Find information below about Ted’s four books:

-21st Century Revolution: Through Higher Love, Racial Justice and Democratic Cooperation (2021)
-Burglar for Peace: Lessons Learned in the Catholic Left’s Resistance to the Vietnam War (2020)
-Climate Change and Social Change in the 21st Century (2010)
-Future Hope: A Winning Strategy for a Just Society (2000)

21^st Century Revolution: Through Higher Love, Racial Justice and Democratic Cooperation

 21st Century Revolution was written based upon my 53 years of continuous involvement in the movement for fundamental, justice grounded, political, social, economic and cultural change–revolution. I was driven to write it because of deep concern about the systemic threats to the possibility of a decent life for future generations, particularly the climate emergency and related environmental threats, the rise of a neo-fascist threat in the USA and elsewhere, and the widening gulf of economic/racial inequality.

21st Century Revolution was written to encourage those who consider themselves part of the movement for systemic change to consider a mix of issues and history that I believe are essential to the prospect of eventual success in our collective revolutionary project. My  particular personal history, which includes not just decades of political activism and organizing but also in-and-out relationships with and study of religion and spirituality, has given him a vantage point which has been of value to others.

21st Century Revolution does a number of things. It explores the issue of the relation between the socialist project since The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and organized religion, primarily Christianity. Within that context it addresses the questions, does “God” exist, and does it matter, as far as the historical project of fundamental social, political, cultural and economic change. It analyzes the major social, economic and cultural changes which began to take place approximately 10,000 years ago in Europe, Asia and North Africa as humans in those areas, after hundreds of thousands of years as hunter-gatherers, evolved into settled, agriculture-based societies. This change led to an historic shift from men-and-women run, predominantly peaceful partnership societies to male-dominated, militaristic and class societies. It puts forward and explains the importance of a wide range of necessary cultural changes in present-day society, including within the political Left, if the human race is going to be able to avoid worldwide societal breakdown because of an intensifying climate and ecological crisis. It describes what the author sees as seven distinct classes in U.S. society, as a contribution toward understanding the potentials, or lack of them, of each class to help make that revolution. It concludes with an articulation of and explanation in support of ten aspects of a winning strategy for revolutionary change in the 21st century which the author considers to be both necessary and already taking place.

Praise

“In his new book 21st Century Revolution, Glick weaves together existential questions such as ‘does God exist?’ with practical issues such as how to center working people and people of color in our organizations. He references a mind-boggling array of historical figures—Marx, Lenin, Gandhi, Ella Baker, Che Guevara, Paolo Freire—and prescriptions for gaining power that move from electoral politics to direct action such as sit-ins and hunger strikes. The result is a sweeping view of revolutionary potential packed into a slim but powerful 100-pages-plus package.”
—Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the women-led peace group CODEPINK and co-founder of the human rights group Global Exchange.

 “For someone like me who reads lots of poetry books, novels, memoirs, essays, this book opened up a whole new vista. It should be read by all poets, writers, studied in high school, read aloud in community centers and activist organizations. It has a breathtaking sweep–religions, personal topography, faith, philosophy–and it percolates with connections, allusions and compass needles that take us in the direction of how to assess where we are in these troubled times, and in doing so affirms our struggle for a kinder society. A great work of understanding where we are, how we got here and where we go from here.”
—Jimmy Santiago Baca, award-winning poet, author of a dozen books of poetry and other memoirs, essays, stories and a screenplay. His book A Place to Stand, about his difficult youth and five years in prison, was made into a feature-length movie in 2016.

“Ted Glick has drawn upon his long and deep history of progressive activism, combined with focused and relevant research, to produce a valuable contribution to the movement for fundamental social transformation. 21st Century Revolution is of value both to long-distance runners for social justice and to those newly active who were inspired by 2020’s Black Lives Matter uprising against all forms of white supremacy. This book should be widely read.”
—Dr. Ron Daniels, President, Institute of the Black World 21st Century.

“Ted Glick’s 21st Century Revolution is full of provocative political ideas and useful strategic insights. But the special contribution of this unique volume is its in-depth analysis of the often-fraught relationship between socialist and Marxist movements and those whose quest for justice and peace is grounded in religious conviction or deep spirituality. Readers across the political and religious spectrum will learn a great deal from Glick’s recounting and come away with a deeper understanding of what is certain to be a constantly recurring issue as people from all backgrounds strive to join together and tackle the dire threats that face humanity and the planet in the 21st century.”
—Max Elbaum, author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che.

