Just a quick post to let everyone know that I'll be on Air America's "State of Belief" program this weekend, hosted by Welton Gaddy, Director of the Interfaith Alliance. I'll be talking about the book, the emerging progressive religious movement, and how these new religious voices for justice and the common good are changing the conversation this election cycle.

You can tune in to your local Air American station, airing in most markets Saturdays at 10am ET and Sundays at 7pm ET. Or you can listen live online here. If you miss the show this weekend, you can download the podcast of the program from iTunes for free here.

Labels: interview, progressive religious movement

Note: This entry cross-posted from Beliefnet's Progressive Revival blog.

In one of the most explicitly theological questions of Saturday night's "Saddleback Civil Forum," Pastor Rick Warren asked both candidates, "Does evil exist in the world today? If so, what should we do about it?" While both Obama and McCain affirmed their belief in the existence of evil, their responses revealed deeply different theological orientations in two major areas that have direct policy implications: human responsibility and the location of evil in the world.

Obama began his answer by declaring that we have a clear responsibility to confront and resist evil, but that it is "God's task" to ultimately defeat evil. . Obama went on to clarify that we can be "soldiers" in that effort but that we must have humility to realize that good intentions are not enough to guarantee good actions. McCain, on the other hand, interrupted Warren's question to flatly state that we should and can "totally defeat evil" in the world.

While McCain's bravado garnered more applause among Saddleback's evangelical audience, it is theologically problematic from a Christian point of view. If America is in charge of defeating evil in the world, this literally puts America in the role of God, a position that theologically speaking is blasphemy. Despite McCain's popularity at the evangelical Saddleback forum, it was ironically Obama's worldview--where God guarantees the defeat of evil while we have faithful parts to play--that reflected not only the more orthodox Christian worldview but also the best of American public theology. This more chastened position, which is rooted in a theological understanding of human finitude, reflects biblically based Christian thinking from St. Augustine through Martin Luther. This stance is also reflected in what is perhaps the greatest theological statement by an American President, Abraham Lincoln's (a Republican) second inaugural address, where he declared at the end of a war where both sides had claimed divine favor that "the Almighty has his own purposes."

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You can read the rest of the article posted on Beliefnet's Progressive Revival Blog here.

Labels: election, evangelicals, evil, mccain, obama

My new book, Progressive & Religious: How Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist Leaders are Moving Beyond the Culture Wars and Transforming American Public Life is now available and shipping at a discount (List: $22.95, Now: $17.96). I want also to express my gratitude to so many of you who have been supporters of this three-year journey to tell the story of the emerging progressive religious movement.

I want to invite everyone not only to buy the book but to join the growing progressive & religious community. You can subscribe to our mailing list to receive:

• The latest podcasts with religious leaders
• Highlights from the progressive & religious blog, and other things happening in the growing progressive & religious community.
• Monthly updates on my upcoming book tour.

You can also join the growing Progressive & Religious group on Facebook.
Advance Praise for Progressive & Religious:

“Robert P. Jones understands that progressive faith is not simply a ‘left’ alternative to the Religious Right, but a bringing together of religious belief and practice with progressive politics.... Progressive & Religious convincingly shows how people of many different faiths are creating an authentic social vision for a pluralistic America. I commend this book to all who are seeking to join their faith and politics in working for a better world.”—Rev. Jim Wallis, Sojourners, author of The Great Awakening

“Robert P. Jones is one of the most searching, thoughtful and practical thinkers in the revival of religiously-rooted progressivism, and his book is a great blessing for that cause and for the country. Anyone—left, right or center—who wants a guide to this new movement would do well to spend time with this book.” —E. J. Dionne, Jr., Washington Post, author of Souled Out

“This instructive book should be in front of every newspaper journalist and every spiritual progressive. Sensitive to theological as well as political concerns, Progressive & Religious is a valuable introduction to the contemporary struggle for a progressive spiritual transformation of the world that is taking place in most of the world's religions.” —Rabbi Michael Lerner, Tikkun Magazine, The Network of Spiritual Progressives, author of The Left Hand of God

“An illuminating road map to religious re-discovery in contemporary America. With a marriage of journalistic enthusiasm and intellectual rigor, Robert P. Jones skips among the tensions that mar intra-religious relations in our society, smashing erroneous preconceptions and championing a renaissance in the way we look at faith. The result is a thorough examination of religion in modernity that highlights the progressive tendencies shared by all faiths in highly readable form.” —Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, American Society for Muslim Advancement

Rabbi David Saperstein talks about the connections between holiness and social justice, healing the world, and authentic religion.

In this fifth episode of Progressive Religious Voices, Rabbi David Saperstein, Director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, speaks powerfully about the need to rekindle the prophetic tradition in Judaism that evokes a vision of human beings as partners with G-d in creating a better world.

