The Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) was voted by the members and visitors of Universe Spirit as our October Organization of the month.
NSP is an interfaith movement welcoming to "spiritual but not religious" secular people as well as religious progressives. The Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) is an association of people interested in:
1. Changing the Bottom Line in America. Today, institutions and social practices are judged efficient, rational and productive to the extent that they maximize money and power. That's the Old Bottom Line. Now Here is the NEW BOTTOM LINE for which we advocate: We believe that they should be judged rational, efficient and productive not only to the extent that they maximize money and power, but also to the extent that they maximize love and caring, ethical and ecological sensitivity and behavior, kindness and generosity, non-violence and peace, and to the extent that they enhance our capacities to respond to other human beings in a way that honors them as embodiments of the sacred, and enhances our capacities to respond to the earth and the universe with awe, wonder and radical amazement.
2. Challenging the misuse of religion, God and spirit by the Religious Right, and educating people of faith to the understanding that a serious commitment to God, religion and spirit should manifest in social activism aimed at peace, universal disarmament, social justice with a preferential option for the needs of the poor and the oppressed, a commitment to end poverty, hunger, homelessness, inadequate education and inadequate health care all around the world, and a commitment to nuclear non-proliferation, environmental protection and repair of the damage done to the planet by 150 years of envrionmentally irresponsible approaches to industrialization, investment, trade, energy and transportation.
3. Challenging the many anti-religious and anti-spiritual assumptions and behaviors that have increasingly become part of the liberal culture, and challenging as well the extreme individualism and me-firstism that permeate all parts of the global market culture. We will educate people in social change movements to carefully distinguish between their legitimate critiques of the Religious Right and their illegitimate generalizing of those criticisms to all religious or spiritual beliefs and practices. We will help social change activists and others in the liberal and progressive culture become more conscious of and less afraid to affirm their own inner spiritual yearnings and to reconstitute a visionary progressive social movement that incorporates the spiritual dimension, of which the loving, spiritually elevating and connecting aspects of religion has been one expression (but so has the group-in-fusion experience of the movements of the 30's and the 60's and the communitarian aspirations of many other efforts--social healing and health care, progressive summer camps, the wide appeal of service and service learning, the women's spirituality movement etc).
The Network is a project of The Tikkun Community, so when you join you automatically receive the option of free membership in The Tikkun Commnunity. You will also receive a one year subscription to Tikkun magazine.
Our perspective is more fully articulated in the Core Vision of The Tikkun Community which you can find at www.tikkun.org ,and the article there entitled Why America Needs A Spiritual Politics. If you feel uncomfortable with the perspective articulated there, you should not join the Network of Spiritual Progressives which is an organization formed around those ideas.
We will also draw inspiration from Jim Wallis' book God's Politics and we will encourage use of Rabbi Michael Lerner's forthcoming (Jan 2006) The Left Hand of God as a study text for local chapters of the NSP in the Winter and Spring of 2006, as well as Michael Nagler's The Search for a Nonviolent Future. These three books, plus the articles by Peter Gabel in Tikkun Magazine, should be considered foundational. But we would also strongly urge members of our Network to study
- Mary C. Grey's Sacred Longings: The Ecological Spirit and Global Culture,
- Kirk Schneider's Rediscovery of Awe,
- Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World,
- Cornel West's Democracy Matters,
- Alice Miller's The Body Never Lies,
- John Dear's The God of Peace,
- Rev. Tony Campolo's Speaking My Mind,
- Sister Joan Chittister's Heart of Flesh: A Feminist Spirituality for Women and Men,
- Sharon Welch's After Empire,
- Charlene Spretnak's The Resurgence of the Real,
- Peter Gabel's The Bank Teller and Other Essays on The Politics of Meaning,
- Jonathan Sacks’ To Heal a Fractured World,
- Robert Inchausti’s Subversive Orthodoxies,
too many of the books of Walter Brueggemann, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Rosemary Ruether, Robert Thurman, Thomas Merton, Sharon Salzberg, Sylvia Boorstein and Wendell Berry to list separately,
- Zalman Schachter Shalomi’s Ageing and Sageing,
- Arthur Waskow’s Down to Earth Judaism: Food, Money, Sex and the Rest of Life,
- Harvey Cox’s When Jesus Came to Harvard,
- Jorge Ferrer’s Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality, and
- Michael Lerner's Healing Israel/Palestine.
Many of the local chapters of The Tikkun Community have already been functioning, in effect, as the local branch of the Network of Progressive Spiritual Activism, and you are welcome to join the local Tikkun Community and become active with it in these activities. However, there are some chapters that do not have a particular interest in this set of concerns, and are more involved in Healing Israel/Palestine or environmental or other related issues. In that case, you are welcome to create another local chapter that is focused primarily on the Network of Progressive Spiritual Activism projects, and to coordinate with the existing local chapter on activities of shared interest. A National Advisory Board (in formation--and you are free to nominate people after you've received their consent) will give guidance to Rabbi Lerner and the other co-chair of The Tikkun Community who will provide the national direction for the organization.
The Network has the following foci for its first two years of operation (from April 2005-April 2007):
1. The Conferences on Spiritual Activism, July, 2005, Berkeley, CA and Spring, 2006, Washington, D.C.
The goal of these conferences is to bring together spiritual activists who share our goals, and then seek to further define the approach that we have been developing and its implications for social policy and political activism. We hope to have a yearly conference of this sort. In 2007 we will finalize a Platform which we will then attempt to bring into the national debate.
