Q&A about the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP)

Questions and Answers on the Network of Spiritual Progressives
Document Actions
  
  
 

1. What is the NSP?

 The Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) is a project of The Tikkun Community that seeks to challenge:

 1. the misuse of God and religion by the Religious Right,
 2. the religio-phobia and hostility to spiritual concerns in some sectors of liberal and progressive culture,
 3. the materialism and selfishness that is the Old Bottom Line of American society. The NSP is an organization that will articulate a politics of meaning—emphasizing that human beings have not only material needs but spiritual and “meaning needs” (the need for a life that is connected to a higher purpose than the accumulation of goods or money or power, to have a meaning to our lives that transcends the individualism and materialism of the competitive marketplace).

 The NSP is an interfaith organization open to progressive people who are religious, or “spiritual but not religious, ” or secular people who understand the need for a politics of meaning and a Spiritual/Religious Left and wish to support efforts to build it.

2. What is the NSP for?

 Our central demand is this: We want a society that promotes rather than undermines love and generosity, kindness and caring, peace and nonviolence, recognition of the spirit of God in each other human being, joy and pleasure in life, humility and social responsibility, recognition of the Unity of All Being, recognition of our interdependence with all other people on the planet and with the wellbeing of the planet itself, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation.


 3. What will the NSP do?
                 
 We will support those in every church, synagogue, mosque and ashram who affirm the prophetic vision of God as the champion of love and generosity, the supporter of peace, social justice and ecological sanity, the God who instructs us to give our highest attention to alleviating the suffering of the poor and the powerless. We will challenge the policies of governments and political parties that do not promote these values. We will challenge the religio-phobia and hostility toward spirituality in some corners of the liberal and progressive world. We will challenge the misuse of God and religion to justify militarism and an assault on programs designed to protect the poor, working people, the environment, and we will champion separation of church and state while advocating for progressive spiritual values.  We will champion a New Bottom Line for American society and critique the ethos of selfishness and materialism. Our primary work is to change the dominant discourse in American society--we are primarily a consciousness-raising movement, though we will also encourage those who have a spiritual consciousness to bring that into the public sphere and reshape our economic, political and social life in accord with a New Bottom Line of love, caring, generosity, kindness, ethical and ecological sensitivity, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation.

4.What is the Political Focus of the NSP?

 Our central political demand is for A NEW BOTTOM LINE to replace the Old Bottom Line of materialism and selfishness. We seek a new definition of productivity, efficiency, and rationality. We want institutions, social practices, legislation, corporations, and even our choices in daily life to be judged efficient, rational, and productive not only to the extent that they maximize money and power (the old bottom line) but also to the extent that they maximize love and caring, kindness and generosity, ethical and ecological sensitivity, and enhance our capacity to transcend a narrow utilitarian framework in responding to other human beings so we can treat them as embodiments of the sacred, and enhance our capacity to respond to the universe with awe, wonder, and radical amazement at the grandeur of creation.

 If we use that New Bottom Line, we quickly become aware of the way that most of our economic and political institutions are inefficient, irrational, and unproductive.

5. Do you have any specific plans for how to implement a New Bottom Line?

 - We call for an end to U.S. militarism, an immediate withdrawal from Iraq of U.S. forces, and the implementation of a Global Marshall Plan.

 - We want the U.S. to lead the G-8 nations to dedicate 5% of their GDP each year for the next twenty to eliminating global poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate health care, and inadequate education and to rebuild the economic infrastructure of third-world countries.

 - We believe that this is the most effective strategy for Homeland Security and the only serious strategy for defense of the United States. But we support it not only because it will be far more effective than all the wars and interventions supported by the Bush Administration and by some Democrats, but also because it is morally right and in accord with our understanding of our religious and spiritual responsibilities.

 - Domestically, we support the Social Responsibility Amendment (SRA) to the U.S. Constitution. The SRA says that every corporation with an income of $50 million or more per year must get a new corporate charter once every ten years, which will only be granted to those corporations that can prove a satisfactory history of social responsibility to a jury of ordinary citizens. The SRA will provide support to the millions of morally centered people in corporations who actually want corporate life to be more socially responsible, but today are bound by the Old Bottom Line and the legal demands of fiduciary responsibility to maximize the profits of corporate investors. The SRA gives them the opportunity to tell their investors that they had no choice but to be more socially responsible in order to protect the value of the investments, since if the corporation can’t pass the SRA assessment by a jury, the value of their investment will decrease monumentally.

