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:

Welcome to AlterNet readers! We love the new AlterNet site [where Harriet Fraad's Tikkun article was cross-posted] and we hope you will love this blog, which aims to refresh the souls of weary leftists. We challenge the religiophobic parts of the Left to engage in better strategies that connect with the American people, who find the crises of modernity to be spiritual as well as economic (but often it is only the Religious Right that speaks to the spiritual crisis). Atheists are as welcome here as believers: for us spirituality is more about how we act than what theological beliefs we hold. We have ideas for Obama, of course, but he’s not listening to us. Tikkun Olam means to heal and repair the world. Let us know in the comments whether you think our posts and our art gallery are helping to do that.

Our lead article in the current print issue of Tikkun is “American Depressions” by psychotherapist Harriet Fraad. The Table of Contents of the whole issue is here — check out Chris Hedges on Celebrity Culture and the Obama Brand and other great pieces, most of which you still have to buy the print magazine to read: try your local bookstore or get one here. You can also subscribe to get the most visionary magazine on the American Left!

Harriet Fraad, on the public access TV show The Struggle (http://thestruggle.org/MediaP.htm)

Harriet Fraad says she wrote “American Depressions”

out of a great sadness that Americans have been unable to defend their lives and stop the bleeding of their wounded salaries, their jobs, their homes and their relationships. I read about the militant and successful demonstrations and other tactics that defended Europeans and wondered, what happened to us?

The Left is well known for providing a gloomy read on America — after all, somebody has to tell the truth. But it used to be that the Left was also the place to go for vision about this world, the dream of socialism. That dream has taken some knocks, just as the mainstream American dream has taken some knocks. What’s to keep a person’s spirits up?