“Ted Glick has issued a call for revolutionary transformation that insists on the need to reject a deterministic view of the path of humanity and, instead, to see in the course of human development the revolutionary moments–both successful and unsuccessful–where humanity worked to shift course.  Glick’s view of the needs of the moment are rooted in a deep revolutionary moralism and spiritualism that is completely consistent with a materialist analysis of history and the current moment.  He leaves us with not simply an historical critique but a suggested path for our journey into a liberatory future.”
—Bill Fletcher, Jr., author of Solidarity Divided; “They’re Bankrupting Us” – And Twenty other Myths about Unions; and The Man Who Fell from the Sky.

“Ours is a broken nation of broken peoples. How do we mend, imagine and rebuild while leaving the grief of loss, injustice, and heinous acts of oppression in the compost?  21st Century Revolution gave me a sense that if loving revolutionaries created, held and carried visions through disintegration to future re-creation, we could bring forth Beautiful Justice through unified actions, rooted in Love, without a whisper of white supremacy, and guided by visions of unprecedented People Power!”
—L. George Friday, National Organizer, United for Peace and Justice, Assistant Director of NC Peace Action and a leader at Move to Amend

“In 21st Century Revolution Ted Glick lays bare a profound project for our future movements. This text not only wrestles with what it means to be loving revolutionaries, it is a testament to a life well lived—a  model of what it means to be fully human inside an inhumane civilization.  Ted Glick and this book are a gift to us all.”
—Rev. Osagyefo Sekou, Author, Gods, Gays, and Guns

“21st Century Revolution is a timely and powerful contribution to today’s social movements. As incisive as it is accessible, the book offers revolutionaries of today and tomorrow both a critical analysis and practical framework for revolution making. Ted shares learnings gathered over a half century of grassroots activism, community organizing, and historical inquiry. The result is a deeply pragmatic work, one that holds space for the personal and spiritual elements integral to uprooting injustice in all its forms and cultivating the world anew.”
—Matt Smith, organizer and trainer in the climate justice movement based in NJ.

“Ted Glick’s 21st Century Revolution leads us on a stimulating and personal journey through the ideas and movements for radical social change. Figures visited along the way include Marx, Engels, Pope Francis, Ella Baker, Howard Thurman, Maria Mies, Freire, Einstein, Castro, Bonhoeffer, and many others. If you think his cast of characters too ideologically diverse, then you lack Ted’s expansive frame of mind. If you think his vision too impractical, see his nuts-and-bolts ideas for sustained organizational renewal. This is a field guide interspersed with the experiences and reflections of a life steeped in grassroots activism.  It is a valuable and accessible resource for movement activists.”
—Andres Torres, co-editor of The Puerto Rican Movement, and Revolution Around the Corner. He taught at the University of Massachusetts and at Lehman College/CUNY.

“I know Ted as a comrade and a leader of fully committed, creative nonviolent activism. This book reveals his decades-long journey of spiritual exploration that underpins his commitment – an inspiration to me and so many others. He outlines ten elements of a winning strategy for power that is already moving toward fruition, based, above all else, on love.”
—Melinda Tuhus, Independent journalist and (climate) activist

“Ted Glick provides the foundation, the understanding, and the path forward for a 21st century justice revolution. His new, thoughtful and provocative book is a must read for all of us who are working to build this revolution to create a better world.”
—Joe Uehlein, Founding President of the Labor Network for Sustainability and Voices for a Sustainable Future, former secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO’s Industrial Union Department and former director of the AFL-CIO Center for Strategic Campaigns.

The book is available through pmpress.org.

Burglar for Peace: Lessons Learned in the Catholic Left’s Resistance to the Vietnam War

 Burglar for Peace is the story of the Catholic Left—also known as the Ultra Resistance—from the late 1960s to the early ‘70s. Led by the Catholic priests Phil and Dan Berrigan, the Catholic Left quickly became one of the most important sectors of the Vietnam War–era peace movement after a nonviolent raid on a draft board in Catonsville, MD, in May 1968.

With an overview of the broader draft resistance movement, Burglar for Peace is an exploration of the sweeping landscape of the American Left during the Vietnam War era as we accompany Ted Glick on a journey through his personal evolution from typical, white, middle-class, American teenager to an antiwar, nonviolent draft resister. Glick vividly recounts the development of the Catholic Left as it organized scores of nonviolently disruptive, effective actions inside draft boards, FBI offices, war corporation offices, and other sites. Burglar for Peace is the first in-depth, inside look at one of the major political trials of Catholic Left activists, in Rochester, NY, in 1970, as well as a second one in 1972 in Harrisburg, PA. With great humility, Glick recalls how his selfless devotion to ending the war in Vietnam resulted in his eleven months of imprisonment, which included a thirty-four-day hunger strike, and he tells the remarkable story of a Catholic Left-organized, forty-day hunger strike against the war. Concluding the story is a reflective account of Glick’s open resignation from the Catholic Left in 1974, his eighteen-year estrangement from Phil and Dan Berrigan, and the eventual healing of that relationship. The final chapter relates timeless lessons learned by the author that will find deep resonance among activists today.