 6. Is the NSP an attempt to help the Democrats win the next elections?

 We have no doubt that if the Democrats were to adopt a spiritual politics that they would be far more successful. So would the Greens or any other political party. We will encourage members to form caucuses within whatever party they are affiliated with to put forward the Politics of Meaning approach that we advocate.

 We hope to see a Spiritual Politics caucus in the Democratic Party that will play an important role in shaping the party in the coming years, and we hope to see a similar caucus in the Green Party.

 But we are NOT a branch of the Democratic Party or the Greens. There are many members of the NSP who have their doubts that the Democrats will ever be serious about a spiritual politics or a politics of meaning. Yes, the Democrats may attempt to manipulate the language of God or religion for narrow electoral gain, but it will take much deeper transformations in the culture of the liberal and progressive world before the Democrats are able to take seriously the notion of a New Bottom Line. So we remain agnostic about whether our vision can become the vision of the Democrats or the Green Party. And we are not partisan in any way--so we encourage those who are part of other parties, including conservative parties like the Republicans, to bring our progressive spiritual vision into their parties as well, and to challenge the ways that they have accommodated themselves to the ethos of materialism and selfishness. Our message is at once needed everywhere and likely to be at odds with the dominant assumptions of every existing poltiical party.  Perhaps at some future moment there will need to be an explicitly spiritual party. But for the moment, our goal is to bring our ideas into every existing political party, every social change movement, every religious and cultural institution, and every corner of the society.


 7. What Impact will your program have on the environmental crisis?

 We are calling for the religious and spiritual communities of the planet to develop a campaign for Ethical Consumption. We want to encourage people to buy only those products and that food which is produced in ways that pay attention to the social-justice needs of those workers involved in the production and marketing of goods, and goods that are healthy for the consumers and produced or grown in ways that are ecologically sustainable. We advocate a life of voluntary simplicity in which we reduce the overall level of consumption of the resources of the planet. We want governments to help in this effort by publicizing the information about the ways that goods have been produced, in regards to both social justice for the workers and environmental consequences of the product itself.

8. How did the NSP come into existence?

 The NSP was first envisioned by the national chair of the Tikkun Community, Rabbi Michael Lerner, as a way to respond to the failure of the Democrats to recognize the spiritual crisis in American society. It is in the process of being born, a process that we envision will take several years.

9. How are you arriving at your actual platform?

 To some extent, our platform already exists. We are a project of The Tikkun Community, and so we function within the context of the Core Vision of The Tikkun Community, which can be read at www.Tikkun.org. That vision is further elaborated in Rabbi Michael Lerner's new book The Left Hand of God, particularly in the Spiritual Covenant with America, and we will use that Covenant as the defacto platform from the point in which it is published in Jan. 2006 till the adoption of a final platform at our national conference in 2007.  In taking stands on issues, the NSP will work within the confines of those documents in the following sense: it will not take stands that are counter to the Core Vision or to the Spiritual Covenant with America.
    Yet there are many issues facing us that are not fully flushed out in the Core Vision and the Spiriutal Covenant.  So,  we have created Work Groups at the Conferences on Spiritual Activism that will propose platform planks. These Platform Planks, along with the Spiritual Covenant with America,  will be the basis for ongoing discussion on the Tikkun website so that people who were not at our first meeting July, 2005, can participate in the process. Then there will be a second time for Work Group input to the discussion of  the platform at the follow up conference, to be held in Washington, D.C. in 2006. The national chairs of The Tikkun Community, in consultation with our National Advisory Board, will take the discussions coming out of the 2005 and 2006 conferences, and use it as a basis to extend, modify or transform the Spiritual Covenant with America and present that to the  Network of Spiritual Progressives for further discussion. Finally, at our conference in 2007, based on the accumulated wisdom that has emerged from this process, we will have a final document, developed by the national chairs in consultation with this process, which will be presented to that conference for possible adoption as our Platform with which we approach American political discourse. The process being envisioned will allow us to maximize input from a wide variety of people who could not make it to this conference or who may not be able to make the second one either, but who share the vision of the Network of Spiritual Progressives and have joined as members, and yet will also ensure coherence that is not possible to develop in the national conferences by themselves.
    Here's an example of what we wouild not modify: our call for a New Bottom Line as the central organizing point of the Network of Spiritual Progressives. Here is an example of what we could modify: how to best take that New Bottom Line into American politics today.  We would not modify our position in support of a Global Marshall Plan as the center of a Generosity Strategy for Homeland Security, but we might very well modify the percentage of the GDP being called for to finance this program or might specify ways that it would work that could assure others that it was goiing to be ecologically sensitive and culturally sensitive to the nuances and needs of the recipients and use the opportunity of such a program to create reciprocity so that advanced industrial countries sharing their financial and technological resources might also benefit from the wisdom and cultural richness that might be shared by some of the societies receiving this support.

