On-line religious liberals plan meeting for Montclair

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

Religion, liberalism, and Web savvy are the watchwords of the first Progressive Faith Blog Con, a convention to be held over the July 14 weekend in the Conference Center at Montclair State University.

Jews and Christians, Buddhists and Muslims, and at least one self-proclaimed pagan will gather to continue in person the kinds of conversations they wage on-line as authors of blogs, the Web diaries that range from the queasily personal to the politically influential.

Like the “Yearly Kos,” a convention of liberal political bloggers that drew Democratic heavyweights to Las Vegas last month, the Montclair “con” will feature discussions on using the participants’ Web sites and chat rooms as agents of social and political change in a liberal — and in this case, religious — framework.

The convention will begin with a Friday night dinner and Shabbat service and will span two days of panels and discussions. Some 50 bloggers will discuss topics ranging from war and peace to poverty and political activism.

In addition to the Jewish rituals on Friday night, Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian worship services will be interspersed among the meetings, with vegetarian meals and overnight accommodations within walking distance of the campus available to observant Jews.

A prime organizer is Rachel Barenblat, a rabbinical student who spoke with NJ Jewish News on a cell phone from a park bench near her home in Williamstown, Mass.

A poet and former journalist, she said she has “danced around with the thought of becoming a rabbi since high school” and is now working toward ordination in the rabbinical program of ALEPH: The Alliance for Jewish Renewal.

For the past three years, Barenblat has been operating a blog called velveteenrabbi.com. “It’s a play on a children’s book called The Velveteen Rabbit, the story of a stuffed rabbit who wants to become real and play with the real rabbits. I thought, ‘I’m kind of a velveteen rabbi. I’m not a real rabbi, but maybe someday I’ll be one.”

Although she has never actually met him, for the past six months, Barenblat has been organizing the convention in cyberspace with Thurman Hart, a former fundamentalist Christian who was born in New Mexico and raised in Texas. He runs a blog called xpatriatedtexan.com out of his home in Jersey City.

Hart, who describes himself as a “maverick believer in the Garden State,” teaches political science at Montclair State while he studies for his doctorate at the City University of New York.

Barenblat hopes the convention “will be the first of many such events in building bridges between people who care about religion and our political life. There is a lot of common ground, although we come from a lot of different places.”

Barenblat said she reads 70 or 80 blogs a day and communicates with many of their authors. Now, she said, she “hopes to bring some of that into real life.”

Hart, her Christian counterpart, agrees.

“We also want to create a space in the public sphere where people of liberal politics and religious faith of whatever kind can feel comfortable about speaking out,” said Hart, who became alienated from his fellow Southern Baptists when they became involved in the anti-abortion battles of the 1980s.

“We are trying to be a voice for people who don’t feel like the Christian Right speaks for them.”

The convention is also asking what liberal faiths can learn from one another. “I’m hoping to learn more about how other blogs and other ‘new media’ can contribute to interfaith dialogue, and I’m curious to see the range of meanings people have for the term ‘progressive,’” wrote Chris Walton, a Unitarian Universalist from Boston, in an e-mail interview. To that end, wrote Walton, who blogs at philocrites.com, “one of the things that excites me most about this conference is the degree of involvement by Jewish bloggers.”

Barenblat is concerned, however, that the fractious issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could rupture the potential solidarity the progressive bloggers hope to forge in Montclair.

“Israel is such a divisive subject within and without the Jewish community. We don’t want to compromise our principles, but we don’t want to squander a valuable coalition,” she said. “It may be naive of me, but I hope we can make it through the weekend without much division on this issue.”

Dan “Mobius” Sieradski, a Jerusalem resident who maintains a widely read Jewish blog called Jewschool.com, will not be attending the conference. But the Teaneck native has asked contributors to one of his blogs, radicaltorah.com, to take part.

Interviewed by e-mail, Sieradski said he is devoted to celebrating “new expressions of Jewish culture and to exhibit the intersection of progressive politics and religious observance.”

Asked whether he feared tensions between Jews and other progressive bloggers over support of the Israeli government, he wrote, “The ongoing occupation has already proven to be a liability for Jewish relations with the Islamic and Christian communities, and in particular with the Left, as exemplified by the divestment movement and the general attitude towards Jews and Israel present among groups in the antiwar movement.”

Mik Moore, the blogger behind jspot.org, is a New Yorker who works as director for communications for the anti-poverty organization Jewish Fund for Justice.

Like others, he hopes that the ecumenical effort to bring together left-of-center people of faith will not get bogged down by disagreements about Israel.

“A large majority of folks in the progressive community have a fairly common view of the conflict. They are not rigid Zionists or anti-Zionists. I have no idea whether this conference will attract people with hard-line views on the subject, and I’m hopeful if there are folks like that, the issue will be handled in a respectful way,” he said.

Hussein Rashid, a Queens-born Shiite Muslim with a blog called islamicate.com, said that if the talk turns to the Middle East, he would fall back on the experience he had coexisting with a college roommate “who was incredibly pro-Israel. We argued and we fought, but at the end of the day we realized it was a political dispute, and we agreed to disagree.”

Rashid considers himself “a voice of Islam’s silent majority.” A doctoral candidate at Harvard University’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Rashid said the conference “will allow us to talk across traditions. That is the wonderful thing about this.”

The three-day conference begins with a 7:15 p.m. Shabbat service on July 14, with sessions and worship services running all day Saturday and through lunch on Sunday.

Admission is $25 in advance or $45 at the door.