Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/nsp/page/2/)
As much as I love the Network of Spiritual Progressives, I am not sure how much of a progressive I am. Seems to me that I spend almost all my time trying to keep things from changing, that in some deep sense I am a conservative—conserving the earth!
Our country badly needs your vision and your spiritual and moral energy to help us chart a path based on generosity, inclusion, and love. The two things I want to talk to you about are where I think we are in our country and where I think we should go.
We have been discussing how we can get members of Congress involved in an Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the Constitution (ESRA). And so what I did over the past few months was to look at the principles and to draft a resolution. The idea is this: we take the principles in the ESRA, and we put them in a congressional resolution asking members of Congress to support the principles, and from there we can work to draft specific legislation for a constitutional amendment.
In this conversation U.S. economist Joseph Stiglitz, recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, endorses economic equality and workplace democracy, and discusses how to accomplish the Network of Spiritual Progressives’ economic goals, with which he sympathizes.
This Q&A explains why we chose the approach we did in the details of this amendment (including why it is so long and so technical).
We invite you to read our Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment (ESRA) and to review the accompanying Q&A to understand why we have gone further than other amendments proposed to deal with the core problems of corporate power and the need for environmental responsibility.
Of the advanced nations, the United States has the highest number of preventable deaths. Why is this? It’s because we are the only advanced nation that thinks of patients as consumers and health as a commodity to be bought on the market. It’s because we have tried to fit medicine into a business model.
If science saves us from religion gone bad, who or what will save us from science gone bad?
THE NSP HAS SET OUT TO TRANSFORM ALL OUR INSTITUTIONS, POLICIES, and social practices so that they encourage rather than undermine our ability to treat every human being as an embodiment of the sacred (as having “inherent worth and dignity,” in secular terms) and our ability to respond to the universe with awe, wonder, and radical amazement. Where does one start on a task that large?
Two pieces of religious literature indicate with special clarity the essential connectedness of spiritual maturity and cultural consciousness. The first call comes from Exodus 3:18. God teaches Moses that his holiness depends on finding holiness where he stands and then by taking that energy to other people for their liberation. The second story of culture and spirituality comes from the tales of the Hasidim: Holiness depends on our choosing the pieties proper to the times. Culture and spirituality, in other words, are of a piece.
How can we frame traditional progressive platform issues in a way that gives them the spiritual reverence they deserve?
One of the casualties of this culture of violence, injustice and war is the loss of our imagination. People across the country cannot even imagine a world without conflict, poverty or nuclear weapons. But our job is announcing a new world of nonviolence.