Fostering Deep Morality: Activist Empowerment (plus more)

NOTE: With this 1300-word essay, I may have summed up my thinking more clearly and convincingly than I have before. I'd be very interested in your feedback.

Fostering Deep Morality: Activist Empowerment
By Wade Lee Hudson

The Moral Monday movement that began in North Carolina is extremely promising. My hope is that it evolves into a nationwide movement that nurtures the morality of its own members as well as that of policy makers. If it does, the movement could become an even more effective instrument for changing our society for the better.

To read more, click here.

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Cornel West Quotes

QUOTES FROM CORNEL WEST, talk, New York Catholic Worker, 8 November 2013, “The Legacy of Dorothy Day,” Catholic Agitator, February 2014

...We can love our enemies. It does not matter what our enemies are doing at the moment. Their deeds do not fully define their humanity; they can change in the same way you have changed in your own lives. You do not want to be frozen in any particular moment that definitely defines you. I know I was a gangster before I met Jesus, and the best I will ever be is a redeemed sinner with gangster proclivities and gangster memories, hence the need for grace to fall back on something that can sustain me....

To read more, click here.

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Dialog with Dean Baker

Following the Feb. 5 public forum on “Employment: A Human Right,” I sent Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, an email that has resulted in an ongoing dialog. I will update this thread as more emails are exchanged.

To read the dialog, click here.

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2014 Netroots Nation Submission

While consulting with Jennry Perrino, Legislative Aid to Congressman John Conyers, Jr., after receiving confirmation that Congressman Conyers would be “definitely available” to participate in a 75-minute panel discussion July 17-20, I submitted a proposal that the conference host a session on “How to Achieve Full Employment: Human Rights, Morality, and Organizing Strategies.” Kazi Sabeel Rahman, a Fellow at Harvard Law School and the Roosevelt Institute, is also on board as “tentatively available.” Rahman has written eloquently on law, economics, and morality. I’ve also invited Claudia Horwitz and Taj James to serve on the panel.

To read more, click here.

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Full Employment, Social Welfare and Equity: Columbia U. Seminar

On February 10, Philip Harvey led a Columbia University Seminar on “Full Employment, Social Welfare and Equity” in the Faculty House. On February 21, he sent to the participants the following written responses to questions that were raised during the seminar.

To read more, click here.

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Reflections from Guanajuato – 11/27/05
By Wade Lee Hudson

After recently re-reading Part One of Martin Buber’s I and Thou (one of the greatest books ever written), and observing interactions with progressive-minded Americans, Canadians, and Europeans here in Guanajauto (I’m unable to communicate much with Mexicans so I can’t comment on this aspect of their culture), I’m struck even more strongly with the superficiality of most communication in the industrialized world.

Objectification is so endemic it’s not even a word in most people’s vocabulary. The women’s movement highlighted certain problems with sexual objectification. The early Marx discussed alienation. Michael Lerner and others on the margins talk about how we use each other as objects.

But in terms of how progressive-minded people relate to one another, all that theorizing has made little practical difference.

To read more, click here.

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Gandhi and King on Nonviolence

Selected quotes.

To read them, click here.

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