Words that inspire action

What Matters Now: 7 Healing Letters to a Friend with Cancer is a personal and practical guide born from over 40 years of intimate counsel with people facing cancer. Written by Commonweal founder Michael Lerner, these 7 letters distill what he’s learned from sitting with more than 2,000 souls navigating a cancer diagnosis, and from his own encounters with life-threatening illness.

It’s a companion, the kind of book you want on hand when a friend tells you they’ve just been diagnosed—something you can give them that says: “You’re not alone. Here’s what matters.”

In this invitation to Exploring the Art of Being, July 2026 Visiting Scholar Catherine Olweny invites us into her world, where her lived experience as a migrant and a black woman; a student of literature, medicine, and hypnosis; and as both a doctor and a healer affect her worldview. Share her journey at Commonweal, cultivating meaningful, experiential ways to benefit patients and clinicians that center healing arts, collective narrative practices from the Aboriginal Australian traditions, and mindfulness-based approaches as the foundation to her work.

In this introductory document to the Secret Body self-paced course, Host Michael Lerner offers an introduction to Jeffrey Kripal’s work, as well as suggestions on what to read to orient yourself to his work before, or while, you explore the conversations.

In this playful terrapsychological exploration of Bolinas, California, Summer 2025 Visiting Scholar Craig Chalquist exemplifies how his worldview brings the land around us to life, affecting our decisions, thoughts, and our relationship with the land itself.

In this concluding article, Summer 2025 Visiting Scholar Craig Chalquist summarizes his residency experience, which exemplified for him how imaginative modes of consciousness allow us to perceive places, beings, buildings, and the elements, normally considered mute objects, as speaking presences, and how tending the living presence of place helps assemble a worldview that centers Earth, humaneness, justice, equity, reenchantment, participation, and imagination.

In this invitation to Land All around Us, Summer 2025 Visiting Scholar Craig Chalquist invites us to join him as he embarks on his residency. In his worldview, imagination, story, and creativity let us tune in on a Greater Conversation unfolding continually within us and with the land around us. He asks: How are we called to respond deeply and soulfully to our turbulent time? Might that response include joining others to weave into being a new worldview?