 10. Wouldn’t it make more sense for the Network of Spiritual Progressives to be a coalition of existing organizations rather than a membership organization?

 We originally imagined that we could bring together the various branches of religious communities that were progressive and build such a coalition. But we quickly discovered that some of the most important component organizations for such a coalition had little interest at this point in merging their activities into such a coalition in any real sense.

 Take, for example, the situation of many of the liberal Protestant denominations. Many of them are under attack from the Religious Right for being too liberal. Yet by and large the response of the national leadership of these denominations has not chosen to win that struggle by vigorously defending a progressive politics, but rather has attempted to portray itself as “neutral” and “apolitical” and to play down areas of controversy with the Right. This has been a big mistake, because from the standpoint of members of these religious communities what they face is active advocacy from the Right versus a mush of alleged neutrality from the liberals who believe that it is more important to maintain “unity” than to fight for their own vision. In this situation, many of these denominations are reluctant to get identified with any politics that is explicitly critical of the Bush Administration, the Republican Congress, and the Religious Right, or to identify with an organization like the NSP, which has no compunctions about criticizing the powerful in each party who support militarism and who are unwilling to challenge the Old Bottom Line.

 In this circumstance, we came to the conclusion that the best way forward was to create a grassroots interfaith organization that would be unconstrained by these kinds of organizational loyalties. We hope that people within denominations, religious communities, and spiritual communities will join the NSP and will use this context to organize strategies to bring a progressive spiritual politics into their own religious and spiritual communities. By being officially outside those communities, it will be possible to interact with people in other religious communities who are facing similar struggles and challenges, and then to work together to create a presence within one’s own religious or spiritual community and organize to impact the debates going on in those communities.

 There are some other grassroots  interfaith organizations, but very few that are willing to openly advocate for transformation of the Democratic party, the Green party, and other political parties, or to call explicitly for a New Bottom Line, and for a Global Marshall Plan, and for bringing the troops home from Iraq and support the Social Responsibility Amendment to the US Constitution.

    On the other hand, there are local organizations or national organizations that may want to affiliate with the project of the NSP, and we will make that possible too. If you are part of such an organization, you can encourage them to affiliate by contacting our executive director: Robyn Lundy Thomas at 510 644 1200.  We hope to have a council of affiliated organizations that will also provide us with their wisdom.

      This is the point of a NETWORK--it is a way to bring together diverse people who share a common agenda but who work in very different kinds of settings, so that they can share our  wisdom and experience with each other, and so that together we can break through the media silence that has made it hard for Spiritual and Religious Progressives to have our message be heard as part of the national discourse.  There are many progressive spiritual and religious voices, but until they are aligned in some very visible public way their impact is less than it could be.

12. Is the Network of Spiritual Progressives meant to be THE VOICE of the spiritual/religious Left?

      No. It is unlikely that any one organization could provide an adequate framework for all those diverse groups that are the spiritual and religious Left. There are good reasons why some groups will want to have a different framework. For example, at least some people working in the Evangelical Christian community or within the Orthodox Jewish community have told us that it would not help their organizing abilities within their own communities to be publicly identified with an INTERFAITH network which included Buddhists or "spiritual but not religious"  progressives or even people who thought that the Scriptures were only one of the possible ways of hearing the voice of God.  We can understand and we support them in creating other organizations to mobilize the progressive social justice and peace orientations that they may be able to affirm within their traditions.  Similarly, there are communities of color and organizations representing them, and churches or mosques in those communities that feel more comfortable working within the context of their own communities and are reluctant to join inter-ethnic or inter-racial groupings.

