Friday, August 12, 2005

Why America Needs a Spiritual Left

Interesting article by Michael Lerner, in Tikkun. Of course, this is what the Catholic Worker people have been saying since forever. For that matter, so have the Jesuits. Not to mention the Anglo-Catholic Socialists you can link to on the sidebar, or all those Lutherans in Scandinavia. Beliefnet even says we have one already, and gives a list of the purported movment's leaders. It wasn't so long ago, of course, that a certain amount of "liberalism" -- concern for the poor, for the welfare of prisoners and the oppressed, all of that -- was what Americans expected in their religious leaders; these days, it seems to be a news flash.

So what does it say about our times that the idea of a religious Left seems alien, even threatening, to Americans on both sides of the Red/Blue divide?

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