Here's a short excerpt from the podcast:

We have lost somewhat the deep religious grounding of the social gospel tradition in the Christian community, of the prophetic tradition in the Jewish community, that our engagement in responding to the call of our texts and our God and our religions for us to be God’s partners in creating a better world is a deeply and profoundly religious task. And working to recapture that is I think the central challenge.... And any religion that does not speak to the great moral issues of the lives of its people, particularly its young, or the great moral issues of their world will fail to capture their imagination, their loyalty, their engagement, and we back off of that prophetic thrust for justice and peace that was so central to the Abrahamic traditions at our peril.

Click here to listen to the podcast.




About Rabbi David Saperstein
Rabbi David Saperstein is the Director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. Described in a The Washington Post profile as the “quintessential religious lobbyist on Capitol Hill,” he represents the national Reform Jewish Movement to Congress and the administration. The Center advocates on a broad range of social justice issues, provides legislative and programmatic materials used by the Jewish community nationwide, and coordinates social action education programs that train nearly 3,000 Jewish adults, youth, rabbinic and lay leaders each year.

About the Podcasts
Progressive Religious Voices is a bi-monthly podcast of interviews gleaned from nearly 100 interviews with progressive religious leaders. You can subscribe to the podcast feed directly or on iTunes to get all 24 exciting interviews that we will feature throughout 2008.

Other Resources
If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy our podcast featuring Rabbi Sharon Brous, founder of IKAR congregation in Los Angeles.

You can also read more about the growing progressive religious movement in my forthcoming book, Progressive & Religious: How Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist Leaders are Moving Beyond the Culture Wars and Transforming American Public Life.

Labels: jewish, podcast, progressive judaism, progressive religious voices, saperstein

Note: The complete version of this article can be found my "Dispatches from the Beltway" column at ReligionDispatches.org.

The release of the massive American Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life this week provides a new window into an old question that has preoccupied sociologists for more than a century: Can religious traditions, with their particularity and ancient roots, survive amidst the pluralism of the modern world?


The Pew Forum findings clearly cast an affirmative vote; Pew found that American religion is increasingly diverse, that most Americans have a non-exclusivist understanding of their religion (70% of the religiously-affiliated agree that many religions may lead to eternal life)—and that religion is alive and well under these conditions, with more than half of Americans continuing to say that religion is very important in their lives.

These findings cut against the grain of some of the dominant streams of sociological theory and recent public discourse. Sociologists have often tried to predict not whether, but how quickly religion might succumb to the alleged corrosive power of modern pluralism. More than a century ago, Karl Marx famously declared that religion’s last refuge was to be found in the sighs of oppressed workers as they toiled in the twilight years of a doomed capitalist system. And Max Weber lamented that amidst the tempest of competing value systems in the modern pluralistic world, trying to imitate the life of a religious exemplar like Moses, Jesus, or the Buddha was doomed for purely practical reasons.

More recently, secularization theorists believed the tumultuous atmosphere of the 1960s would finally kill off traditional religions. They too were convinced that the coexistence of so many competing belief systems in the same social space would ultimately prove destabilizing to all of them.

But despite the predictions, religion would not go quietly into that good night. By the 1980s, most of the world experienced not the decline but the resurgence of public religion, especially in literalist/fundamentalist forms that were explicitly anti-modern (and importantly, in many parts of the world, anti-colonial). Religious extremists across traditions hit the headlines so forcefully and often violently that they became the public face of religion through the 1990s.

Faced with insurmountable data, chastened theorists now allowed two tracks for modern religion: secularization/decline on the one hand or anti-modern retrenchment on the other. These basic assumptions have driven much of the contemporary public discourse about religion, from Samuel Huntington’s vision of a future marked by a “clash of civilizations” organized around monolithic religious identities to the more recent declarations by Christopher Hitchens and other neo-atheists that “religion poisons everything.”

But the recent Pew data, and my own research among progressive American religious leaders in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism, demonstrate that decline and retrenchment are not the only options. A new public face of religion is emerging....
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Read the rest of the article in my "Dispatches from the Beltway" column at ReligionDispatches.org.

You can read more about the emerging progressive religious movement in my forthcoming book, Progressive & Religious: How Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist Leaders are Moving Beyond the Culture Wars and Transforming American Public Life. The book is available for pre-order from Amazon.com and will be in bookstores nationwide in August 2008.

Labels: diana eck, dispatches from the beltway, eboo patel, pew forum, pluralism, secularization

Note: The following thoughtful piece is an excerpt from a longer article published in the May/June 2008 issue of Tikkun Magazine, which featured a number of articles reflecting on the 60th anniversary of the national of Israel. The full article is available here.

By Dr. Omid Safi

I begin my reflections on the sixtieth anniversary of the establishment of the modern nation state of Israel, alongside the events commemorated by Palestinians as the Nakba (The Catastrophe), with a reminder of an event that at first sight might seem unrelated: Barack Obama’s March 2008 speech entitled “A More Perfect Union” that called for addressing racial issues in the United States.

In this speech Barack Obama, a Christian spiritual progressive who would surely find a home among many committed to the Tikkun ideals, spoke about how there is no way for us to immediately and magically get beyond our racial divisions. There is, however, a way for us to begin addressing issues of racial justice by confronting systematic injustices inflicted upon black communities as well as the real economic anxieties of white communities.