      We want to work in coalition on specific issues with any groups that do not feel comfortable aligning with our Core Vision and Spiritual Covenant as a whole, but do agree with some particular plank and have ideas on how we could work to implement or popularize it. Or with groups or organizations that do not feel that they can be part of an INTERFAITH coalition with a broad agenda, but could be in an INTERFAITH coalition on a particular issue.

       Nevertheless, it is our contention that those orgnaizations and individuals who do feel comfortable with our Core Vision and Spiritual Covenant and feel ok. about working in an interfaith context with people who have very different theologies would benefit greatly from being part of one Network that could coordinate their efforts. It is our goal to hve the NSP grow into that reality in the course of the coming years if it becomes possible to overcome the centrifugal tendencies that make everyone want to keep their own indepenence from each other. But we do not minimize the problems. Working within the framework of capitalist societies, many progressive nonprofits find it very difficult to sustain themselves financially. Their politics would encourage them to cooperate with other groups, but their fundraising needs make them wary of losing membes and donors to other groups, so they are reluctant to share their lists with each other. This is not irrational ego--it is the reality of organizational life in which each organization wants to support their (often meagre) salaries of their own staff, and quite reasonably fears that aligning with other organizations in some kind of Network or Coalition might lead to their members joining or funding the coalition and decreasing their contributions to the original organization to which they belonged.  It doesn't help to "guilt trip" people or organizations that have this concern, because the concern is legitimate. So it remains to be seen whether the NSP can convince enough organizations to participate and share in a real way so that it becomes an effective Network, or whether it will only be another membership organization without much of a coordinating role among organizations. If that happens, the NSP will stay an important role in introducing into the public sphere its ideas and perspective.
    There is another dynamic we want to avoid in our NSP: focusing on those groups who have not yet joined as a way of arguing that those who have joined are not enough, inadequate, or somehow only partial.  We are not an organization whose goal is to reach everyone and include everyone: our goal is only to include everyone who shares our particular perspective. While we will do our best to outreach and invite people to share our perspective--for example  to people in Red states, people in a wide variety of religious communities, people in spiritual communities, Republicans as well as Democrats, people of color, people of all gender and sexual identities, people from all national and ethnic backgrounds, poor people and working class people and suburban people and exurban people and city dwellers, corporate executives and union activists and environmental activists and peace activists, academics and policy experts, and every possible profession--we will also resist the old New Left IDENTITY POLITICS in which people get selected for leadership on the basis of their identity and in which someone from an under-represented identity gets to guilt trip everyone else because that identity isn't being adequately represented or listened to. Those who like that kind of discourse should NOT join or participate in the Network of Spiritual Progressives. While we are determined to do as much outreach as possible to invite into the organization people from all of the various possible identity groups, we also want to insist that the fundamental message--explicit and implicit--given at our chapter meetings and our national conferences and in publications coming from the NSP is this: "You who have come to our gatherings are enough, you are precisely who we  want to be here, and the fact that you have gotten active with us is terrific. There is nothing inadequate about you and if our organization only attracts people just like you, that's also totally fine. You can make a tremendous contribution to spreading these ideas, and hopefully others in other communities who are not represented or only represented in a token way in our gatherngs will be able to move with these ideas in their own contexts and do NOT need to be part of our context (though they are welcome should they choose to accept our outreach invitations)."  In particular, we intend to break the dynamics on the Left that make white men feel that they are unwelcome or that their very maleness and whiteness makes them less desirable--a message that has over time contributed to pushing many such white men into poltiical passivity or into right-wing politics.  People coming from leftie backgrounds who have become used to that kind of dissing of white men should not play a leadership role in the NSP until they've found ways to overcome this tendency in themselves. This should not be misunderstood to mean that we want to be an organization of white men. Quite the contrary--the majority of members at the moment are women. But our goal is to repair some of the dynamics that have made it difficult for many white men to function in progressive contexts, without thereby undermining our desire to engage in serious outreach to people of color, women, GLBT, etc.

