We can replace the ethos of endless growth and conspicuous consumption with an approach to nature based on awe and wonder at the preciousness of the earth, love of all beings, and celebration of life.
2015
Working-Class Power and Spirituality: Reflections on SeaTac’s Minimum Wage Campaign
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The push for $15 per hour at SeaTac was about more than just paychecks—it was an interfaith, values-based struggle against power inequality.
2015
Transcending Market Logic: Envisioning a Global Gift Economy
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The act of mothering shatters the market-based expectation of equal exchange. Building on that model, let’s build a global gift economy.
2015
Building an International Bank for Right Livelihood
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It’s time to create an alternative to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund—a global bank that prioritizes sustainability, not growth.
2015
Embracing the Radical Economics of the Bible
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The spirit of the Jubilee laws is clear and relevant: to prevent the emergence of a permanently impoverished underclass.
2015
Sharing Empathy, Sharing Power: A Catholic Take on Debt and Jubilee
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If we are going to demand just and fair debt relationships no longer hijacked by power plays, perhaps we need to instill in our systems and ourselves an understanding of childhood and adult development and build toward a capacity for perspective-taking.
2015
Jubilee and Debt Abolition: An Introduction
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What would it mean to take seriously the Torah’s call for the cancellation of all debts and the equal redistribution of property every fifty years?
2015
Adapting Ancient Ethical Principles in Modern Times
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How might we update the Bible’s call for the periodic redistribution of wealth? Could we use estate taxes to create a trust fund for every child?
2015
Sabbatical Year and Jubilee in Twenty-First-Century America
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A campaign to reinstitute the Sabbatical Year and Jubilee in industrial societies could fundamentally transform the global capitalist system.
Editorials & Actions
Yearning for a World of Love and Justice
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We live in a world filled with loving and caring people. We all crave a world filled with love and care. Yet most of us doubt that we can experience a loving and caring world beyond our own private lives and homes. Why? Because the ethos of the capitalist marketplace, which places greatest value on money and power, has infiltrated our personal lives, shaping our unconscious and conscious beliefs about “human nature.”
In the economic marketplace we are taught to look out for ourselves, maximize our profits, and do what we need to do to get ahead, even at the cost of people we care about.
Activism
Radical Sanctuary: Faith Groups Rally Around Migrant Youth
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All over the country, people in communities of faith are on the front lines of a renewed and growing movement pushing for basic aid and a path to legalization for some 11 million migrants living in the United States without legal status.
2014
Illness and Innocence
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Why do many of us feel guilty when we catch a cold or grow a tumor? Is it because so many religions depict illness as divine punishment?
2014
Diverse Insights into Jewish-Muslim Relations
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A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations
Edited by Abdelwahab Meddeb and Benjamin Stora
Princeton University Press, 2014
This collection of scholarly yet accessible articles by dozens of Jewish and Muslim experts is the definitive source for understanding a complex relationship between Muslims and Jews from the seventh century to the present day. Its 1,146 pages cover pressing political issues like whether Jews are demeaned in Islam and whether Jews faced real (as opposed to just remembered) anti-Semitism in Islamic societies. It also explores the ways in which contemporary Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are both products and causes of the political struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. Yet the richness of this fantastic and exciting book lies also in its descriptions of how Jews and Muslims have learned from each other in the arenas of philosophy, science, art, literature, and mysticism.
2014
New Leadership in the NSP
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The Network of Spiritual Progressives is excited to welcome Rev. J. Alfred Smith Sr. as co-chair and Cat J. Zavis as executive director.
2014
Can a Spiritual Outlook Regenerate Our Social Institutions?
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Another Way of Seeing: Essays on Transforming Law, Politics, and Culture by Peter Gabel. Review by Kim Chernin.