President Obama’s speech calling for a "new beginning" for American and Muslim relations inspired warm responses from several progressive religious leaders featured in my recent book, Progressive & Religious. They were especially unified in praise for his focus on justice, interfaith cooperation, and common values, all of which serve as cornerstones for future peace and mutual respect. Obama highlighted the need for open and frank discourse in this process. These leaders are important progressive, religious voices in this dialogue, where emphasis is shifting from a history of suspicion to a future of cooperation.

Below I've featured video responses from two important leaders featured in Progressive & Religious, Rabbi David Saperstein and Dr. Eboo Patel.

Rabbi David Saperstein, Director of the Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism, called Obama's address an "extraordinary, remarkable speech" that contained impressive "moral consistency" and "political courage." Click here to watch the video. Rabbi Saperstein also noted:

"One of the greatest challenges facing humanity today is finding common ground between diverse religious traditions and working with all religions to delegitimize extremism that embraces violence."

Dr. Eboo Patel, Director of Interfaith Youth Core, highlighted the hopeful vision of "interfaith cooperation," rather than "a clash of civilations" that has been a mark of President Obama's administration from its beginning. Click here to watch the video.

These video responses, and audio and written responses to President Obama's speeach from other leaders featured in Progressive & Religious, including Asra Nomani and Rami Nashashibi, are featured on a new religion website, www.Patheos.com. Thanks to Patheos for gathering these resources into one page.

To hear more of the inspiring religious perspectives that Rabbi Saperstien, Eboo Patel, and others are bringing into American public life, you can check out the "Progressive Religious Voices Podcast," which features interviews with these leaders.

To read more about the emerging progressive religious movement, you can check out Progressive & Religious: How Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist Leaders are Moving Beyond the Culture Wars and Transforming American Public Life. Rowman & Littlefield has made my book available at the best price so far ($12.48 for hardcover). To buy the book at this sale price, click here, and enter promotion code “4S9JONE50″ at checkout.

Labels: Christian, eboo patel, interfaith, jewish, muslim, obama, progressive, rami nashashibi, religion, saperstein

President’s Faith-Based Advisory Council Taps Four Progressive Leaders Featured in Recent Book, Progressive & Religious

Contact: Robert P. Jones, Ph.D.
rjones@publicreligion.org, 240-638-6403

(Washington, DC) - President Obama’s newly unveiled Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships taps four progressive religious leaders featured in the recent book, Progressive & Religious: How Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist Leaders are Moving Beyond the Culture Wars and Transforming American Public Life (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). The leaders come from across the religious spectrum, representing Christianity (both mainline and evangelical Protestant), Judaism (Reform), and Islam.

These leaders, like many others on the council, have been at the vanguard in sustaining and reviving a progressive public face of religion. The excerpts below illustrate how these leaders are faithfully and critically engaging their faith and religious tradition to work for social justice and the common good--a hopeful sign in this new era.

• Harry Knox, Director of Religion and Faith Program, Human Rights Campaign. Under his leadership, HRC created a national speakers' bureau that reaches more than 10 million Americans monthly and a national network for 22 progressive state clergy coalitions around the country. Knox was denied ordination because he is openly gay, and is a former licensed minister of the United Methodist Church in Georgia.

The people that we study now as great thinkers were all revolutionary in their time. They all listened to God first, and then made what they were hearing bump up against the text and bump up against the tradition of the church. And they found that maybe the text and the tradition weren’t big enough to hold what they were hearing from God, and so they said some new things.
-Knox, in Progressive & Religious

• Dr. Eboo S. Patel, Founder and Director, Interfaith Youth Core. Dr. Patel, an Indian-American Muslim, founded his Chicago-based organization to build the interfaith youth movement through service and dialogue. Patel is a Rhodes scholar and serves on the Religious Advisory Committee of the Council on Foreign Relations.

A religious pluralist is somebody who may believe very deeply that their own tradition is the only “right” tradition, but who fundamentally believes in a society where people from different backgrounds have the freedom and the right to live by their own traditions and where they can live together in equal dignity and mutual loyalty.
-Patel, in Progressive & Religious

• Rabbi David N. Saperstein, Director and Counsel, Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism. Rabbi Saperstein was recently named the most influential rabbi in America by Newsweek magazine. For more than 30 years, Rabbi Saperstein has represented the Reform Jewish Movement to Congress and the administration and lobbied for a variety of social justice issues.

