We are beginning to put videos of some of the speeches from our conference in June up online. To get you started we’ve got some great speeches by Rep. Keith Ellison, Lester Brown, Sister Joan Chittister, Gary Dorrien, John Dear, Rev. Dr. James Forbes, and a Q&A with Rabbi Lerner, Peter Gabel, and Sister Joan Chittister. More to come after the new year . . .

Check out the videos here! Happy holidays and new year; stay warm.

Meet your favorite author! Every Monday night I interview a Tikkun author on a conference call that you can join, and you can ask questions and make your own comments: half radio show, half virtual town meeting.

It’s free to you, but we ask on the honor system that if you join the call more than once that you do something to keep us going financially: subscribe to the magazine, join the Network of Spiritual Progressives (which includes a subscription) or donate. These three are the ONLY ways we have of surviving. But of course when you listen to this audio on the web it’s free to you and at no cost to us, so you can squeak by without feeling guilty that you haven’t contributed… or you could contribute anyway for the sheer joy of it.

There is some wonderful stuff on these weekly calls. You can download MP3s for your ipod or listen on your computer. All the past audio is saved here. We had a backlog after our last intern (the wonderful Daniel O’Leary) left, and now two volunteers have come forward to do the editing of the audio and conversion to MP3s (the most wonderful Jeff Moskin and Jack Lampl), and they have cleared the backlog.

So now you can hear all these great people. This last Monday, for example, Tikkun Daily’s Lauren Reichelt gave one of the very best of these interviews. It’s one thing to read her stunning article in Tikkun about community organizing, and another to hear her talk about it with such clarity and enthusiasm. If you wondered whether your vote for Obama had helped anyone or not, listen to Lauren tell how totally the new administration has turned around her work of providing health care to a low income county in New Mexico that is as large as Massachusetts and in which most people have no health insurance. Under Bush she kept a low profile and started blogging incognito lest she draw attention to herself and lose more for her district faster (her description reminded me of how dissidents in the old Soviet Union wrote samizdat); under Obama she has developed strong relationships with the administration and is writing openly under her own name. Links are in the first paragraph below.

Sending me the edited version of Lauren’s call, our volunteer just wrote “Very interesting and inspiring. Will be sending the link to a few colleagues.”

Here’s everyone from this year:

Two revolutionaries: MLK and Malcolm X in 1964.

It’s extraordinary to me how such a polarizing figure as Martin Luther King has apparently been embraced by the whole society, with street and school names and a national holiday. Conservatives like the Heritage Foundation hold lectures and symposiums honoring his legacy. He is surely a much more radical figure than any of other people who are so widely celebrated by the American mainstream in its holidays and public life.

I could understand it a little more easily if he had “only” stood for full inclusion of African Americans in capitalist society, so that he would have measured it a complete success if there ever came a time when African Americans were rich, middle class and poor in the same ratio as whites, and had no more glass ceiling to the U.S. presidency and boardrooms than whites (a day that is still very far off, of course, despite our current president — as Pastor Lynice Pinkard said in church today about Obama, “Audre Lorde told us that we can never dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools”). The conservatives who praise MLK, apparently think this is what he did stand for. How many of them celebrate this quote by King?

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Despite its recent prominence, the religious right is only about thirty years old, while the religious left has a genealogy that stretches back more than two centuries. In every generation people of faith have brought their bodies and spirits to the causes of human freedom, racial and gender equality, economic solidarity, and global peace. Catholics and Calvinists, theological liberals and evangelicals, adherents of indigenous spiritualities and immigrants of every faith have worked to extend the radical vision of the American Revolution to all peoples.

More here, from “The Religious Left: an Old Tradition for a New Day” in the Unitarian Universalist magazine. Saying the Religious Left only stretches back “more than two centuries” is a little thin, when one thinks of Cromwell’s Ironsides who cut off the king’s head, or the Anabaptists of the 16th century, or the medieval Cathars and Hussites and so on. And that’s just the Christians.  The article ends with a survey of the religious left today, seeing four wings of it:

1. grassroots activists like the 185 Catholic Worker houses, and the new monastics, typically nonviolent
2. the social advocacy arms of the mainline denominations (only Christian and UU ones are mentioned, though)
3. those who identify with theologies of liberation and consider the first group too nonviolent, the second group too liberal
4. the “spiritual but not religious” for whom social activism is inherently spiritual.

Tikkun isn’t mentioned and I am not clear where they think we would fall. I’ve been working on our deadline for the next issue all day and will keep cranking all tomorrow and on to Tuesday end of day, and don’t have a brain cell left for making that judgment call, or for saying something analytically wise and interesting. Giving the link to this article is enough.

Though I have to add that we published a kick-ass article on the relevance of the social gospel today, by Gary Dorrien, that goes much deeper than this UU World survey is able to do.