occupy wall street

Should St. Paul’s Cathedral be responsible to regular worshippers trying to get to Evensong or the protestors who might be modeling the social concerns of Christ?

But the ECI is no friend to Israel.

Ours is primarily a linear society which rewards building, doing, improving, and growing. It’s no surprise, then, that countercultural movements have tended to emphasize circles: consensus rather than hierarchy, egalitarianism, nuanced notions of ‘progress.’ Does this sound familiar? It should—it’s behind a lot of what observers have noticed about the Occupy movement: that there are no clear goals, no policy prescriptions, no realistic (i.e., incremental) demands.

Saturday’s surge of Occupy Wall Street-themed actions could be a turning point. There’s obviously more to be felt and said about this than any journalistic treatment could hope to engage; nonetheless, four RD contributors, moderated by Senior Editor Sarah Posner, shared their own thoughts about a movement that remains fluid and thrilling and quite literally indescribable.

The organizer behind the Kol Nidre service at Occupy Wall Street says the Jewish establishment has asked Jews to “check our social justice values” at the door.

Now that the curtain’s been pulled back on the false wizardry of a deregulated financial system, and Americans have been left holding a bag full of bank bailouts, home foreclosures, historic levels of unemployment and poverty, and wage stagnation for those with jobs, “loser” is a label most of us can, in one way or another, wear easily in the current economy. So goes the American Dream these days.

Many liberal religious activists, Rev. Merritt said, remain stuck in the 1960s in how they frame and address economic issues, yet have abandoned protest strategies in favor of the model of maintaining a Washington office whose purpose is to lobby members of Congress. Other religious activists are too focused on “events-oriented things” like staged arrests, “where they’ve pre-negotiated the thing, which is not to me civil disobedience.”

Eric Cantor says he’s “concerned.”

Under normal circumstances, we would view the words of atonement in the Kol Nidre service as speaking about our own spiritual commitments—but these are not normal circumstances.

Bear with me.