There is hardly a classic text of Judaism that does not resound with both spiritual meaning and God’s call for us to be engaged in creating a better world. You can open up almost any story in the Bible and feel this deep spiritual resonance that speaks across the centuries and embodies this call: that we are called to create a more just and fair world for humanity.
-Saperstein, in Progressive & Religious

• Rev. Jim Wallis, President and Director, Sojourners. Sojourners is a progressive evangelical organization that has been a longstanding voice for poverty reduction, peace, and the environment. Wallis’ book, God’s Politics, stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for 4 months.

One thing that changes American Christians is direct proximity, relationship to poor people. Revival is going to be triggered when the relationship to the poor on the part of the churches reaches a critical mass.
-Wallis, in Progressive & Religious

These leaders are featured prominently in the recent book, Progressive & Religious, which explains how progressive religious leaders are tapping the deep connections between religion and social justice to work on issues like poverty and workers’ rights, the environment, health care, pluralism, and human rights. The book is the result of three years of systematic research and nearly 100 interviews with progressive religious leaders in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism.

The website companion to the book (http://www.progressiveandreligious.org/) also features selected audio podcasts and transcripts with these groundbreaking leaders, including podcasts with Dr. Eboo Patel and Rabbi David Saperstein.

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Labels: eboo patel, knox, progressive christianity, progressive islam, progressive judaism, saperstein, wallis

Note: The complete version of this article can be found my "Dispatches from the Beltway" column at ReligionDispatches.org.

The release of the massive American Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life this week provides a new window into an old question that has preoccupied sociologists for more than a century: Can religious traditions, with their particularity and ancient roots, survive amidst the pluralism of the modern world?


The Pew Forum findings clearly cast an affirmative vote; Pew found that American religion is increasingly diverse, that most Americans have a non-exclusivist understanding of their religion (70% of the religiously-affiliated agree that many religions may lead to eternal life)—and that religion is alive and well under these conditions, with more than half of Americans continuing to say that religion is very important in their lives.

These findings cut against the grain of some of the dominant streams of sociological theory and recent public discourse. Sociologists have often tried to predict not whether, but how quickly religion might succumb to the alleged corrosive power of modern pluralism. More than a century ago, Karl Marx famously declared that religion’s last refuge was to be found in the sighs of oppressed workers as they toiled in the twilight years of a doomed capitalist system. And Max Weber lamented that amidst the tempest of competing value systems in the modern pluralistic world, trying to imitate the life of a religious exemplar like Moses, Jesus, or the Buddha was doomed for purely practical reasons.

More recently, secularization theorists believed the tumultuous atmosphere of the 1960s would finally kill off traditional religions. They too were convinced that the coexistence of so many competing belief systems in the same social space would ultimately prove destabilizing to all of them.

But despite the predictions, religion would not go quietly into that good night. By the 1980s, most of the world experienced not the decline but the resurgence of public religion, especially in literalist/fundamentalist forms that were explicitly anti-modern (and importantly, in many parts of the world, anti-colonial). Religious extremists across traditions hit the headlines so forcefully and often violently that they became the public face of religion through the 1990s.

Faced with insurmountable data, chastened theorists now allowed two tracks for modern religion: secularization/decline on the one hand or anti-modern retrenchment on the other. These basic assumptions have driven much of the contemporary public discourse about religion, from Samuel Huntington’s vision of a future marked by a “clash of civilizations” organized around monolithic religious identities to the more recent declarations by Christopher Hitchens and other neo-atheists that “religion poisons everything.”

But the recent Pew data, and my own research among progressive American religious leaders in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism, demonstrate that decline and retrenchment are not the only options. A new public face of religion is emerging....
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Read the rest of the article in my "Dispatches from the Beltway" column at ReligionDispatches.org.

You can read more about the emerging progressive religious movement in my forthcoming book, Progressive & Religious: How Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist Leaders are Moving Beyond the Culture Wars and Transforming American Public Life. The book is available for pre-order from Amazon.com and will be in bookstores nationwide in August 2008.

Labels: diana eck, dispatches from the beltway, eboo patel, pew forum, pluralism, secularization