Burglar for Peace is an inspiration and an invaluable resource for those committed to transformational, revolutionary change.

Praise:

“Ted Glick’s Burglar for Peace tells a remarkable story of one man’s lifelong commitment to peace and social justice. His story is revealing, honest and self-critical, as he has obviously thought deeply about his actions and the movements of which he was a prominent member. Burglar for Peace is an engaging and most welcome addition to the literature on the war in Vietnam and the movement that tried to stop it.”
—Bruce Dancis, author of Resister: A Story of Protest and Prison During the Vietnam War

“Many of us know about Dan and Phil Berrigan, the amazing priests who poured blood or napalm on draft files, but we have forgotten the hundreds of others who made up the radical Catholic movement that they led, and their colleagues from other faiths: the ‘Ultra-Resistance’ to the war in Vietnam. Ted Glick, though not a Catholic, was in the midst of this movement, burglarizing FBI offices, destroying draft files, standing trial several times, serving prison sentences, going on long hunger strikes. This book, part memoir and part collection of documents, is an irreplaceable source not only for historians but for many others who want to know what it was like to be a Christian outlaw. The transcripts of the Flower City Conspiracy trial alone are worth the price of the book.”
—Michael Ferber, co-author The Resistance and one of the Boston Five indicted in 1968 for supporting draft resistance

“This book offers outsiders a comprehensive understanding of the movement to destroy Selective Service records during the Vietnam War. Especially valuable are the extracts from Ted Glick’s diaries which help readers, who have not themselves gone without food or nourishing liquids for weeks at a time, to assess this form of nonviolent struggle. Also of great value are accounts by Ted and colleagues who as criminal defendants argued their own cases in court, sometimes inducing a judge to let the accused testify as to why they had acted as they did and reaching jurors who, although initially hostile, came to sympathize with and even support defendants who broke laws that protect property in pursuit of the greater goal of safeguarding human lives.”
—Staughton Lynd, chairperson of the first march on Washington DC to protest the Vietnam War, with Tom Hayden he made an unauthorized trip to North Vietnam in hope of clarifying the terms on which the government in Hanoi might be willing to enter peace talks

“Ted Glick offers us a window into aspects of the past that routinely remain closed and foggy—history that media outlets rarely mention—the inner life and outer actions of people so committed to peace that they’re willing to make enormous sacrifices to end war. For more than five decades he has strived for deep awareness in real time while considering ‘what are the most effective forms of action for today.’ We cannot know profound answers unless we’re willing to intensely explore profound questions. By sharing his own experiences, Ted Glick will help readers to go deeper in the quest to understand what we care about most and how we truly want to live as a result.”
—Norman Solomon, author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death

“A hero in the country’s history of fighting for social justice recounts in gripping detail the courageous, sometimes high risk but always nonviolent battles he and other committed patriots of the peace movement fought to put an end to the disastrous war in Vietnam. This is the story of a principled freedom fighter—the cause driving him to go so far as to creep through a dark and forbidden place to protect his fellow young men—then stand as a defendant in the glare of political trials, and finally do time behind bars in his unyielding effort to save lives and bring our country back to its senses. Ted is the epitome of an American activist hero—unrelenting, inspiring, giving everything he’s got. Now as the climate crisis deepens, Ted recounts the challenges at the center of this ongoing disaster. Though hopeful America’s youth are rising, he warns we are running out of time. Read, learn and feel the urgent call to action now by this personal, unique account of perilous times.”
—Lise Van Susteren, M.D., board certified psychiatrist, CEO of Lucky Planet Foods, and a leader of Interfaith Moral Action on Climate

“Ted Glick’s Burglar for Peace tells a story that very few people have heard, and they should. The activities of the Catholic Left during the Vietnam War played an important role in bringing that war to an end. Glick’s inside history of that sector of the anti-war movement is history that needs to be learned widely. This is especially true today when we are facing Trump and a Republican Party that harkens back to the worst days of the Nixon Administration, taken on, very much to their credit, by the Catholic Left.”
—Ed Asner (U.S. actor who has performed in numerous TV shows, plays, and movies since the 1950s and former president of the Screen Actors Guild)

