Powerful social change only happens when ordinary people create movements to fight for their ideals.

• Do you feel moved to help build a global human community based on love, generosity, true caring for each other, mutual forgiveness and compassion?
• Do you want to allow yourself time to connect with your own inner spiritual being?
• Do you want time to experience awe, wonder and amazement at the grandeur and mystery of the universe, the on-going miracle of your own consciousness, and the beauty and fragility of life itself?

If these desires resonate with you, join together with us – members of the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) - in a movement to heal and transform the world. NSP is open to anyone, from atheists, agnostics, “spiritual but not religious” to religious people, who support a NEW BOTTOM LINE IN AMERICA of love and caring, ethical and ecological sensitivity and behavior, kindness and generosity, nonviolence and peace. We challenge corporate greed and the “me-first”-ism that permeates the global market culture. Our goal is very concrete action e.g. H.R. 1016 Global Marshall Plan and our Environmental Social Responsibility Amendment (ESRA) to the Constitution.

Join a Caring Society: Care for the Earth, Care for Each Other

During past programs, we’ve covered a broad spectrum of global, yet which affect us all: we examined a phenomenal discourse on why poverty exists when there is so much wealth in the world; heard a brilliant theorist and visionary for social change speak soberly about where we are as a society and a planet in healing, repairing, and transforming the world, and the strategy for the Obama years ahead; learned how the world’s largest corporations & governments are responding to Earth’s looming environmental disaster and what we can do as social activists; learned about global warming & organizing a worldwide movement, and more.

In the months ahead, we’ve planned a:

Video & Discussion: Positive Economic Alternatives

Thurs., Nov. 11, 7:00-8:30 pm

Economist David C. Korten’s addresses the NSP’s 2010 Conference in Washington, D.C. Founder of Yes! A Journal of Positive Futures magazine, author of five books and many articles about global economies, including The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, When Corporations Rule the World, & Agenda for a New Economy.

Video & Discussion: Caring for the Earth and Each Other

Sun., Nov. 14, 12:30-1:45 pm

Watch the following addresses to the NSP’s 2010 Conference: Congressman Dennis Kucinich speaks on the need for the Environmental Social Responsibility Amendment to the Constitution (ESRA) to protect the planet from environmentally and socially destructive behavior; Rabbi Arthur Waskow, author of God Wrestling & Down-to-Earth Judaism: Food, Money, Sex, and the Rest of Life, speaks on “Earth as Our Sacred Temple” and confronting big oil; Marianne Williamson, spiritual activist and author of Healing the Soul of America and founder of Peace Alliance supporting legislation establishing a U.S. Dept. of Peace, speaks on “soul power”—turning love into a political force for good.

Film: The Corporation (2 ½ hr., divided into 2 parts)

Mondays, Nov. 15 (Part I) & Nov. 22 (Part II), 7:00-9:00 pm

Watch & discuss this Canadian documentary’s exploration of the genesis of the American corporation, its global economic supremacy and its psychopathic leanings, based on Joel Bakan’s book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit & Power. Featuring candid interviews with CEOs, whistle blowers, brokers, gurus, spies, players, and pundits—including corporate social critics like Noam Chomsky & capitalist views of Milton Friedman. (Fundamental to understanding the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling’s effects on democracy.)

Video & Discussion: Ethics, Economic Democracy, & Social Change

Mon., Nov. 29, 7:00-8:30 pm

Watch the following addresses to the NSP’s 2010 Conference: Dr. Sharon Welch, UU ethics scholar and Provost of Meadville Lombard Theological School (UU Seminary) and author of Feminist Ethic of Risk & Real Peace & Real Security: The Challenges of Global Citizenship, speaks on paradoxes & challenges of democratic government, opening closed minds; Dr. Gary Dorien, Professor of Religion at Colombia University, and leading social ethicist, speaks on economic globalization, meltdown, democracy and the National Council of Churches’ Social Creed for the 21^st Century; Dr. Graylan Hagler, leader in United for Peace and Justice & Director of Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America (NACA) fighting predatory lending, speaks on new ways of doing things, seeing things, engaging each other.

