Chris posted something last week, around Wednesday I think, saying that there were too many submissions to get them all judged on time.  So presumably, the winners will be announced in a little while.

Well, voters and donors are not all political junkies and pollrats.  If that were true, then I suppose me and all my pollrat colleagues have been enormously successful, since there are well over 100 million pollrats and political junkies in the US.  Huzzah!

I was referring to the fact that when progressives think about working together with labor unions and vice versa, it is often at the level of legislative or electoral campaigns; electing a Democratic president, for example, or enacting health care reform.  There's nothing wrong with that, but we should also be mindful of the fact that both communities are facing a very similar set of structural problems, and might have a lot to learn from one another in terms of solving those problems.

Political engagement among young people these days is actually quite high.  And because young people these days are naturally progressive, we already are reaping the benefits of that engagement.

There is a reasonable degree of participation in the progressive movement among young people, which is why I say that the problem of youth participation in the progressive movement is not as severe as the parallel problem in the liberal religious movement.  There are a number of projects ongoing aimed at recruiting young people into the movement; they could always improve, of course, but we are being reasonably aggressive in dealing with this problem.

FutureMajority.com discusses these issues in excellent depth, and I recommend you check them out for more info.

Hee hee yes very funny but back to work now please invisi

There are questions at the periphery, but I think there's a broad understanding that some religions and some traditions within religions are broadly construed as liberal (e.g., liberal Catholics, Episcopalians, UCC, UU, Quaker, Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism, progressive Muslims, etc.)  I would also include the quickly growing "spiritual but not religious" group in this camp, and I might even include atheists or agnostics (although they might not want to be included, I'd imagine).  There are real questions, in my mind, whether religions which are minority in the US, and tend to vote heavily Democratic, but have a history of conservative theology and or conservative politics, should be counted as part of the religious left.  I just don't know enough to say.

With regards specifically to pagan communities, I  don't know much about their theological and political histories, so it's a little hard to say.  I'd have to imagine that those communities are either largely apolitical, or extremely progressive; in the latter case, I'd say they probably do belong in this camp.

Frederick Clarkson, incidentally, is doing some great yeoman's work on exactly this question, i.e. how would one define the religious left, and what is the shared ecumenical vision of that group.  He has a book due out in about a year which should shed some really interesting light on this issue.

As for separation of church and state, as you may have noticed, I'm not exactly a high-ranking government official.  If you're insinuating that progressives working together with religious people somehow compromises our ability to advocate for separation of church and state, I think you're emphatically mistaken; we've been doing just that for a long, long time.

What specifically do you mean by, "liberal religious movement"

and why should it become a political movement?

What is your criteria for establishing a religion?

After all, we wouldn't want to include any of the pagen religions.

Don't we push the concept of "separation of church and state"?

as they will. I understand there are both liberal and conservative religious organizations. It's up to religious organizations to decide how they fit into our secular society. As non-denominational political activists, I don't think its our place to promote religion in a political context.

I'm not sure if I entirely agree that the netroots as a whole has such an antipathy to religion, but other than that, I entirely agree. And I wonder if this is another part of the 'encouraging diversity in the progblogs' conversation.

I have major questions about how the progressive religious movement seeks to gather and wield power, if at all.  My understanding of the movement is that it's significantly hampered by a couple of things: a) religious liberals typically have deep respect for separation of church and state, and therefore are very suspect of any attempt to bring politics into church life; and b) in some cases, religious liberals are part of denominations whose leadership is very conservative.

I think you are quite right that this movement should not seek power in the insidious and deeply divisive way the religious right did.  My suggestion would be that the movement do two things.  First, articulate a broad cross-denominational, ecumenical vision for a just world which is consistent with their own faith tradition.  Second, work to make that vision real for their congregants, and to recruit newcomers to that vision.

A couple of caveats: I don't think the religious left will ever have a single shared theological vision for a just world; that would be nearly impossible, given the diversity of the movement.  At the same time, I do think it's possible to have broad areas of agreement, and plan for disagreement that doesn't completely tear the movement apart.

Furthermore, I think many progressives, especially secular ones, will blanch at my encouragement of what basically amounts to evangelicalism within the religious left.  (I wouldn't call it evangelicalism exactly, since some religious liberals aren't Christian.)  Leaving aside, for now, the point that liberal religious groups (like UCC) are already evangelicizing without any help from me, I think it's silly to object to a social movement which tries to recruit new members.  I also think that, as Howard Zinn would say, you can't be neutral on a moving train.  In a world where religious conservatives are aggressively recruiting new members, religious liberals who neglect to do the same are essentially ceding the national theological conversation to conservatives.

Some of these thoughts are a bit half-formed.  Perhaps I'll try to think them through some more, and write them out in a bit more detail.

I am absolutely sure that no one here but you thinks NARAL is an extreme organization.

His judgment cannot be.

I didn't say anything about Jim Wallis being a sellout.  I just don't think he's a progressive.  We have common cause with him on a lot of things, but he's not a progressive.  He consistently says that Democrats are just as bad as Republicans, and he promotes a fantasy that Democrats are, as a party, hostile to faith.  I think he's about 95% right when it comes to speaking out for peace and social justice, and 100% wrong on his partisan political judgments.

I am somewhat interested in the Social Forum.  I had been following the local variants (Harvard and Boston Social Forums) for a little while, but they've recently dropped off my radar screen.  I've tried checking out the US social forum's website, just now, but there's not much there, and it's not very easy to understand what was discussed, what the results were, what the next step is, etc.

I spent a fair amount of time doing social justice stuff in college, and I did enjoy it quite a bit.  However, much as we talked about creating a new world and planning to change things, I never really saw that happen, and the change that I did see was brought about in a remarkably inefficient way.  As I recall, the movement's understanding of power was too simplistic: approximately, that the way to gain power was to push social justice stories into the media via rallies and demonstrations, and thereby to pressure various actors (corporate, government, what-not) to do the right thing.

There is certainly a place for this, and it is of course important to push pro-justice narratives into the media.  However, I think this picture vastly misunderstands the levers of power in the country, and the various methods for bringing about social change.  Social change includes changing the religious landscape; changing the dynamics of power in the workplace; changing the way families and other personal relationships work; and changing the kinds of values which are imbued through the educational system.  I heard vague discussions of these visions of social change among social justice types back in the day, but in terms of actual things done about them - not much.  Now, maybe I was hanging out with the wrong types or was in the wrong scene or something (I went to school at Harvard, after all).  But I'd really like to know what the social justice movement is doing, besides trying to exert public pressure and change the media.  What are they doing to strengthen the labor movement?  To build up a religious movement that is not deeply individualistic?  What is really being done to bring about social change?