Progressive Revival

The New York Times has a piece today about Obama and the Dems and their efforts to appeal to Catholic voters who may be turned off by the party’s pro-choice dogmatism. It includes comments from the much-pilloried pro-life, yet pro-Obama, Doug Kmiec. I expect this won’t be the last of these sorts of stories. On…

The Pew Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life have published a report that confirms my suspicions about the use of religion on the campaign trail. The study found that we are in the midst of an election for a Pastor-in-Chief rather than a Commander-in-Chief. An analysis…

To all Text Messengers: Help get out the vote in the upcoming presidential election. In Korea, text messages sent to millions of cell phones significantly influenced a national election; Switzerland too is experimenting with direct communication to the Thumb Generation. If millions of committed Boomers joined with the TextGen (text message generation), we could create…

The Elaison Group has written a detailed memo going through the imagery in the McCain ad designed, they argue, to intentionally imply that Obama is the anti-Christ

The mere mention of being accused of playing the “race card” is the third rail of American politics.  Your campaign can come to a screeching halt if it is even implied that a candidate is invoking race.   However, the “race card” can be used effectively by a candidate.  It can invoke intense sympathy and…

Obama’s new Muslim outreach coordinator is already gone.  According to the Wall Street Journal, he had served for a few months on the board  of a Muslim investment fund with ties to fundamentalist Islam and an indirect connection (through a board member) to Hamas.

If you want to understand just how difficult it can be for Muslims to participate in public service, look no further than my friend Mazen Asbahi.  An accomplished attorney and long-time Democratic volunteer, he took on the position of Sen. Obama’s national coordinator for Muslim and Arab affairs last week.  Unfortunately, he resigned yesterday out…

Who knew?! Luckily, Hadley Arkes is here to straighten us out. In an essay at “The Catholic Thing,” Arkes bravely ventures back onto the hallowed ground surrounding Russert’s passing in June, when he first wrote (read “Tim Russert: The Story Untold”) a rather firm word of dissent from what he called “this out-of-scale display for…

On Saturday afternoon, after putting my children down for a nap, I took the opportunity to reread selections from Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath.  First published in 1951, this poetic gem has been read by countless spiritual seekers–Jewish and non-Jewish–throughout the world. As I flipped through the pages of the book, I was struck again…

This time the hilarity is from Stuart Shepard, correspondent for the Focus on the Family network (that’s run by that guy, whatsiname, who said he’d never ever endorse McCain–ecxept he might), who muses on bothering God about prayers for some biblical rains to wash away Obama’s convention speech in Denver this month. After all, he…

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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