Video & Discussion: Nuclear Disarmament, War & Peace, the Great Awakening

Thurs., Dec. 2, 7:00-8:30 pm

Watch the following addresses to the NSP’s 2010 Conference: Father John Dear, activist Jesuit priest, author of A Persistent Peace & Put Down Your Sword, arrested over 75 times for civil disobedience against war & nuclear weapons, speaks on Pres. Obama’s nuclear policies, nonviolent practice within and resistance without; Jonathan Granoff, President of the Global Security Institute, author, attorney, and international peace activist, speaks on universal spiritual imperatives—loving your neighbors as yourself and protecting the global commons; Rev. James Forbes, Pastor Emeritus of the Riverside Church of New York City, Director of Healing of the Nations Foundation and who Newsweek called one of “12 most effective preachers in the English-speaking world,” speaks on the need for the 4^th Great (Interfaith) Awakening in America.

Video & Discussion: Compassion

Thurs., Dec. 9, 7:00- 8:30 pm

Watch Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister’s address to the NSP 2010 Conference. Social psychologist, author of 30 books, co-founder of the NSP & Tikkun Magazine, and one of America’s key visionary spiritual voices for over 30 years, she speaks on compassion. Drawing on scientific brain research and universal religious principles, she answers the questions: What is a Caring Society? What is Compassion? She names six major global crises and what we need to do in response, in order to manifest our human instinct for compassion.

Video & Discussion: Non-Alienated Human Relationships Necessary for Social Transformation

Sun., Dec. 12, 12:30- 1:45 pm

Watch address of Keynote Speaker, Peter Gabel, to NSP’s 2010 Conference. Psychotherapist and founder of the Institute for Labor and Mental Health in Oakland, CA., Associate Editor of Tikkun Magazine, lawyer and a founder of Critical Legal Studies, and author of The Bank Teller and Other Essays on the Politics of Meaning, Gabel speaks on why social and political change/transformation is part of spirituality, what he says Ronald Reagan clearly understood--our need for recognition and community.

Please join us at the Morristown Unitarian Fellowship, 21 Normandy Heights Rd, Morristown, for the NSP Film/Talks I’ve described above. For more info, www.spiritualprogressives.org or www.tikkun.org, local NSP contact Teresa Guyton at teresguyton@yahoo.com or 973-989-9098 or Jo Sippie-Gora at seedsofpeacemuf@optonline.net or 973-838-8576.

Help Build a Caring Society starting Sept. 16

Building a Caring Society- Free Films & Discussion
Morristown Unitarian Fellowship
21 Normandy Heights Road, Morristown, NJ 07960

Thursday, Sept. 16, 7-9 pm Watch and discuss PBS documentary: Frontline Heat (2008). Frontline producer Martin Smith investigates how the world’s largest corporations and governments are responding to Earth’s looming environmental disaster and what we can do as social activists.

Thursday, Sept. 30, 7-9 pm Watch and discuss DVD of Bill McKibben’s address to the Network of Spiritual Progressives’ Washington, DC, Conference, 2010, on global warming and organizing a worldwide movement. McKibben wrote Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (2010) and founded 350.org. Time Magazine called him the world’s best green journalist and Foreign Policy named him “one of 100 most important global thinkers.”

Thursday, Oct. 21, 7-9 pm Watch and discuss Film: The End of Poverty (2008). An “Inconvenient Truth” for global politics. A phenomenal discourse on why poverty exists when there is so much wealth in the world.

Thursday, Nov. 11, 7-9 pm Watch and discuss David C. Korten’s address to the Network of Spiritual Progressives, Washington, D.C. Conference 2010, on positive economic alternatives. Korten’s latest book is Agenda for a New Economy: A Declaration of Independence from Wall Street.

To register for this series, RSVP: Teresa Guyton at teresguyton@yahoo.com or 973-989-9098 or Jo Sippie-Gora at seedsofpeacemuf@optonline.net or 973-838-8576. Read more about Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) at www.spiritualprogressives.org.

Mother's Peace Day

A Gold Star Mother's Testimony
and the True Intent of Mother’s Day
by Valerie Elverton-Dixon on May 7, 2010 (Tikkun)

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When Celeste Zappala’s son, Sherwood Baker, decided to join the Pennsylvania National Guard, he assured her that the most violent duty he would have to perform would probably be to confront his parents at a peace rally that got too rowdy. Zappala has always opposed violence and war. She taught these values to her son.