2. Support for an Independent Judiciary
The systematic attempt by the political Right to portray the courts as involved in a conspiracy to undermine religious values poses an immediate danger to the separation of church and state. That danger goes beyond the specific efforts of the Bush Administration and its allies in Congress to pack the courts with right-wing judges, something it has already been doing successfully. The greater danger still is that the Right will succeed in creating a climate of fear in which liberals and moderates in the judiciary, and even in the Congress and in other positions of authority in the media, educational institutions, government and corporate life, will feel intimidated to speak out or pursue their own views for fear that they too will be vulnerable. For that reason, the NSP (Network of Spiritual Progressives) will encourage its members to organize local activities in support of an independent judiciary. We encourage local groups to launch a weekly information picket in front of court houses aimed at supporting the independence of the judiciary, at encouraging judges and potential jurors to use their own intelligence and intuitions in making judicial determination, and to educate the public to the many benefits that have accrued to American society by virtue of an independent judiciary. We will also seek to do outreach to the legal profession and the media around these issues.
3. Spiritual Democrats, Spiritual Greens
We will seek to provide education on our core issues to the Democrats, the Greens, other political parties, environmental organizations, women’s organizations, gay and lesbian organizations, the labor movement, civil rights and civil liberties organizations about the need to create a climate welcoming to religious and spiritual people and concerns. Members of the Network will meet with elected officials, party and social change movement activists, and others in these movements, to develop political platforms that have a spiritually progressive message and to seek to uproot attitudes and messages from these movements that are hostile, ridiculing or unfriendly to progressive spiritual and religion practices and beliefs. NSP activists will seek to strategize with these movements about ways to incorporate a spiritual-positive approach into their movements and to avoid religio-phobia. NSP members may decide to form a caucus inside any of the political parties across the spectrum in order to introduce our perspective.
4. Study and Theory Development
Using Rabbi Michael Lerner’s book The Left Hand of God (HarperSanFrancisco, Jan. 2006) Jim Wallis’ book God’s Politics. and Michael Nagler's book The Search for a NonViolent Future as foundational, the NSP will try to educate itself and then others about what a progressive spiritual politics could look like in the U.S. In particular, the NPSA will attempt to convince the social-change-positive liberal and progressive movements to adopt and popularize the Spiritual Covenant with America that will be proposed in The Left Hand of God.
5. Think Tank Activity
The NSP will seek to develop an ongoing think tank that produces detailed analyses of contemporary policy issues.
6. Conference Call
To link activists in a more interactive way, we will have a bi-weekly conference call. It is understood that the conference call is not a decision making instrument for the Network, but rather a way to exchange ideas and information.
7. Outreach to the Media
The NSP will seek to hone media-oriented skills so that members may get their message heard more effectively in both mainstream and the growing alternative media.
8. New Bottom Line in Your Profession, Union or Work Place
The NSP will encourage people within each profession or work place to form ongoing discussions and consciousness raising groups aimed at developing a concrete vision of what a New Bottom Line might look like when applied to that particular profession or workplace.
9. Exercising the Responsibility that is Part of our Democratic Heritage
We must nonviolently resist attacks upon our freedoms and what we deem to be excesses of our foreign and domestic policies. Such nonviolent resistance would include, at the appropriate time and place, civil disobedience for which we would accept fair legal penalties as an integral part, and many other nonviolent mechanisms that have been used with success, for example against corrupt and dictatorial regimes, in the decades following the careers of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Some people in our Network of Spiritual Progressives have begun to consider the possibility of Non-violent civil disobedience in support of our spiritual politics agenda, including bringing the troops home from Iraq, transforming American foreign policy from a dominate-the-other to a generosity-for-the-other approach to security, ecological sanity, support for a Global Marshall Plan, an end to US torture of prisoners, single-payer health care, funding of programs for middle income and the poor and rescinding of tax cuts for the rich, defense of an independent judiciary, human rights, and separation of church & state. They are discussing the possibility of calling for a major mobilization of spiritual people around these themes in Washington D.C. sometime in the Spring of 2006. The discussion is purely exploratory at this point, but there is general agreement that sometime in the next year and a half there should be some national activity challenging the drift of American politics by presenting an alternative, focused through a public action of a non-violent nature, specifically led by and framed by and for spiritual and religious people (plus any secular friends who are open to a spiritual and non-violent focus, non-violent both in substance and in the discourse).
10. Ethical Consumption and Environmental Issues
We are in the very early stages of organizing a global movement to encourage consumption of goods that have been produced by companies that are just both in pay and treatment of their workers, and produced in ways that are environmentally sustainable and make a contribution to the common good. This will take years to put in place, but our goal is to have every religious and spiritual movement on the planet coordinating a massive effort to discourage consumption of goods that are destructive to the social justice or environmental climate.
11. Support for Progressives in All Denominations
There are many progressives within Protestant denominations, Reform, Reconstructionists, Conservative and Renewal Judaism, Islam, Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and others. Many are trying to resist the assault of the Right in their own religious communities. They often face a national leadership that insists on ""unity" as the highest goal, pressuring progressives to soft-pedal their own perspective (while the Right continues to make headway by attacking the national denomination as "too liberal"). NSP provides a place for people from different religious communities to strategize together, and for people within the same denomination or religion to meet outside the formal context of their own community so that they can plan ways to coordinate their activities and get mutual support.
12. Fundraising so that All These Efforts Can Reach Their Full Potential
We all know that the Religious Right has been powerful in part because it has convinced millions of middle-income people to make regular donations to their cause. Liberals and progressives have only done this in a serious way for political candidates, but not for building the intellectual, spiritual and media infrastructure that is essential to launch an effective counter-movement to the Religious Right. If you have skills or connections that could help us launch an effective fund-raising drive, please work with us on this.
For more information please visit www.spiritualprogressives.org