The fact that the streets are not crowded with protest does not mean the peace movement has grown weary or gone to bed. I passionately believe that something far more dynamic is emerging. We are learning that peace is never a quick-fix.
Activism
Post-Election: Build Power, Act Strategically, and End the Rule of Concentrated Wealth
|
Now it is time to educate, organize and mobilize around a strategy that will build the power of people and put in place the kind of sustainable economy and participatory government we urgently need.
Activism
Stop-and-Frisk in New York and the Politics of Crime in America
|
To deny that race and class do not matter in contemporary America and its criminal justice system is to deny the most obvious political, scientific, and moral reality of our society.
27.4 Fall
They Must Call Us To Sacrifice: A Christian Perspective on the 2012 Election
|
In short, it’s time for Democratic and Republican candidates to treat us citizens as adults who are strong enough to hear truth from our leaders and patriotic enough to sacrifice some important things on behalf of more important things.
27.4 Fall
Practical Curiosity and Democratic Leadership
|
I contend that it is our failure to cultivate practical curiosity, our inability to reckon with the complexity of democratic governance and leadership that is responsible for the low numbers of people within the United States who identify as liberal or progressive.
27.4 Fall
God Sucks as a Campaign Manager
|
Like Robertson’s Coalition crusaders, we need to make it clear that when the election is over, no matter the outcome, we are not going away; that when we make a call to action, that the call is answered.
27.4 Fall
Politics and the Limits of Religious Optimism
|
The manner in which the current political discourse in the United States is marred by shortsighted discussions of the “good” and the nature of morality capable of pushing the nation toward its better self is glaring. While neither seems willing to acknowledge this, both the religious Right and the religious Left have fallen short with respect to these ideological challenges.
27.4 Fall
The Moral Priority of the Common Good
|
If Obama can re-establish the fundamental moral priority for the nation of the public or common good to what the founders originally held dear and what the biblical tradition teaches, he might have a fulcrum by which to pry the American moral spirit free from the prison into which the Tea Party and severely conservative Republicans have confined it.
2012
The Stoker and the Plugger
|
Stopping the tsunami requires every tool in our kit, even the choice of a timid and misguided plugger—whom we need to prod, push, and often militantly oppose—over the stoker. Plugging the leak opens up prospects that the people will mobilize rapidly from below and rebuild the levy while quieting the floodwaters.
2012
Supporting Obama from the Left
|
As we confront the current election and the next four years, many progressives are reflecting upon how we reached this juncture and what role we should play moving forward. Given the partisan character of our country and the mixed results of the current administration, what are spiritual and religious progressives to do?
2012
Reclaiming the Radical Imagination: Reform Beyond Electoral Politics
|
It is time for progressives and others to shift the critique of Obama away from an exclusive focus on the policies and practices of his administration and instead develop a new language for politics—one with a longer historical purview and a deeper understanding of the ominous forces that now threaten any credible notion of the United States as an aspiring democracy.
2012
Be a Progressive Democrat!
|
Election year is different from all other years. The media will invite progressives into the fray. They’ll goad us, for ratings’ sake: Do you love Obama? Hate him? Are your politics pure?
2012
Why Progressives Should Follow Feminism’s Lead in 2012
|
Feminists, facing an escalating “war on women” and recognizing the enormous political stakes, have been organizing with renewed energy. It’s time for progressives of every gender identity to join this bloc and follow our lead.
2012
Obama in Question: A Progressive Critique and Defense
|
Four years ago we seemed to take a shortcut to some kind of national redemption. The same nation that enslaved African Americans until 1865 and imposed a vicious century-long regime of segregation and everyday abuse upon them elected an African American to its presidency. The same nation that elected twelve slave masters to its presidency elected a president whose wife was a descendant of American slaves. The same nation that never would have elected a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement to national office fulfilled some of the movement’s most idealistic hymnody.
2012
Why America Needs a Left
|
The United States today should be engaged in a great debate, not so much over who the next president will be, or over the role of government in economic life, but over the very identity and future orientation of the country itself. On the one hand, powerful right-wing voices argue that America is an essentially conservative country. On the other hand, other voices, led by the president, argue that “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America!” implying that we are an essentially centrist country.