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....
....

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....

***
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

For much of the last two decades, voices that are both progressive and religious have been like the “the Whos” in Dr. Seuss' classic Horton Hears a Who, yelling "We are here! We are here! We are here!" just to be noticed. This is how Rev. Tim Ahrens described it in an interview I conducted with him last year about the founding of We Believe Ohio in 2005 (for the full interview see my forthcoming book Progressive & Religious). But in just a few short years, the Whos have indeed been heard.

We Believe Ohio has grown from a few religious leaders responding to a single email into a broad organization that includes more than four hundred pastors, priests, rabbis, cantors, imams, and other religious leaders all over the state. These religious leaders have come together in an unprecedented way to reclaim a progressive voice for religion in the public square.

The growth of We Believe Ohio contrasts sharply with the fate of Rev. Russell Johnson, a fundamentalist megachurch pastor who had one of the biggest megaphones in Ohio in 2004. With his 2,000-member Fairfield Christian Church, Johnson ridiculed the early participants of We Believe Ohio, joking that their combined congregations could fit into a phone booth. Along with Rev. Rod Parsley—the movement’s bombastic mouthpiece who called on Ohio Christians (who he called the largest “interest group” in the state) to “lock and load” to defeat the “hordes of Hell”—Johnson was the force behind the so-called “Ohio Restoration Project,” an attempt to recruit “patriot pastors” to register one million “values voters.”

But by late 2007, Johnson had fallen. The pinnacle of Johnson’s work turned out to be supporting the failed bid of Kenneth Blackwell for governor in 2006. And he found himself in a swirl of controversy: the IRS placed a lien on him and his wife for failure to pay $22,269 in income taxes and penalties from 2002 to 2004; his church and the school and hotel it owns showed a net operating loss of $1.5 million for its fiscal year ending in June 2007; official complaints were filed against his church for violating its tax-exempt status in backing Blackwell’s campaign; and although neither he nor the church officially cited problems with his leadership, Johnson resigned his post as pastor in October 2007.

In the meantime, Ohio Christians clearly voiced their preference for a candidate that shared all their values rather than a candidate running on a narrow divisive platform of opposing abortion and same-sex marriage. Blackwell was handily defeated by Ted Strickland, a Methodist minister who stumped as a “Golden Rule Democrat” and who, as a senator, insisted on paying for his own health coverage as long as his constituents were not covered. According to the 2006 NEP exit polls, Strickland gained fourteen points among voters who attended religious services once per week or more, compared to support these voters gave Senator John Kerry in 2004. And voters, including a majority (fifty-one percent) of weekly church attenders, overwhelmingly supported a long-overdue ballot measure to increase the minimum wage.

Especially since 2006, I have been struck (and heartened) by the contrast in the energy, new ideas, and accomplishments among progressive religious groups and the flagging, tired efforts to trot out the same old lines among the religious right....

Read the rest of the article at Religion Dispatches.

Labels: dispatches from the beltway, faith in public life, progressive religion, we believe ohio

There was a particularly ignorant and shamefully inflammatory op-ed published by the New York Times on May 12, 2008. The piece, by Edward N. Luttwak, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, provides a good example of what can go wrong when people who have no specialized training in religion (Luttwak is a historian most known for writing about military history) try to draw wooden, deductive conclusions from selected pieces of ancient religious traditions and apply them willy nilly to the contemporary scene.

Luttwak writes:

With few exceptions, the jurists of all Sunni and Shiite schools prescribe execution for all adults who leave the faith not under duress; the recommended punishment is beheading at the hands of a cleric, although in recent years there have been both stonings and hangings.... [Muslim law also] prohibits punishment for any Muslim who kills any apostate, and effectively prohibits interference with such a killing.

At the very least, that would complicate the security planning of state visits by President Obama to Muslim countries, because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards. More broadly, most citizens of the Islamic world would be horrified by the fact of Senator Obama’s conversion to Christianity once it became widely known — as it would, no doubt, should he win the White House. This would compromise the ability of governments in Muslim nations to cooperate with the United States in the fight against terrorism, as well as American efforts to export democracy and human rights abroad.

Eboo Patel has provided a thoughtful, sane response to this inexcusable mistreatment of the broader Muslim tradition.

In "Obama and the Muslims," Eboo writes on his blog, The Faith Divide:

For a minute, I thought I was reading the script for a late-night cable B movie. Aliens abduct a brilliant, charismatic American president, saying that he was once one of theirs before he treasonously defected to the other side. Despite heroic negotiation efforts by both his wife and his former opponent for the Presidency (gotta give Hillary a role somewhere), they successfully behead him in a giant stadium (think Gladiator), to the wild applause of their fellow blood-thirsty aliens.

When I realized that the aliens in the script were referred to as ‘Muslims’, I figured that perhaps this was an article on some right-wing, Muslim-hating blog. What those guys lack in credibility, they certainly make up for in imagination, I thought to myself. If their funding ever dries up, and they don’t mind doing a nude scene or two, they could work for Cinemax.

