Progressive Commentary Hour - 12/05/11

The role and necessity of spirituality in political and social activism

 

Rabbi Michael Lerner is clearly one the nation’s greatest Jewish intellectuals and spiritual political activists. As a teenager, Rabbi Lerner was a student of Abraham Joshua Heschel, a great socially responsible mystical thinker who marched with Martin Luther King. During the 60s, he was a chair of the Berkeley chapter of the Students For a Democratic society and was incarcerated as member of the Seattle Seven.  Michael is the founding editor of Tikkun Magazineand is the founder of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, a spiritual activism organization dedicated to care, gratitude, spiritual insight in all dimensions of human society, and respect for the earth. 

 

Professor Robert Thurman holds the Jay Zong Ka-pa Robert Thurman Chair of Indo-Tibetan Studies at Columbia University. He is the President of Tibet House US and is President of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies. The New York Times has hailed him as the “leading American expert on Tibetan Buddhism.”  In 1962, Prof. Thurman was ordained as a Buddhist monk by the Dalai Lama, with whom he has remained a close colleague to this day.  He has written many books on Tibetan culture, art, politics and Buddhism. His most recent is “Why the Dalai Lama Matters: His Act of Truth as a Solution for China, Tibet and the World” – an attempt to find a win-win situation in the Tibet-China crisis. 

 

Prof. Dan McKanan is the Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer at Harvard Divinity School, where he specializes in the American history of religious and spiritual movements for social transformation. He is the author of “Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition” from Oxford University Press, that provides an all-encompassing look at religious activism during the past 200 years of American history.

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