 11. What is the organizational structure of the NSP?

One way to be involved with NSP is to create or join a local NSP chapter. Chapters will develop their own local campaigns around the major themes of the NSP (challenging the Religious Right, challenging the religio-phobic Left, challenging the Old Bottom Line, and supporting a New Bottom Line). NSP chapters will be largely autonomous and free to set their own directions, though they must work within the political framework of the Core Vision and Spiritual Covenant and local members must pay the national dues, even if they have to set additional dues to help finance local chapter functioning.
    We encourage local chapters to form small groups of ten to meet outside the context of a chapter meeting. These small groups will help members explore their own inner spiritual lives, get to know each other's personal lives, and become a major source of personal and spiritual support.   We believe that these groups can provide an important element that has often been lacking in the world of liberal and progressive social change. However, there is a danger that in promoting this form, the groups might give the appearance that the NSP is only about emotional and spiritual support. We therefore require that such small groups encourage their members to JOIN the NSP as dues-paying members, that they give some of their efforts to studying together The Left Hand of God, the Core Vision and "Why America Needs a Spiritual Left," and that they affirm and work within the context of the basic principles and platform that can be derived from those three sources. Small groups that do not feel comfortable doing so and urging their members to do so  are not part of the Network of Spiritual Progressives.
    We also encourage chapter members to set up a process so that each new member gets to participate in a study group in which they read and explore the Core Vision, The Left Hand of God, and other key texts of our community before or while they are becoming active in local NSP work. To promtoe organizational coherence, the national office will suggest a priority project for local chapters each month, but the chapters are under no obligation to work on that priority beyond making it known to its members what that priority suggestion is.
    We encourage organizational modesty: not taking on more than can actually be handled. There will be a tendency for people to come to a chapter with a wide diversity of interests and for the chapter to want to encourage them all. This will quickly result in dissolution of the chapter. We suggest that chapters pick a few priorities for their activism.  Some chapters, for example, might decide that all they can reasonably accomplish, given the time demands on their members, is to organize an annual regional conference of the Network of Spiritual Progressives at which they will attempt to invite the widest possible participation of relevant community groups and individuals to expose them to NSP ideas. If a chapter did nothing more than this, that would still be terrific!
    In starting a new  organization, one of the pitfalls is that some of the people who come forward first may be terrific at leading local activities, while others may be less effective as leaders. There is a tendency for people to quit if they come to a few meetings and find themselves underwhelmed by the sophistication or energy level or spiritual depth that they encounter. We urge them, instead, to create another local chapter in which they themselves provide the leadership in accord with their own sense of what will work best.

