At Progressive and Religious, FPL friend Robby Joneshosts a podcast with Rabbi David Saperstein, Director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. Throughout, Saperstein articulately emphasizes the connection between faith and social justice:

There is hardly a classic text of Judaism that does not resound with both spiritual meaning and God’s call for us to be engaged in creating a better world, the two major themes from my own life. So you can open up almost any story in the Bible and find such themes – read any psalm, any proverb, any of the stories of the prophets – and feel this deep spiritual resonance that speaks across the centuries in the embodiment of this call that we are capable and called to create a more just and fair world for humanity.

Saperstein describes two challenges that lie ahead for religious progressives -- Keeping focus on the spiritual truths which catalyze their social views:

We have lost somewhat the deep religious grounding of the social gospel tradition in the Christian community, of the prophetic tradition in the Jewish community, that our engagement in responding to the call of our texts and our God and our religions for us to be God’s partners in creating a better world is a deeply and profoundly religious task. And working to recapture that is I think the central challenge.

...and ensuring their voices receive an equal hearing in the public square:

Why is it that the media defaults to this notion of authenticity and that somehow the religious vote, the religious voice is those who are fundamentalist in our society? This is a very difficult challenge for genuinely religious, theologically liberal believers to grapple with and has proved very difficult, particularly in the last 50 years, as media has fed this bias, for them to strongly perpetuate their vision of religion. And I think will remain in the 21st century a central challenge for progressive religion.

Click here for the full discussion with one of America's foremost religious leaders