Our social change organizations have internalized the destructive messages of mainstream society. It’s time to compost what’s not working.
2015
Structure Without Hierarchy: Effective Leadership in Social Change Movements
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It’s impossible to create activist spaces where everyone is equally powerful. Instead, we can acknowledge and encourage different paths to power.
2015
The Power of Service
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Leadership doesn’t have to be patriarchal. Remembering that leadership is service will help social movements resist the tyranny of structurelessness.
2015
Sacred Earth, Sacred Self: A Meditation on Inner Transformation
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To overthrow the alienation and false needs of capitalism, we must imagine a culture of love, fearlessness, and honor for the sacred—then start building it.
2015
Making Amends: Healing from Individual and Collective Trauma and Loss
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The bloody photos from East Jerusalem triggered memories of violence at home. Resisting state violence can’t be separated from personal healing.
2015
Left-Wing Follies: The Self-Defeating Ideas That Hold Activists Back
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To access the tools we need to transform our society, we must overcome anti-intellectualism on the left. Let’s reforge the link between head and heart.
2015
A Response to Gary Peller
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The desire for mutual recognition is not an abstract universal, but a concrete universal manifested in all human situations as an expression of the very meaning of what it means to be a social human being.
2015
History and Transcendence
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The imposition of the “desire for mutual recognition” as the universal that ties us all together in common humanity onto the description of every social phenomena is ahistorical and undialectical—it fails to account for the concrete particulars of time and space that give exercises of social power a particular spin and story.
2015
The Spiritual Dimension of Social Justice: Transforming the Legal Arena
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We need a new legal paradigm that affirms the spiritual dimension of our common existence. Join our efforts to place empathy at the center of the law.
2015
Net Neutrality and the Fight for Social Justice
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Net neutrality is not just for techies. The digital roots of the Black Lives Matter movement show why we must fight to keep the internet open to all.
2015
Spiritual Evolution and the Law
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One way to view the inexorable march of biological evolution is as the development of the neurological capacity necessary to recognize this universal inner presence more and more fully. And not just in humans.
Activism
The Path to Defeat Racism
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Racism is the demeaning of an entire group of people and refusal to see them as fully human in the way we see ourselves and those we deem to be “like” us. When we fail to see the humanity of the “other,” we ascribe to them ugly characteristics that somehow justify treating them with less honor and less generosity than we would others who are part of the groups we do see as fundamentally like us. From this place of separation we justify denying the “other” equal rights, benefits, and caring that all human beings deserve. Racism in the United States has a long history. It was foundational to U.S. expansion throughout the North American continent, allowing white people to justify to themselves genocidal policies toward Native Americans, to allow slavery, and to incorporate into our Constitution a provision that would count African slaves as three-fifths of a human being so that Southern States would have higher representation in the Congress, though racists both North and South didn’t think of them as human beings at all.
Activism
The Community Radio Revolution
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With stations like KNSJ realizing the potential of grassroots radio and hundreds more stations set to go on the air very soon, many advocates see the 21st century as a new era for participatory media.
2015
A Bodhisattva’s Approach to Climate Activism
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Bodhisattvas commit daily to an impossible task: the liberation of all living beings. What can climate activists learn from their active nonattachment?