Meet Samantha Kirby on the Phone Forum this Monday (she'll be calling in from Chicago not the desert)

Every Monday night there is a fascinating community meeting near you: as close as your phone, in fact. You can join in from your armchair or your washing-up sink. Better still, thanks to the wonder of the web, you can listen in at any time on your computer or iPod.

It’s like a Tikkun radio show for the first twenty minutes, in which I interview some of the people most interesting to spiritual progressives. Then I unmute the lines and you can offer your own questions and comments to the speaker for their response: the Q and A is sometimes the best part.

There is no phone company charge: the call is free. This is our gift, though, to those who subscribe to Tikkun (only $25 a year, $18 for students, and you can do it online) or join the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP), which is a sliding scale fee and is a way to support our work beyond the magazine.

So check out the recordings of past Phone Forums online and if you’d like to be on the conference call itself, please subscribe and just call in (no one will ask if you are signed up, and if you truly can’t afford it, call anyway).

The last two Tikkun / NSP Phone Forums were on vital topics — 1) progressive Hinduism and the future of India, and 2) restorative justice and the future of prisons — with highly engaging speakers: Murli Natrajan and Sunny Schwartz. We lacked the time to get them edited and posted at first, but now, thanks to our new web intern, Daniel O’Leary, you can listen to them online or as MP3 downloads via their links on the Phone Forum page. The twenty minute Natrajan interview is here, the Schwartz one here, and for links to their Q and As go here again.

This coming Monday, you can meet Samantha Kirby on the Phone Forum. Samantha and Eboo Patel wrote “Hungry for Change: Interfaith Service in Action” in the current Tikkun, about Muslim and Jewish students who organized a fast-a-thon on their U.S. college campus during the holy month of Ramadan to promote understanding and service. Samantha simultaneously entered our Under 25 Writing Contest and, because she wrote one of the five best essays out of more than forty we received, she had the highly unusual distinction of two articles printed in one issue of Tikkun! Her essay on the challenges of interfaith social change work is online here.