      Most members of NSP, however, will not have the time or energy to participate in local chapters. They will have joined NSP because they want to support the goals, but they are already over-extended in their lives and they do not have time for activism at this point. For many of these people, the key to NSP will be its effectiveness in gaining visibility nationally in promoting its central ideas. For these members, the primary form of involvement with NSP will be a. paying membership dues and possibly helping us with donations or by introducing others to the NSP ideas (e.g. by once a year having a house party for all their friends and showing an NSP video in which our ideas are presented, followed by a pitch to donate or to join the NSP); b. attending a national conference yearly or once every few years; c. sharing the New Bottom Line ideas of NSP with friends, neighbors, members of their community whenever possible.  We want to make it clear that this kind of member is just as valuable to us as those who have time to be involved in NSP activism.
    Some members of the NSP will want to be activists, but not in a local chapter but rather on a natioanl project group. For example, we want to launch a campaign for a New Bottom Line in Professions, an Ethical Consumption Project,a Spiritual Democrats project and a Spiritual Greens project. Members can be involved in these projects directly through web-based discussions in which they begin to develop a campaign to achieve certain specified goals and share with each other what they are doing and how. Or people in a given area can form a chapter that is exclusively focused on that particular area of interest, as long as the members pay national dues and agree to do their work within the context of the Core Vision and the Spiritual Covenant.
      On the national level, the NSP will be housed in the structure the Tikkun Community, which will provide staff and financial support.  The national office has the following tasks: 1. To coordinate all activities of the national organization and be the hub for information sharing. 2. To develop national projects  3. To plan and organize national conferences  4. To plan national speaking tours for NSP leadership  5. To issue press statements  6. To connect the NSP with other related projects, to give NSP endorsements to related projects, and to represent the NSP in public functions   7. To coordinate membership drives and to raise monies for NSP projects  8. To provide intellectual and ideological leadership and vision for the organization. 9. To supervise and approve of any statements being issued in the name of the NSP from any group that claims to be speaking for the NSP except for local chapters  10. To ensure that local chapters are working within the boundaries of NSP positions  The national staff funcions under the leadership of Rabbi Michael Lerner, chair of The Tikkun Community, and the co-chairs Cornel West and Sister Joan Chittister. The national chair in turn consults with the following advisory groups: a National Advisory Board, a Council of Affiliated Organizations, and a Coordinating Committee of local chapters.
     To understand our reality, please note that we have a tiny national staff with huge commitments. Here is the paid staff: 1. Rabbi Lerner is National Chair. He is also editor of Tikkun Magazine.  2. Robyn Lundy Thomas is Executive Director of The Tikkun Community  3. Joel Schalit is Managing Editor of Tikkun Magazine. 4. Simone Richmond is national membership coordinator for both the Tikkun Community (including the NSP)  5. Liz Weiner is the Assistant Editor of Tikkun Magazine and the Office Coordinator for the Tikkun Community. And Mark Werlin is a a data entry person who also coordinates membershhip information and subscriptions.  That is the entire staff. This tiny staff puts out Tikkun Magazine coordinates The Tikkun Community and put on the Conference on Spiritual Activism (with the assitance of Rabbi Lerner's two assistants from Beyt Tikkun synagogue, and many interns and volunteers). It is important to understand that until NSP gets substantial funding, this is the staff upon which it will have to rely for its national coordination. With this kind of tiny staff, the vitality and viability of the NSP depends on the activism and initiative of its members to accomplish our primary task: to spread our ideas and get them into public discourse. We urge our mebmers to actively engage in spreading the ideas to friends, writing letters to the media (e.g. challenging them to include coverage of our perspective whenever they address American political issues), challenging politicians who seek support and financing to address the perspective of the NSP and to introduce to their constituents the notion of a New Bottom Line, to create local educational forums and conferences, to reach out in their own communities and also invite not-yet-represented communities to be part of our discourse to the extent that they agree with our perspective. And please help us find insiders in foundations or corporations or people of means who might help fund our activities and expand our staff so that it can begin to handle the large number of requests we receive. But please understand that until we get such funding, the volume of requests and information coming through almost guarantees that there will be mistakes, that some emails or phone calls to us will remain unanswered (often not because they have been given a low piriority but because they have fallen through some huge crack in the information flow), some checks or memberships will not get reported correctly, some subscriptions will not be fulfilled correctly, some donations will not be acknowledged in a timely fashion, etc. On that front, you could help us in one of the following ways: a. Notify us of our error--we want to correct it!!!!  DO NOT hold back on the grounds that "we've overloaded"--because then we won't know and won't know that we should be fixing the problem.  b. Come volunteer at our office--we can't pay, but it's a nice place to give volunteer time.  c. Be forgiving.
     There are other organizations who share the goals of the Tikkun Community and who will be able to affiliate and pay a membership fee to be determined by the co-chairs of the Tikkun Community. When a sufficient number of organizations of this sort affilaite, we will create a Council of Affilaited Organizations,  and they, like the local chapters organization and the National Advisory Board, willl provide advice and ideas to the national co-chairs.   
     Membership dues for the NSP are the same as membership dues in The Tikkun Community, since the NSP is a project of The Tikkun Community. We want to make it clear that people who do nothing more than to join, pay annual dues, and donate to the organization are still making an important contribution, putting their resources behind the ideas articulated in the Core Vision, the Why America Needs a Spiritual Left, and The Left Hand of God.  Part of what the national co-chairs and the national executive director do is to speak in many venues, keep in contact with the membership that is not part of a local chapter, as well as with many others who are potential members, and through those contacts ensure that the organization is responsive not only to the desires and ideas of the people who are involved in local chapters but also to the far greater number of members who are not involved in that way.
      

 12.  Where can I read a fuller discussion of the ideas that underlie the Network of Spiritual Progressives so that I can feel sure that I’m in alignment with them?

 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 Left”. 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 and as a definitive source for our strategy,  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.


13. Isn’t the Tikkun Community a Jewish organization?

 No. TIKKUN Magazine is a magazine that came from the Jewish world and addresses both political and spiritual issues of universal concern, but gives special attention to Jewish and Israel-related issues. The Tikkun Community, on the other hand, was conceived in 2002 as an interfaith organization, and a majority of its members are not Jewish. It is chaired by Rabbi Michael Lerner and co-chaired by Sister Joan Chittister and Professor Cornel West.