“Ted Glick’s story of his experiences taking risks to end the Vietnam War, his political trials and his time in prison 50 years ago make compelling reading. Prison was a turning point in my life, and Glick’s story reveals something similar. His story and commitment that resonate throughout it is only another witness to a piece of the American soul we as Americans all share—and that is—that we love democracy, we honor truth, we despise lies and dictatorship, but we call upon ourselves to dig deep into our hearts for that courage to take the first step from our comfort zone, then another step out the door, to greet the world and fight for it, open-armed, embracing all that is good about our humanity and lives and fighting, with every ounce of faith we can endure, for our right to be happy and just and fair and for our right to call each other, regardless of skin color or ethnicity or religion, brothers and sisters!”
—Jimmy Santiago Baca, award-winning American poet and author of A Place to Stand

“This is a book from a movement veteran who has made history and helps us learn lessons on how we can make history that is more just, sustainable and democratic. This is a book from the heart, to move our minds and hands into action.”
—Heather Booth, chair, Midwest Academy

“In Burglar for Peace, Ted Glick uses his remarkable personal story to capture a pivotal moment in the history of U.S. social movements. His journey embodies many of the values and practices we urgently need now: courage, humility, and an abiding faith that our different struggles can unite in common purpose.”
—Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough and This Changes Everything

“Burglar for Peace is a blessing, a hope, and a way of acknowledging the sacredness of those whom we encounter, why this journey is difficult, the hills we must climb, and the reasons we dedicate our lives to justice. What makes Ted such an important author and pivotal leader is his understanding that we need an environmental movement that includes everybody and we must be willing to sacrifice everything for future generations.”
—Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., president of the Hip Hop Caucus

The book is available through pmpress.org.

Love Refuses to Quit: Climate Change and Social Change in the 21st Century

This manuscript was finished in December, 2009. I did not find a publisher but I did put it up here, on this website.

This book was written primarily in response to the passage of federal climate legislation in the House of Representatives in June of 2009 that was woefully weak. A good case could be made that it would have been better to go back to the drawing boards and come up with a different kind of climate legislation than for something like this to be passed by the Senate and signed into law. As it turned out, no climate legislation was ever brought to the floor in that session of Congress.

Love Refuses to Quit is my personal response to this failure of vision and leadership on the part of the Democrats who control the White House and the U.S. Congress as well as, to be honest, most national environmental groups and the progressive movement generally.

Here’s what author and climate activist Bill McKibben has written about Love Refuses to Quit: “Fascinating reflections on a life spent trying to make this country a better place, and to protect the planet of which it is a part. This is a good reminder of the depth and hardship of these struggles–thank heaven there are some people who refuse to quit!”

Chapter One: James Lovelock and the End Times – Read Chapter
Chapter Two: Keeping It Together Personally – Read Chapter
Chapter Three: Fasting for Our Future – Read Chapter
Chapter Four: Building a New (Old) Culture Within the Shell of the Old (Decaying) – Read Chapter
Chapter Five: If You Want a Revolution, Start with a Clean Energy One – Read Chapter
Chapter Six: Tactics to Get to a New Society – Read Chapter
Chapter Seven: Government of, by and for the People and the Earth – Read Chapter

Future Hope: A Winning Strategy for a Just Society

In the late 1990’s I wrote a book, “Future Hope: A Winning Strategy for a Just Society.” Here is what Howard Zinn said about this book:

“Ted Glick’s Future Hope is a bold attempt, provocative and intelligent, to lay out the strategy and tactics of a new revolutionary movement in this country. It draws on the wisdom of important thinkers and applies that to the unique conditions of our time. Further, it insists on combining the spiritual and and the political, the personal and universal, and dares to suggest what a good society might look like in the future.”

I describe the book in its introduction as “based upon research and writing that I did between 1993 and 1997, but more fundamentally it is based upon my 32 years of political activism [as of year 2000]. What was my purpose in writing this book? The first purpose was entirely personal: to clarify my thinking about what I have learned over these past 30 years of activism, what I believe is necessary if future generations are to see a different country and a different world. Indeed, I am convinced that unless we succeed in our awesome task of transforming this society in fundamental ways, there may not be a future worth living in.

“The times are urgent: to have hope for the future, we need a winning strategy for a just society, and we need to come together now to create the political movement, organizations and alliances that will make that strategy real. I pray that this book is of value in this crucial set of objectives.”

The book is 93 pages long and consists of eight chapters:

-Love and Socialism
-The Danger of Reformism (Not Reforms)
-A Popular Alliance as the Way Forward
-Class Structure and a Popular Alliance
-Down with the Two Corporate-Dominated Parties
-A New Society: What Would It Look Like?
-Organizational Questions
-Tactics for a New Society

Copies are available for $10.00, including postage and shipping.  Contact Ted at indpol@igc.org to order one.