Obama stressed that we can “address our past without becoming victims of our past.” It is in this spirit that I wish to address the Palestinian/Israel situation/tragedy. Jews have historically been persecuted and marginalized as few other communities in the history of the West have been. The rise of Zionism in many ways was a response to this persecution. While Zionism did begin with European Jews, it is in many ways part and parcel of the same milieu that saw the rise of other nationalist movements. For many Jews, the desire to return to what they have seen as their ancestral homeland is also real, and was a joyous cause for celebration after centuries of exile. Furthermore, there is little doubt that the establishment of the state of Israel has had a positive impact on the survival of Judaism—and Jews—in the Western world that for far too long had attempted to eradicate them. Furthermore, the concerns of the Israeli civilian community for genuine and meaningful security are real, and must also be addressed.

And yet part of our attempt to see with two eyes, hear with two ears, and yet feel with one heart is to recognize and remember that the same establishing of Israel is remembered differently, radically differently, by Palestinians. Going back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, there has been a history of colonial support for the creation of Israel that remains for many Arabs and Muslims a painful reminder of centuries of oppressive foreign occupation and domination. The establishment of Israel in 1948 involved the forceful and violent ethnic cleansing of some 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homelands (see Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld 2006). The homes and lands of these indigenous Arab inhabitants of Palestine were confiscated and handed over to Jewish immigrants. In a matter of two generations, Palestinians who had made up 90 percent of the inhabitants of Palestine were forced to become a persecuted minority in their own homeland, or perpetually homeless exiles, much as Jews themselves had been for centuries before. The other major act of injustice on the part of Israel has been the forty-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, combined with draconian measures that inflict collective punishments upon Palestinians, in both the occupied territories and inside Israel itself. These systematic injustices too are real, and the subhuman condition that many Palestinians live in must be addressed if words like justice are to rise above being hollow mockeries of their lofty reality.

All of this is well known. And yet our point is quite simple: if we are to have a common future for all of us in this sacred land, there must be a just and compassionate way to atone for these atrocious realities of the past and the present.

I write these words not as a nationalist, but as a person of faith who remains convinced that the Divine qualities of al-Rahman and al-Rahim, the Compassionate and the Forgiving Merciful, are the two greatest Divine qualities that human beings can and should embody. I write as one of many who are certain that forgiveness and reconciliation are indeed possible, as they were in South Africa, so long as the reconciliation is an exercise in Truth and Reconciliation. The truth must be told, as bitter as it might be for some of us to speak it, and as unpleasant for others of us to hear it. Yet if we are understand one another’s realities, we have to grant that the same truth that brings joy to some members of humanity has caused immense pain and suffering for others....

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To download and read the remainder of this article as published in Tikkun Magazine, click here.

Labels: islam, israel, obama, omid safi, palestine

Hozan Alan Senauke talks about socially engaged Buddhism, weapons of mass redemption, and "just sitting down" as a radical act.

In this fourth episode of Progressive Religious Voices, Hozan Alan Senauke, Soto Zen priest at the Berkeley Zen Center and program director of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship talks about the place of socially engaged Buddhism in the emerging progressive religious movement.

Senauke talks about the resources engaged Buddhism brings to the fundamental task of trying not to live life "at the expense of others" :

To me the Buddhist precepts, they boil down to not living your life at the expense of other beings, ...and this is very difficult to sustain in America. Good people - anyone can be a good person, but do you want to live at the expense of the person in Bangladesh or Pakistan who’s making your shirt or the oil rig worker in Nigeria, the agricultural worker in the Central Valley who is being hounded by the INS? Do you want to live that way? Until we address those questions, I don’t think we’ll have a truly progressive religious movement or truly progressive movement.

Senauke also discusses how Buddhism complements and challenges the prophetic, monotheistic religions and how Buddhism contributes a sense of "dynamic stillness" to the emerging progressive religious movement.

Click here to listen to the podcast.

About Hozan Alan Senauke
Hozan Alan Senauke is a Soto Zen priest and teacher in the tradition of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. Alan is presently serving as tanto or head of practice at Berkeley Zen Center in California. From 1991 to 2001, Alan was Executive Director of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and currently serves as its program director.

Alan is one of the founders of Think Sangha, a group of Buddhist-activist intellectuals and writers. He continues to work as a social activist supporting the development of a Socially Engaged Buddhism. In another realm, Alan has been a student and performer of American traditional music for nearly 40 years.

About the Podcasts
Progressive Religious Voices is a bi-monthly podcast of interviews gleaned from nearly 100 interviews with progressive religious leaders. You can subscribe to the podcast feed directly or on iTunes to get all 24 exciting interviews that we will feature throughout 2008.

You can also read more about the growing progressive religious movement in my forthcoming book, Progressive & Religious: How Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist Leaders are Moving Beyond the Culture Wars and Transforming American Public Life. The book is available for pre-order from Amazon.com and will be in bookstores nationwide in August 2008.

Labels: buddhist peace fellowship, peace, podcast, progressive religious voices, socially engaged buddhism, zen