Our friend Robby Jones just posted a podcast of his recent interview with Rev. Jim Forbes, who not so long ago retired from his position as pastor of New York City's historic Riverside Church, where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered "Beyond Vietnam," one of his less appreciated but more important sermons.

Forbes puts King's critique of the three-headed beast of materialism, militarism and racism into a 21st century context and offers a profound meditation on what it means to be a progressive religious leader. A snippet:

We are exceedingly materialistic in terms of how we look at the worth of people, the way we look at power, at prestige,etc. But we are also a caring nation. We live in the tension. So we now are in a pluralistic age, but we have not been tutored in how to honor alternative or different religious perspectives, and we don’t really know how to receive the critique of religion to at least moderate our materialistic “addictions,” I think I prefer to use. I started to say “obsession,” but it seems a deeper dynamic than that. Pluralism confronts us with multiple loyalties, and yet we’ve got to live together.

Listen to the entire discussion at Robby's blog, Progressive and Religious.