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Upcoming New School Events
Sunday, September 5
, 2010
2 - 4 pm
Stories and Poems at the End of Life
A Reading and Conversation with Rachel Naomi Remen
Commonweal Library
First event in the new TNS End of Life Conversations series!
Rachel Naomi Remen is one of the earliest pioneers in the mind/body holistic health movement and the first to recognize the role of the spirit in health and the recovery from illness. She is Co-Founder and Medical Director of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program featured in the Bill Moyers PBS series, Healing and the Mind and has cared for people with cancer and their families for almost 30 years.
She is also a nationally recognized medical reformer and educator who sees the practice of medicine as a spiritual path. In recognition of her work she has received several honorary degrees and has been invited to teach in medical schools and hospitals throughout the country. Her groundbreaking holistic curricula enable physicians at all levels of training to remember their calling and strengthen their commitment to serve life.
Dr. Remen is Clinical Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the UCSF School of Medicine and director of the innovative UCSF course "The Healer's Art," which was recently featured in US News & World Report. She is founder and director of the Institute for the Study of Health and Illness, a ten-year-old professional development program for graduate physicians.
She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal, Riverhead Books, 1996. Her newest book, My Grandfather's Blessings: Stories of Strength, Refuge and Belonging, Riverhead Books, 2000, is a national bestseller. As a master story-teller and public speaker, she has spoken to thousands of people throughout the country, reminding them of the power of their humanity and the ability to use their lives to make a difference. Dr. Remen has a 48-year personal history of Crohn's disease and her work is a unique blend of the viewpoint of physician and patient.
RSVP to the New School at thenewschool@commonweal.org
Sunday, September 19
, 2010
2 - 4 pm
Sacrifice Zones
with Steve Lerner
Commonweal Library
Across the United States, thousands of people, most of them in low-income or minority communities, live next to heavily polluting industrial sites. In Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States, Steve Lerner tells the stories of twelve communities, from Brooklyn to Pensacola, that rose up to fight the industries and military bases causing disproportionately high levels of chemical pollution. He calls these low-income neighborhoods "sacrifice zones"—repurposing a Cold War term coined by U.S. government officials to designate areas contaminated with radioactive pollutants during the manufacture of nuclear weapons. And he argues that residents of a new generation of sacrifice zones, tainted with chemical pollutants, need additional regulatory protections.
Steve Lerner is research director of Commonweal, and the author of Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor; Eco-Pioneers: Practical Visionaries Solving Today’s Environmental Problems; The Earth Summit: Conversations with Architects of an Ecologically Sustainable Future; and Beyond the Earth Summit: Conversations with Advocates of Sustainable Development.
Learn more about Steve Lerner's book, Sacrifice Zones.
RSVP to the New School at thenewschool@commonweal.org
TNS End of Life Conversations Series
The End of Life Conversations are scheduled on the first Sunday of September, October, November, December, and February 2010/2011. The time is always 2pm-4pm. Mark your calendars!
September 5
Rachel Naomi Remen—Stories and Poems at the End of Life
October 3
Michael Lerner—Death and Dying: Lessons from the Commonweal Cancer Help Program
November 7
Susan Braun—Fighting Till the End
December 5
Eric Karpeles—The Last Threshold: Artists and Mortality
February 6
Steve Heilig—The Modern Evolution of Death
Commonweal Board Member Eric Karpeles is a gifted painter, author of Paintings in Proust, and translator of Proust's Overcoat. Steve Heilig is director of Public Health and Education for the San Francisco Medical Society and the Collaborative on Health and the Environment at Commonweal, co-editor of the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, and a clinical ethicist at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. Commonweal Executive Director Susan Braun has spent most of her career helping and advocating for people with cancer.
You may, of course, pick and choose among these conversations on the End of Life as among all New School events. But you can also choose to attend them all. We encourage those who intend to attend all sessions to let us know (TheNewSchool@Commonweal.org).
RSVP to the New School at thenewschool@commonweal.org
Sunday, February 13, 2010
2-4 pm
Reading and conversation with
United States Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin
Commonweal Gallery
We are honored to host this special event, featuring U.S. Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin reading his poetry and in conversation with Eric Karpeles.
In a career spanning five decades, W.S. Merwin, poet, translator, and environmental activist, has become one of the most widely read—and imitated—poets in America. The son of a Presbyterian minister, for whom he began writing hymns at the age of five, Merwin went to Europe as a young man and developed a love of languages that led to work as a literary translator. Over the years, his poetic voice has moved from the more formal and medieval—influenced somewhat by Robert Graves and the medieval poetry he was then translating—to a more distinctly American voice, following his two years in Boston where he got to know Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Adrienne Rich, and Donald Hall, all of whom were breaking out of the rhetoric of the 1950s.
W.S. Merwin’s recent poetry is perhaps his most personal, arising from his deeply held beliefs. He is not only profoundly anti-imperialist, pacifist, and environmentalist, but also possessed by an intimate feeling for landscape and language and the ways in which land and language interflow. His latest poems are densely imagistic and full of an intimate awareness of the natural world. He was named United States Poet Laureate for 2010-2011 and is a
Pulitzer Prize-winning and National Book Award-winning poet and essayist.
Learn more about W.S. Merwin's life and poetry, and hear recordings of him reading his poetry.
RSVP to the New School at thenewschool@commonweal.org
Other New School Events
Thursday, September 16, 2010
6:30 pm
Shodo Harada Roshi calligraphy demonstration
at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco
Download a flyer about this event.
Friday, September 24, 2010
2 - 4 pm
Martha Herbert, M.D., Ph.D.
EVENT CANCELLED
Instead, see Martha at the Morgan Autism Center Conference Saturday, Sept 25
The UCSF Department of Psychiatry, San Francisco Medical Society, and The New School at Commonweal are proud to present A New Paradigm of Autism Research and Treatment - a lecture at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute Auditorium.
Martha Herbert is the assistant professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, and the pediatric neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. She also directs the research program TRANSCEND.
Download a flyer about this lecture.
Fragrance-Free Events: Please refrain from wearing perfumes and colognes when attending events so that those who are sensitive to chemicals may also attend. Commonweal Gallery is not wheelchair accessible.
Directions to Commonweal
Commonweal is located in Bolinas, California at 451 Mesa Road, Bolinas, CA 94924.
Download a map (PDF) with driving directions to Commonweal.
Click here for driving directions from Google.