This bracing pick-me-up half-hour production seems perfect during the current economic crisis. Millions of down-and-outers need to be reminded of the power of positive thinking. But Norman Vincent Peale wasn’t the first one to latch onto this notion. In “As You Like It,” Shakespeare’s banished Duke utters the line, “Sweet are the uses of adversity.”

According to Elizabeth Lesser, Co-founder and Senior Advisor with the Omega Institute, the worse things get, the more we need to hang “onto the tiniest shred of hope.” Rather than wallow in anger and despair at being out of work, out of synch with the good times we’ve come to expect here in the wealthiest country on the planet, we need to immerse ourselves in the “river of change.” It’s not necessary to pore over river imagery in the writings of the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus – or quote President Obama – to realize that this moment in time, what one poet called “the still point of the turning world,” will give way to a new moment and perhaps a wholly new scenario.

It’s hard to avoid sounding like a platitudinous Pollyanna, but Lesser manages to stay grounded in her references to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi, who triumphed over adversity. Although she might have quoted any number of self-help providers, Lesser has a healthy skepticism about gurus. “Be careful about putting people on pedestals,” she says. Her book, “Broken Open,” deals, among other things, with her divorce, a “life quake,” from a husband she may well have put on a pedestal. “All humans are works in progress,” she says, having moved beyond her bad marriage. If this is possible, can we not move beyond Square One – or Square Forty-seven – where we have been unhappily parked for months or years?

A couple of minor quibbles:

1) At one point during the program a woman named Molly from Dayton, Ohio phones to say she lost her job, only to end up with a far better position. I wish there were more local feedback from a piece that’s apparently part interview, part talk show. (I also know how hard it is to elicit phone calls from local listeners.)

2) Because of the way Lesser speaks directly into her mic, her plosives crackle with static. This problem could be corrected electronically.

Full disclosure: the co-hosts of this “Interconnect” segment are two of the most knowledgeable, animated personalities I know on public radio. Over the years when WMUB was part of Miami University I worked with John Hingsbergen and Cheri Lawson. If ever anyone’s voice radiated a smile, it was Lawson’s; I recall her unfailingly chipper voice on morning fundraisers in Oxford, Ohio. As to Hingsbergen, he has the intellectual salt of a Jesuit and the street cred of a comeback kid whose has tasted – and savored – the sweetness of adversity.

Attention, PDs: Hingsbergen and Lawson’s Present Moment Productions is open for business.