Editor in Chief: Rabbi Michael Lerner
Rabbi Lerner, author of a national best-seller in 2006, The Left Hand of God: Taking Our Country Back from the Religious Right (in paperback, HarperSanFrancisco, 2007) is rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue in San Francisco and the editor of Tikkun magazine: A Bimonthly Jewish and Interfaith Critique of Politics, Culture and Society.
Tikkun is one of the most respected intellectual/cultural magazines in the U.S., but also one of the most controversial because of its stand in favor of the rights of Palestinians, on the one hand, which locates Rabbi Lerner in the minds of many as the leader and most prominent spokesperson in the U.S. of supporters of the Israeli peace movement, and on the other hand, a pioneer in contemporary social thought because of his stand critiquing the anti-religious and anti-spiritual biases of the secular Left, insisting that they need to address the spiritual hunger of Americans as equally important to their material needs (he calls this a hunger for "meaning" and says that for many Americans the desire to transcend the individualism and selfishness of the competitive marketplace and connect their lives to higher meaning is as important as any interest in money or things, and that one reason why people who might on purely economic grounds be supporting the liberal and progressive social change movements actually end up supporting the Right is that the Left doesn't have a "politics of meaning").
He is the co-author with Cornel West of a book entitled Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin, and ten other books. And with Cornel West and Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister, he is chair of the interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives which you can find on the web at www.spiritualprogressives.org. Rabbi Lerner was once called "the most dangerous criminal in America" by J. Edgar Hoover when Lerner was a national leader in the movement against the war in Vietnam, "the guru of the White House" by the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal when Hillary Clinton for a short time adopted his Politics of Meaning, but the most frequent description of him came from a five page article about him in the NY Times Magazine that called him "This Year's Prophet." He has a message that is not only for people or all religious faiths, but also for the many spiritually attuned, but not religious, secular people in our society, and for that reason, he remains one of the most frequently quoted progressive intellectuals in the American media. Perhaps you saw him on Larry King, or on Meet the Press, or on Bill Moyers Journal, but if not, you will get to hear him now.
Managing Editor: Dave Belden
Dave Belden joined Tikkun as Managing Editor in March 2007. He was previously a freelance web and business writer in New York's mid-Hudson Valley. He has a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University. Dave wrote over 40 columns on religion and politics worldwide for the global web magazine openDemocracy. He ran a weekly radio show, Spiritually Speaking, with a rabbi and a minister, to help counteract the overwhelming presence of conservative religion on the airwaves, and appeared regularly on WAMC, northeast public radio. The radio shows and some of Dave's articles can be found on the website of the Hudson Valley chapter of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, which he founded with his wife, Debi Clifford, and colleague Mike Ignatowski.
Dave was a member and four year President of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Catskills, an experience he credits with turning him from an organization-phobic loner back into an activist citizen. The epiphany was that a spiritual community could be a place of warmth, intellectual openness, nourishment, activism and hope - even for an agnostic like himself (see www.uucckingston.org). From there it was a natural step to seek out the leaders and writers who had most fully developed an analysis and practice of spiritually-based citizenship and radical politics. Rabbi Michael Lerner appeared to him to be the most convincing and deeply thoughtful of these. Dave is hard pressed to think of any job in the world he would rather be doing than editing Tikkun.
Born in Switzerland in 1949 and raised in England, Dave worked as a religious volunteer in India in 1967 and in Eritrea/Ethiopia after graduating from Oxford in 1970. His parents were leading members of the Moral Re-Armament (MRA) religious movement (better known to some by its earlier name of the Oxford Group, the movement within which Alcoholics Anonymous was formed). After five years intense commitment to the movement's understanding of God, Dave left MRA and religion altogether. He wrote a historical and sociological study of the Oxford Group as his doctoral thesis at Oxford University, 1976. He was involved in radical community and third world politics, and then in his 30s turned to writing science fiction novels that explored gender and religion. From 1981, when he fell in love with Debi Clifford on a trip to San Francisco, until they moved with their then four-year-old son Rowan to the Hudson Valley in 1993, Dave financed writing science fiction novels and fatherhood by remodeling San Francisco Victorians. Rowan is now studying video game design at USC and the Belden-Cliffords are a California family again.
Editor in Chief: Michael Lerner
Managing Editor: Dave Belden
Assistant Editor: Alana Price
Associate Editor: Peter Gabel
Poetry Editor: Joshua Weiner
Art Director: Design Action Collective
Web Management: Reach And Teach
