Meet your favorite author! Every Monday night I interview a Tikkun author on a conference call that you can join, and you can ask questions and make your own comments: half radio show, half virtual town meeting.

It’s free to you, but we ask on the honor system that if you join the call more than once that you do something to keep us going financially: subscribe to the magazine, join the Network of Spiritual Progressives (which includes a subscription) or donate. These three are the ONLY ways we have of surviving. But of course when you listen to this audio on the web it’s free to you and at no cost to us, so you can squeak by without feeling guilty that you haven’t contributed… or you could contribute anyway for the sheer joy of it.

There is some wonderful stuff on these weekly calls. You can download MP3s for your ipod or listen on your computer. All the past audio is saved here. We had a backlog after our last intern (the wonderful Daniel O’Leary) left, and now two volunteers have come forward to do the editing of the audio and conversion to MP3s (the most wonderful Jeff Moskin and Jack Lampl), and they have cleared the backlog.

So now you can hear all these great people. This last Monday, for example, Tikkun Daily’s Lauren Reichelt gave one of the very best of these interviews. It’s one thing to read her stunning article in Tikkun about community organizing, and another to hear her talk about it with such clarity and enthusiasm. If you wondered whether your vote for Obama had helped anyone or not, listen to Lauren tell how totally the new administration has turned around her work of providing health care to a low income county in New Mexico that is as large as Massachusetts and in which most people have no health insurance. Under Bush she kept a low profile and started blogging incognito lest she draw attention to herself and lose more for her district faster (her description reminded me of how dissidents in the old Soviet Union wrote samizdat); under Obama she has developed strong relationships with the administration and is writing openly under her own name. Links are in the first paragraph below.

Sending me the edited version of Lauren’s call, our volunteer just wrote “Very interesting and inspiring. Will be sending the link to a few colleagues.”

Here’s everyone from this year:

March 15: Lauren Reichelt: Healing in Community. A poverty-stricken town racked by violent crime comes together to build a playground but ends up accomplishing much more.Lauren Reichelt is the director of Health and Human Services for a county in Northern New Mexico. She has served as a successful community organizer in Japan and the United States and is writing a book about organizing as a healing process. She is a frequent blogger on Tikkun Daily, Daily Kos and elsewhere. The audio of the interview is here.

March 8: Bruce Ledewitz: Bruce’s article “The Future of God — and Secularism” is in the current Tikkun, available as a single copy here. Bruce Ledewitz is professor of law at Duquesne University Law School. He is author of American Religious Democracy: Coming to Terms with the End of Secular Politics (2007) and Hallowed Secularism: Theory, Belief, Practice (2009). Click here to listen to the audio of the conversation.

March 1: Bruce Peterson — A Spiritual Perspective on Family Courts. Legal culture promotes combat. Stressed families deserve better than that. We must invent a new system. Read his article in the March/April Tikkun here. Listen to the interview with Bruce here and the Q and A afterwards here.

February 22: Chris Hedges — Celebrity Culture and the Obama Brand. Pulitzer journalist Chris Hedges asks what our global celebrity President has done for us. Read his article in the Jan/Feb Tikkun here. Read about the debate between Chris and Rabbi Lerner here. Listen to the interview with Chris here.

February 15: Roger S. Gottlieb — The Mystery of Forgiveness. Deep attractions to both forgiveness and revenge are, psychological researcher Michael McCullough tells us, hard-wired aspects of our brain and personality. Read Roger’s article in the Jan/Feb Tikkun here. Listen to the interview with Roger here.

February 8: Harriet Fraad – America’s Two Depressions: One Economic, One Psychological & Spiritual. See our blog post here and her cover article for the Jan/Feb Tikkun here. Listen to the interview with Harriet here, and the Q and A afterwards here.

January 25: Josh Healey — poet and activist. See his article “Justice in Jerusalem” in the January/February 2010 print issue of Tikkun–in which the poet disinvited from J Street’s conference describes the generational divide in the Jewish Left. On Tikkun Daily see “J Street and the Poet” and “Josh Healey’s take on J Street.” Listen to the interview with Josh here.

January 18: Gary Dorrien — Christian Socialism, Commonwealth Economics. Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr, and the current relevance of the Social Gospel. Social Gospelers were dismissed for speaking an optimistic language of progress and social evolution-but they were more right than their opponents. Read this story from the January/February 2010 issue of Tikkun here. Read Dave Belden’s blog on the subject here. Listen to the interview with Gary here.

January 11: David Pinault –Sunni-Shia Sectarianism and Competition for the Leadership of Global Islam: Muslims are seeking global versions of Islam to replace the local versions from which globalization has uprooted them. Read this story from the January/February 2010 issue of Tikkun here. Listen to the interview with David here.