He was a social worker. However, after Sherwood started to have some financial trouble, the National Guard seemed to be an opportunity to earn extra money. He could pay off his college loans and make a down payment on a house. He and his wife were starting a family. They had a young son. It was also an opportunity to serve in a branch of the nation’s armed forces whose primary mission was to help people in times of trouble. “The National Guard never goes to foreign war,” Zappala thought. “9/11 changed everything.”

Members of the Pennsylvania National Guard were deployed to Iraq, and on April 26, 2004, Sherwood was killed by an explosion in Baghdad. His mission was to search for weapons of mass destruction. He was the first Pennsylvania guardsman killed in combat in a foreign war since World War II.

Celeste Zappala was a witness this past March at a Truth Commission on Conscience in War held at the Riverside Church in New York City. Her testimony about her son told of a man who was serious about his obligations to his family, his country and to his own word. He told her he would go to Iraq because “I made an oath before God to do my duty.”

However, his country did not do its duty to him, and it does not do its duty to members of the National Guard and to their families. Members of the Guard tend to be older than recruits into other branches of the military. They have jobs and families. Their families tend to live far from military bases, thus they get “precious little support,” according to Zappala. When members of the Guard are deployed to foreign wars they can lose their families, jobs, health and even their lives.

For Zappala, this is a betrayal. Guard members want to do their duty, but when they are asked to kill and to die on foreign battlefields when they signed to perform very different duties, they are left with no viable choices. Nothing can bring Celeste Zappala’s son back to her or bring back the thousands of other sons and daughters who have died in Afghanistan and in Iraq, but she spends much time and effort working for peace.

According to the Truth Commission web site. “Since losing Sherwood, she and her family have worked relentlessly to promote a peaceful end to the occupation of Iraq. She has spoken out in many U.S. cities, was a featured speaker at a 2007 International Peace Conference in Istanbul and at the 2008 Japan Mother’s Conference.” (www.conscienceinwar.org/who_bios.php)

Mother’s working for peace is the true intent of Mother’s Day in the United States. In 1870, Julia Ward Howe, the woman who wrote the words to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, appalled by the carnage of both the U.S. Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, wrote a Mother’s Day Proclamation. The proclamation called on women to refuse husbands coming to them smelling of death and expecting approbation. It urges women to refuse to allow their sons to be taken away to unlearn the morality mothers have taught them and injure the sons of other women. It asks women to raise their voices for disarmament and to organize international peace congresses: “To promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”

Howe originally wanted her vision of Mother’s Day to occur on July 4. However, June 2, 1873, Mother’s Day was observed in 18 North American cities. Most of these observances ended when Howe stopped funding them. The Mother’s Day that we celebrate now started in West Virginia as a day of reconciliation after the Civil War. Anna Reeves Jarvis wanted a day that would bring together families and neighbors who had fought on different sides during the war. It was considered a “Mother’s Day Friendship Day.”

When Anna Reeves Jarvis died, her daughter Anna M. Jarvis worked for an official Mother’s Day to honor mothers and to honor peace. May 10, 1908, she handed out carnations, her mother’s favorite flower, to mothers at the first official Mother’s Day celebrated at Andrew’s Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia. That same day a service was held at a church in Philadelphia. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson made Mother’s Day, the second Sunday in May, an official national holiday.

In a flash the day became a commercial bonanza. Now it is second only to Christmas for the purchase of cards and gifts. It is the busiest day of the year for restaurants. Florists make much money. This commercialization of the holiday did not please Anna M. Jarvis, and she spent years of her life working to repeal the holiday she had worked to create. In the 1930s, she was arrested for disturbing the peace as she protested an American War Mother’s sale of flowers. (www.mothersdaycentral.com/about-mothersday/history/ )

I say: It is time we reconnect Mother’s Day to its true purpose, a day to advocate for peace and reconciliation. After Mother’s Day Sunday, after children and husbands serve their mothers and wives breakfast in bed, after the gifts have been given, after dinner out, we ought to extend Mother’s Day to Mother’s Day Monday. On this day, mothers all over the world ought to take to the streets and demand an end to war. We ought to demand an end to structural violence that produces economic disparity which is the root cause of violent conflict. We ought to do this in solidarity with Celeste Zappala and every mother who has lost a child to the violence of foreign wars and the violence in our own streets. As Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation says: “

Arise, then, women of this day!

Arise all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

This is a clarion call for all of humanity to end the insanity of violence, especially the madness of war. Happy Mother’s Day.