The Network of Spiritual Progressives

1. The NSP is an association of people interested in changing the Bottom Line in America. Today, institutions and social practices are judged efficient, rational and productive to the extent that they maximize money and power.That's the Old Bottom Line. Now Here is the NEW BOTTOM LINE for which we advocate: We believe that they should be judged rational, efficient and productive not only to the extent that they maximize money and power, but also to the extent that they maximize love and caring, ethical and ecological sensitivity and behavior, kindness and generosity, non-violence and peace, and to the extent that they enhance our capacities to respond to other human beings in a way that honors them as embodiments of the sacred, and enhances our capacities to respond to the earth and the universe with awe, wonder and radical amazement.

2. Challenging the misuse of religion, God and spirit by the Religious Right, and educating people of faith to the understanding that a serious commitment to God, religion and spirit should manifest in social activism aimed at peace, universal disarmament, social justice with a preferential option for the needs of the poor and the oppressed, a commitment to end poverty, hunger, homelessness, inadequate education and inadequate health care all around the world, and a commitment to nuclear non-proliferation, environmental protection and repair of the damage done to the planet by 150 years of envrionmentally irresponsible approaches to industrialization, investment, trade, energy and transportation.

3. Challenging the many anti-religious and anti-spiritual assumptions and behaviors that have increasingly become part of the liberal culture, and challenging as well the extreme individualism and me-firstism that permeate all parts of the global market culture. We will educate people in social change movements to carefully distinguish between their legitimate critiques of the Religious Right and their illegitimate generalizing of those criticisms to all religious or spiritual beliefs and practices. We will help social change activists and others in the liberal and progressive culture become more conscious of and less afraid to affirm their own inner spiritual yearnings and to reconstitute a visionary progressive social movement that incorporates the spiritual dimension, of which the loving, spiritually elevating and connecting aspects of religion has been one expression (but so has the group-in-fusion experience of the movements of the 30's and the 60's and the communitarian aspirations of many other efforts--social healing and health care, progressive summer camps, the wide appeal of service and service learning, the women's spirituality movement etc).

The Network is a project of The Tikkun Community, so when you join you automatically receive the option of free membership in The Tikkun Commnunity. You will also receive a one year subscription to Tikkun magazine.

Our perspective is more fully articulated in the Core Vision of The Tikkun Community which you can find at www.tikkun.org,and the article there entitled Why America Needs A Spiritual Politics. If you feel uncomfortable with the perspective articulated there, you should not join the Network of Spiritual Progressives which is an organization formed around those ideas.

We will also draw inspiration from Jim Wallis' book God's Politics and we will encourage use of Rabbi Michael Lerner's forthcoming (Jan 2006) The Left Hand of God as a study text for local chapters of the NSP in the Winter and Spring of 2006, as well as Michael Nagler's The Search for a Nonviolent Future. These three books, plus the articles by Peter Gabel in Tikkun Magazine, should be considered foundational. But we would also strongly urge members of our Network to study: Mary C. Grey's Sacred Longings: The Ecological Spirit and Global Culture, Kirk Schneider's Rediscovery of Awe, Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World, Cornel West's Democracy Matters, Alice Miller's The Body Never Lies, John Dear's The God of Peace, Rev. Tony Campolo's Speaking My Mind, Sister Joan Chittister's Heart of Flesh: A Feminist Spirituality for Women and Men, Sharon Welch's After Empire, Charlene Spretnak's The Resurgence of the Real, Peter Gabel's The Bank Teller and Other Essays on The Politics of Meaning, Jonathan Sacks’ To Heal a Fractured World, Robert Inchausti’s Subversive Orthodoxies, too many of the books of Walter Brueggemann, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Rosemary Ruether, Robert Thurman, Thomas Merton, Sharon Salzberg, Sylvia Boorstein and Wendell Berry to list separately, Zalman Schachter Shalomi’s Ageing and Sageing, Arthur Waskow’s Down to Earth Judaism: Food, Money, Sex and the Rest of Life, Harvey Cox’s When Jesus Came to Harvard, Jorge Ferrer’s Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality, and Michael Lerner's Healing Israel/Palestine.
Many of the local chapters of The Tikkun Community have already been functioning, in effect, as the local branch of the Network of Progressive Spiritual Activism, and you are welcome to join the local Tikkun Community and become active with it in these activities. However, there are some chapters that do not have a particular interest in this set of concerns, and are more involved in Healing Israel/Palestine or environmental or other related issues. In that case, you are welcome to create another local chapter that is focused primarily on the Network of Progressive Spiritual Activism projects, and to coordinate with the existing local chapter on activities of shared interest. A National Advisory Board (in formation--and you are free to nominate people after you've received their consent) will give guidance to Rabbi Lerner and the other co-chair of The Tikkun Community who will provide the national direction for the organization.