Having had to turn away several hundred people after we had 1,300 registered for our July conference in Berkeley, we want to encourage you to register early for the D.C. conference May 17-20 at All Souls Church in Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, if you are interested in starting a local NSP (Network of Spiritual Progressives) group in your area, and want some help finding like-minded people, contact Simone@tikkun.org and we'll try to put you in touch with people to invite to the first meeting.

In February, 2006, HarperSanFrancisco will publish Rabbi Lerner's new book The Left Hand of God which presents a full vision of the ideas behind The Network of Spiritual Progressives. If you can set up a large public event at which Rabbi Lerner can speak about these ideas anytime from February 20-May 15, we will try to arrange for Rabbi Lerner to be there. We encourage mini-spiritual activism conferences in your area building energy for the national conference in D.C. Let us know what you have in mind and we will try to assist.

Reviving the American Spiritual Left--Conference May 17-20 2006 Plus: Creation of a Network of Spiritual Progressives

INVITED: "Spiritual but not Religious" Secular Progressives, Religious Progressives, and anyone else who agrees with our founding statement on Why America Needs a Spiritual Left and wants to help us build it.

In Western societies today, the major crisis is not the deprivation of money but the deprivation of meaning-- and people desperately hunger for a framework of meaning that can connect their lives to a transcendent purpose beyond "making it" or maximizing money, power or fame. It is this spiritual crisis that the liberal and progressive forces have been unable to address because they don't even recognize it as a central reality of contemporary life.

The most effective way to challenge the misuse of God, religion and spirituality by the Religious Right is to create a Spiritual Left--welcoming not only to people associated with traditional religions, but also to the many secular people who have deep spiritual yearnings and sensitivities but who have not felt comfortable articulating them within the context of established religious communities.

The Network of Spiritual Progressives that we seek to create is actually a unique attempt at inclusionary politics, uniting secular and religious people who affirm the spiritual dimension of human experience, are unwilling to see the spiritual linked to the political program of the Right (particulalry its militarism, denial of human rights, insensitivity to environmental survival, and preferential option for the rich while dismantling educational, medical and social services for the needy, demeaning of homosexuals, and attempts to criminalize abortion), and who seek A New Bottom Line of love and caring and generosity to replace the selfishness and materialism of the Bottom Line of contemporary global capital.

We are seeking to foster a new atmosphere in liberal and progressive culture that is open and curious about spiritual and religious perspectives, open to learning from them, and willing to engage in serious discourse with progressive spiritual and religious people without a tinge of cynicism or an automatic dismissal of their concerns as inherently and necessarily reactionary, irrational or flaky.

We hope to create is an awareness of the need for cooperation, coordination, and mutual support among the many religious and spiritual traditions where spiritual activism is taking place, and to strengthen that activism through sharing the teachings, rituals, and wisdom that each of these traditions embodies. Similarly, we hope to provide an organizational framework in which activists in social change movements who have not found adequate support for spiritual dimension in those movements can meet with others to strategize how to promote a new consciousness within their movements, and a framework for people in existing religious and spiritual communities who have not found adequate support for a transformative social/political vision to meet with others to strategize how to biuld that consciousness in their religious and spiritual communities. In the context of The Network of Spiritual Progressives we provide a context for the kind of thinking and support for a spiritual/poltiical integration that can then be brought back into our lives, our community organizations, our workplaces, our families--knowing that we have an international community of support. And from that base, we can become an important voice and presence in American public life, providing a coherent and spiritually sensitive alternative to the Religious Right.

The Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) is a project of The Tikkun Community whose Core Vision can be found at www.Tikkun.org/core_vision . If you join the Network, you automatically become a member of Tikkun Community (and receive a year subscription to Tikkun Magazine). If you are already a dues-paying 2005-dues-paid member to the national organization of The Tikkun Community, there is no additional fee to become involved in the Network of Spiritual Progressives. The NSP will also seek to foster cooperation and coalition among organizations who share its goals.

The core uniting those who work on this project will be agreement with the goals articulated in the article "Why America Needs a Spiritual Left" which can be found in Tikkun Magazine, Jan/Feb. 2005 www.tikkun.org/rabbi_lerner/society_politics. Out founding documents are Jim Wallis' God's Politics and the forthocming (in Jan 2006) The Left Hand of God by Rabbi Michael Lerner, but we intend to expand and more fully define a vision of The Network of Spiritual Progressives through the process that will begin in July 2005 and Feb 2006, and which will lead to a more formal shared perspective which will emerge for shared discussion, amendment, transformation and ratification in our July 2007 conference.

