One of the President Obama’s first promises was that he would close Guantanamo Bay.  Closing Gitmo, which has been become a worldwide symbol of American abuse and intertwined with the horrors of Abu Ghraib, has been supported by military leaders and civil liberty activists alike.  But once the rubber actually hit the road, cowardly representatives in…

I’m sick of the constant harping on Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s ‘Wise Latina’ comment.  Jeff Sessions, the Senator from the great state of Alabama (‘everybody knows about Alabama’ -Nina Simone) made reference to it again in his opening/opposing statement at Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings today.  The sentence, for those of you who haven’t been following the obsession, goes…

Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh are calling Judge Sotomayer and President Obama racists – and Democrats must be loving it. Newt and Rush pulled out a quote from a speech given by Judge Sotomayer at a symposium called: Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation in which the Supreme Court…

In 2004, a little book appeared that made quite a splash among dispirited Democrats:  George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant.  In it, Lakoff argued that Republicans and Democrats worked out of two different “framing” stories–frames are “mental structures that shape the way we see the world.”  Republicans frame their politics in the terms of…

Michael Lerner
about

Michael Lerner

Rabbi Michael Lerner was a student and disciple of Abraham Joshua Heschel when Lerner studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He earned a ph.d in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley and a second ph.d in clinical psychology at the Wright Institute. He subsequently formed the Institute for Labor and Mental Health where he did research on the psychodynamics of American politics, and discovered the immense hunger for "meaning and transcendent purpose for life and work" that became the hallmark of what he calls "a poltiics of meaning." Lerner founded and is Editor of Tikkun Magazine and Chair of The Network of Spriitual Progressives.

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