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:

“The future of God depends on the future of secularism,” writes Bruce Ledewitz in the March/April 2010 issue of Tikkun.

Ledewitz is a secularist but not of the Hitchens/Dawkins variety. On his blog Ledewitz says of this Tikkun issue:

Almost all of the contributors to the magazine commenting on the theme of God seem to share [Rabbi Arthur] Green’s framework: science first and religion adapts. Hans Kung, Aryeh Cohen and Zaid Shakir are exceptions…

First, I’m in the same boat as most of the others, but I don’t call it religion. I call it Hallowed Secularism. Thus, you don’t have to join organized religion. Actually, I can’t join organized religion and I don’t understand how others manage to do so.

Second, and more significant, I argue in my recent manuscript, Higher Law in the Public Square, that if God can mean what these writers mean by God, then In God We Trust does not violate the Establishment Clause.

Join us tomorrow, Monday, March 8, when Bruce Ledewitz will be my guest on the Tikkun Phone Forum at 6 pm Pacific time, 9 pm Eastern time.