Our gatherings will be an opportunity to show and tell, to share wisdom, to learn each other's traditions without fear of being proselytized into any particular religion, and to build mechanisms for ongoing contact and information sharing.They will also be an opportunity to provide training of relevant skills for doing this work. And we expect to have an annual gathering of this sort each year.

If you cannot come to either of the Founding conferences, you can still be an important part of shaping the activities and creating the reality of the Network of Spiritual Progressives. Please join the organization as a dues paying member (else we can't even begin to get this off the ground). Read the perspecitve on the organization's activities at
www.tikkun.org/community/spiritual_activism_conference/document.2005-04-27.5780162886 or hit the connecting link above. We will contact you about ways that you can be involved with us after you've joined! But it would be far better if you could come to one of these conferences (and if money is the problem we will try to work with you to find a way for you to be with us if you are seriously committed to the vision of this project--so please call if money is the obstacle to your comng, to 510 528 6250).

We seek to bring people from every major religious community, plus spiritual people who are not affiliated with any religious community. But this is not yet entirely an open gathering-it is meant only for people who agree with and wish to implement the perspective articulated in the "Why America Needs a Spiritual Left" article by clicking HERE!!

Conference Agenda: a tentative agenda should be posted by March of 2006.

Interns

We are seeking interns to work on building the Network of Spiritual Activists. Interns work at our Berkeley office as volunteers. They attend the conferences for free. In the summer, we need fulltime interns (40 hours a week from beginning of January to June 2006). We also need nine-month interns from Jan 2006-Sept 2006 (15-20 hours a week, to permit you to get paid employment elsewhere alongside the internship). Interns are sometimes hired as openings develop in staff positions at Tikkun. We also need volunteers who would work from Washington D.C. to help coordinate the conference. We wish we had paid employment, but noone is funding us to do this conference.
To apply:send a self-revealing letter about your person worldview, your life experience, your skills (computer literacy required), what parts of the Core Vision of The Tikkun Community appeal to you and which do not (read the Core Vision at www.tikkun.org), when you would be available to intern, and your life-experience and passions, to liz@tikkun.org.

Housing

You may want to book through an online service. There may also be some limited home accommodations or floors for sleeping bags for students--so if the only way you can afford to come is if you can get free accommodations, contact emily@tikkun.org to see if we can find something for you.

Registration: If you believe in what we are doing Register now! Don't wait till we have our speakers and program developed fully, because there may not be enough space by that time. Read our vision at www.tikkun.org and if you are turned on by it and agree with the "Why America Needs a Spiritual Left" article, come help us make that happen. Plan now--we had to turn away hundreds of people in July, including friends of those who had already registered (because although their friends "planned" to attend, they didn't tell that to us and we didn't have enough space. The same problem is likely to occur in May, so get your friends to register NOW).

Send a check to us now, made out to TIKKKUN, and put "NSP Conference" in the lower left hand corner of the check. Mail it to Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP), 951 Cragmont Ave, Berkeley, Ca. 94708.

Incomes under $40,000/yr: $90

Incomes $40k-$80k/yr: $250

Incomes over $80k/yr: $360.

Students: $50 plus zerox of your current registration card at your college or university, and you must bring that card to the conference to validate your lower cost entry.

There are NO one day-passes. This is an organizing conference, not an array of entertainments, so we are going to give priority to people who can take the time from work or their busy lives to dedicate themselves to helping us build this very ambitious project! If you can't, we still want to urge you to become part of the Network of Spiritual Progressives and work with us. BUT IF SPACE IS NOT FILLED AT THE END, THEN WE WILL ALLOW ONE DAY PASSES AT 60% OF THE PRICE FOR THE FULL CONFERENCE AT YOUR INCOME LEVEL.

Questions?

For other information, including request for scholarship or work/study, email KATHRYNY@tikkun.org OR EMILY@TIKKUN.ORG or call EMILY or Kathryn at 510-528-6250.

For Organizations

As part of developing an effective network of spiritual activists and organizing a national conference we welcome support from other organizations. There are several ways and levels to help build the network and conference. You can work with us on the conference in three ways:

1) Sponsoring Organizations

Agree to: give us a mailing list of over 5,000 names OR donate at least $1,000 toward the cost of the event. In return:

2) Supporting and Endorsing organizations

Agree to: publicize the event but do not give money or mailing lists. In return:

3) Tabling:
Tables are available: $500 per organization plus 20% of all profits on sales above $500 goes to NSP.