Hundreds of warm voices rang out Monday at the University of San Francisco as spiritual progressives sang together and debated how best to push our society toward a vision of economic justice, environmental sustainability, ethically oriented institutions, and a foreign policy based on generosity rather than militarism.

Hosted by the Network of Spiritual Progressives and Tikkun, the one-day conference in San Francisco included in-depth strategy sessions about how to develop a constitutional amendment to establish that corporations are not persons and how to support Obama while pushing him to live up to his progressive campaign promises. You can read Michael Lerner’s report on the conference to learn more about the proposed amendment and discussions about it. Here are some photos to give a feel for the event itself:

Medea Benjamin speaks at the Feb. 15 NSP conference in San Francisco.

Rev. J. Alfred Smith Sr. speaks at McLaren Hall.

The day was just a foretaste of the visionary analysis and vigorous debate set to take place during the NSP’s four-day national conference, June 11-14 in Washington, D.C. Presenters at the upcoming conference will include dynamic speakers from the conference cosponsors, which include The Nation, Yes! magazine, Peace Action, Pace e Bene, Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Code Pink, the Institute for Policy Studies, the Shalom Center, Democracy Matters, OpEdNews, the Backbone Campaign, the Metta Center for Nonviolence Education, and 350.org.

I had never attended a Network of Spiritual Progressives conference before, and I was struck by how sharply the discourse around social change differed from mainstream secular progressive analyses about political strategy.

I guess some part of me still expected the conference to feel like a standard leftist conference attended by people who happened to identify as spiritual. Not in the least. The “spirituality” (a term that I think some but not all of the participants would claim personally) resided not so much in the spiritual identities of the participants as in the compassion-filled, psychologically sensitive quality of the political analyses and strategies they were seeking to craft.

Rather than compiling a laundry list of political complaints, sliding into cynicism, or doomsdaying about the trouble ahead, participants in the conference consistently sought to articulate positive goals.

Code Pink founder Medea Benjamin, having just returned from Port-au-Prince, called on U.S. activists to come together as people in Haiti have done in the face of crisis. She said that walking through the destroyed streets of Port-au-Prince, “what you hear is singing, what you hear is praying, what you see is community coming together to take care of each other.” We need to call upon a similar faith and love in our community, she added, in order to face our own less acute but still urgent crises of violence and ecological destruction.

Social scientist Riane Eisler described her efforts to create new economic measurements that reflect the currently invisible and undervalued care work, calling for a redefinition of “productive work” that affirms the value of caring practices and policies.

Rabbi Michael Lerner, even as he issued a fiery call for a constitutional amendment to counter corporate power and a Global Marshall Plan to end U.S. militarism, also urged activists to “look for the humanity and the decency in those with whom we disagree … to find the rational core in the irrational shell … find the core of decency in the other, because it is there, no matter how distorted its form of articulation.”

Peter Gabel, an activist from the Critical Legal Studies movement and the associate editor of Tikkun, called on progressive activists to create models of the world we want to live in by forming communities in which we are fully visible to each other (in a Buberian sense) and where we can draw ourselves out of apathy-inducing isolation. I was particularly inspired by his call for progressives to reframe policy positions in ways that accurately communicate the ethical urgency that underlies them. “The core of any health care platform has to be evocative of the spiritual meaning of living in a society where we care for each other’s health,” he said. “We need to defend policies based on their moral core … you have to reach down to the moral meaning of the social issue and evoke it.”

If this leaves you wanting more, you should register for the June conference in D.C. and join the conversation!