What I didn’t want to admit was that this article was in the national paper of record, supposedly the most prestigious platform for news and views in the world, the paper I’ve counted on to bring me intelligent perspectives on global affairs since I was twenty years old.

Suddenly, I became a late-night cable B movie script writer. I started wondering who kidnapped the editors of The New York Times OpEd page, and replaced them with Muslim-hating lookalikes. (If you’re interested in that plot line, Cinemax, we should talk. But you should know up front, no nude scenes.).

Or maybe, I wondered, the conspiracy theorists were right. Maybe the gatekeepers of opinion in America do hate Muslims. I mean, think of how often Ayaan Hirsi Ali gets to spew her Islamophobic poison in those pages.

Thankfully, the OpEd in question – an absurd piece of trash claiming that Islamic law requires Muslims to view Obama as an apostate because his father was born a Muslim, leading to Obama being assassinated with the tacit support of Muslim states – generated a set of intelligent responses by people who actually know something about Islam, which The New York Times OpEd page printed (apparently, the aliens returned the original editors).

Ingrid Mattson, the President of the Islamic Society of North America, wrote, “Islam is not an ethnic affiliation, nor is it passed through the gene pool … Islam does not consider Barack Obama ever to have been part of the Muslim community. Apostasy has no relevance here.”

Zaid Shakir, a respected Muslim scholar and teacher at the Zaytuna Institute wrote, “People in Muslim countries are aware that Senator Barack Obama is not a Muslim, and yet he enjoys wide support in those countries. That support has nothing to do with Mr. Obama’s being a full, half or non-Muslim; it is rooted in the fact that he promises to change the kind of policies that have led to such a negative view of America by people in other countries, both Muslims and members of other faith communities.”

The whole incident got me thinking about American Muslims and Obama....

You can read the rest of Eboo's thoughtful response here.

Eboo Patel is one of the inspiring religious leaders featured 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: obama, progressive muslims, terrorism

Note: This op-ed originally published in The Jewish Advocate on May 16, 2008.

An ongoing genocide rages in Darfur, Sudan. The violence has already claimed as many as 450,000 lives and displaced more than 2.4 million people.

Mothers, in particular, are at substantial risk in Darfur. After five years of conflict, most women who survived the destruction of their villages now live in displaced persons or refugee camps, where it is difficult to find firewood to cook with.

With no other way to feed their families, thousands of courageous women make the choice every day to leave the camps and expose themselves to attack from roving militiamen so that their husbands (who are at an even greater risk of being murdered) and children may live. The strength and resilience of these women reminds me of Shifrah and Puah, the two midwives in the first chapter of Exodus, who courageously defied Pharaoh and intervened to save the lives of the Israelite male children.

This past Mother’s Day weekend, in synagogues and churches across the country religious leaders shared the story of the brave mothers of Darfur with their communities, and congregants responded by donating generously to help protect these heroic women. This initiative was organized by the Genocide Intervention Network, one of the leading anti-genocide organizations in the United States. Over the next six months, GI-Net will work to build propane-powered kitchens in the camps, thus eliminating the need for firewood collection.

Of course, the crisis in Darfur will not be solved by humanitarian efforts alone. In addition to helping alleviate the pain and suffering of the millions of people languishing in camps along the Sudan-Chad border, we must also agitate for a just political solution.

With the Beijing Summer Olympics on the horizon, Darfur activists are calling on the Chinese government, Sudan's largest oil customer, valued arms supplier and chief ally on the U.N. Security Council, to stop President Omar al-Bashir and his ruthless administration from continuing its genocidal campaign against the people of Darfur.

The American Jewish World Service and several other social justice organizations (including GI-Net) are calling on President Bush to boycott the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games unless China takes several key steps to help end the crisis in western Sudan. The list of actions includes China ending all arms transfers to Sudan, strongly and publicly condemning the atrocities in Darfur, and demanding that the government of Sudan comply with existing U.N. Security Council resolutions and rapidly facilitate the deployment of the United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force.

President Bush could use this opportunity to recommit himself to the Darfur cause, as his record on this issue is inconsistent at best. What better way for an outgoing president to spend his final months in office than to dedicate himself to ending the first genocide of the 21st century.

As we reflect on the meaning of Mother’s Day and on our love for our families, let us also remember the mothers, fathers, and children of Darfur who desperately need us to take action both as humanitarians and as political advocates. Let us act with the courage of the ancient midwives of Exodus by joining GI-Net, AJWS, and others in helping to birth a new era of justice and peace in western Sudan.

Rabbi Or N. Rose is an associate dean at the Rabbinical School at Hebrew College and the co-editor of Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call for Justice. Rabbi Rose is also featured 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: darfur, genocide, olympics, progressive judaism