See Sadja’s recommendations.)
On January 31, Thomas Kirsch, MD, talked with us about Carl Jung’s The Red Book. Kirsch, a Jungian analyst married to another Jungian analyst, was himself born to two first generation Jungian analysts. He knew Jung as a child. He was president of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco and the International Association of Analytical Psychology. He taught Jungian psychology at Stanford Medical Center for many years, and is the author of an acclaimed study, The Jungians. One of the most interesting facts to emerge from Kirsch’s work is the strong role of European Jewish Jungian analysts trained by Jung in making Jungian psychology a global movement—despite Jung’s well documented flirtations with Fascism.
Those are a handful of the events. We also continue to deepen our collection of telephone interviews. One stunning recent interview was with Colin Greer, Executive Director of The New World Foundation in New York. Greer is a polymath who combines exceptionally creative philanthropy with a simultaneous career as a playwright, poet, and essayist. We discussed his new play on Spinoza, the 17th century Portuguese-Jewish philosopher excommunicated by the Jewish community in Amsterdam who went on to become one of the founders of modern philosophical thought.
Because we are throwing a better party, The New School is outgrowing our Library, where we can seat about 60 people maximum. Listeners spill out onto the deck and into the hallway. So we are moving more events upstairs to the Commonweal Gallery and working hard to find funds to soundproof the room and install new lighting, new carpeting, and an elevator for better handicapped access.
You can download podcasts of all New School events on the Commonweal website (www.commonweal.org/ new-school/)—and sign up to receive podcasts and updates. We won’t abuse your email box. We always welcome contributions to The New School.
The New School is supported by grants from the Bet Lev Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and the Whitman Institute, as well as contributions from many individuals, for which we are profoundly grateful.
