Revolutionary Love

 

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Excitement about Revolutionary Love

“Michael Lerner takes the universal qualities wrongly diminished as ‘feminine’—caring, kindness, empathy, love—and dares to make them guides to a new kind of politics that can challenge the cruelty, competition, and dominance wrongly elevated as ‘masculine.’ Revolutionary Love opens our minds and hearts to a fully human way of living and governing.”

Gloria Steinem, feminist activist, and author of My Life on the Road

“In these times of rage and fear, when despair can so easily tempt us, Michael Lerner’s voice of fierce compassion calls out to humanity to trust in the redeeming power of revolutionary love and wisdom as a way toward a different future.”

Ariel Dorfman, author of Death and the Maiden

“The caring society is the only realistic path for humanity to survive, and in Revolutionary Love Rabbi Lerner lays out a powerful and compassionate plan for building that caring society. I love this book. Please read it and join with others to build the movement that can enable these ideas to reshape our society that so badly needs this vision.”

Keith Ellison, Attorney-General of the State of Minnesota, formerly vice-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and the first African American and Muslim to be chosen as deputy-chair of the Democratic National Committee

“What is post-socialism? Can we conceive of a society that is actually based on community and love? Michael Lerner can. Anyone wanting to overhaul the inequities and mean-spiritedness of our social system should read this book—and incorporate its message into the array of social-change movements. Going beyond the narrow confines of what we are resisting, this book not only puts forward a positive vision, drawing much from the wisdom of feminists and peace activists, but provides a coherent strategy for how to get there. It liberates readers to go beyond the ‘be realistic’ command of our ruling elites and to embrace the beautiful and love-filled world that Michael Lerner proposes.”

Medea Benjamin, cofounder of Code Pink

“Michael Lerner is one of the most significant prophetic public intellectuals and spiritual leaders of our generation. Secular intellectuals and those who yearn for a major change in the direction of American society can learn a lot from reading his book.”

Cornel West, Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy, Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University

“In Revolutionary Love, Rabbi Michael Lerner has provided a great theoretical and political service. No one that I am aware of does a better job of using love as a theoretical tool to address these issues and suggest what a politics based on a love of the other might look like. This book is not merely innovative—it is ground breaking in its scope, depth of scholarship, insight, and originality.”

Henry Giroux, Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy, McMaster University

“Rabbi Lerner is no innocent romantic about love. His call for a New Bottom Line is of immense importance not only for my colleagues and students in the Christian and Jewish worlds, but for all in the United States, Canada, and Europe who are seeking a path out of the narrow materialist, ultra-individualist, and competitive-acquisitive approach to politics that has severely limited the appeal of both Left and Right in the Western world. This book must be required reading for every opinion maker, every spiritual leader, every political leader, every college student hoping to understand American politics, and any citizen hoping to avoid the drift in Western societies toward reactionary nationalism, fascism, and/or the destruction of the life-support system of Earth.”

Walter Brueggemann, Professor Emeritus of Old Testament, Columbia Theological Seminary

“Love is the thread that connects and heals us all. Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Revolutionary Love shows us a meaningful path to heal our hearts, minds, souls, society and planet. Highly recommended.”

Dean Ornish, MD, Founder and President, Preventive Medicine Research Institute, and Clinical Professor of Medicine at University of California, San Francisco

Revolutionary Love is a much-needed antidote to today’s hardball politics of cynicism and self-interest über alles. Drawing from Rabbi Michael Lerner’s spiritual wisdom and lifetime of social activism, it provides a treasury of practical tools to counter the drift to domination and violence, and to build a more caring and sustainable society for us all.”

Riane Eisler, President of the Center for Partnership Studies, author of The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics

“Michael Lerner is a tough-minded, bold, and intellectually brilliant writer and speaker. Read this book, and he will show you that survival as a nation and a planet depends on not being so embarrassed by the concept of love that you dismiss it as too soft. It isn’t. Michael spells out a detailed plan for new way of living in which love is taken seriously and soberly. I feel that my brain cells, speaking metaphorically, have been rearranged by this energetic book that inspires with its clarity and visionary power.”

Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life

“This visionary and hopeful book’s argument for the fusion of love, compassion, and politics counters narrowly economistic progressivism, narcissistic spirituality, and the reigning forces of oppression. Its model of respect and care should be widely read, widely discussed, and—because it would work beautifully in the classroom—widely taught.”

Roger S. Gottlieb, author of Morality and the Environmental Crisis

“Bringing together the critical with the theological in purposeful and humanitarian ways, the book benefits from Lerner’s evident passion. It is sufficiently grounded in a number of the philosophical debates and does a very good job of proposing love as something that can have real and tangible effects.”

Brad Evans, coauthor of Histories of Violence: Post-War Critical Thought