''Liberals embrace faith, seek greater clout among voters''

"God doesn't belong to conservatives.
So sayeth more than 1,000 clergy members, scholars and activists convening upon the University of California, Berkeley this week for a four-day conference on "Reviving the American Spiritual Left." Just as Mohandas Gandhi, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Aung San Suu Kyi have made faith part and parcel of their causes, so too must American liberals embrace faith in fighting for their ideals, organizers say. They hope to emerge from this conference and another scheduled for February in Washington, D.C., having laid groundwork for a "Network of Spiritual Progressives" with chapters nationwide to challenge what they see as the religious right's misappropriation of God, religion and spirituality.

Another conference presenter, Sojourners magazine editor and "God's Politics" author Jim Wallis, met last week with Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, whom Wallis has called the leader of the "secular fundamentalist wing of the Democratic Party" and accused of being inauthentic in speaking about faith.

Also among dozens of presenters scheduled for the conference's working groups and seminars Wednesday through Saturday are Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope; Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas Gandhi and founder of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence; physicist and author Fritjof Capra; political linguistics expert George Lakoff; Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-San Rafael, and Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va.; and the Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance."-from the story in today's Oakland Tribune.