2014

Angry Jews on the Freedom Bus

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“We have to change the way we talk about and relate to the State of Israel. And we have to do it now.”

So declared one of the almost dozen Jewish participants in the most recent Freedom Bus ride through Palestine. I recently traveled the length and breadth of the West Bank on the annual Freedom Bus trip sponsored by the Jenin Freedom Theatre, a cultural center and theater based in the Jenin refugee camp. Despite having spent more than two decades living in, working on, and writing about Palestine/Israel, I was struck by the intensity of traveling through frontline communities in the unending struggle over land in the West Bank. Reading a Haaretz headline declaring that “Israel authorizes record amount of West Bank land for settlement construction” is one thing; experiencing the realities of constant settlement expansion from the perspective of the residents whose lives are most directly and deleteriously impacted by it, is quite another.

2014

Confronting the Corporate Expediter: Building the Religious Counterculture

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So I’m at a dinner party chatting with the guy sitting next to me, and he asks me what I do for a living. I tell him all about ministry, and then I ask him what he does for a living. “I’m an expediter,” he says. “An expediter,” I say, “I’ve always been curious about this. What exactly is an expediter?”

“I help companies do their business.

2014

Disability Justice and Spirituality

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Disability activism often starts with a call for accessible spaces—for ramps, interpreters, braille copies, and fragrance-free gatherings. But a deeper engagement with disability justice requires more than a series of accommodations: it requires a transformation of our core values and institutions. Disability justice demands that human lives be valued not for their ability to create profit but for the divine spark within each of us. Meeting this demand in practice requires nothing less than what Tikkun has been calling for since its founding: a radical turn toward a society based on love and care rather than on profit and domination. In this special issue, we share the perspectives of activists, theologians, and theorists writing from the front lines of disability justice work.

2014

Online Exclusives: Disability Justice

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The online exclusives below are freely accessible articles that are part of an ongoing special series associated with Tikkun’s Fall 2014 print issue, Disability Justice and Spirituality Many of our most provocative articles on this topic appeared in that print issue, which is only accessible to subscribers. Subscribe now to read the subscriber-only print articles on the web (explore the table of contents to see what you’re missing!). If you appreciate the free web-only articles below, please do enable us to keep up this important work by becoming a print subscriber or offering a donation. We will continue to update this page as new web articles in this series come out. Inspired by Moses: Disability and Inclusion in the Jewish Community
by Shelley Christensen

“You Talking About Me?”

2014

Jesus and the Jews

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Jesus is not what many people think he is. As a cradle Christian, ordained for nearly forty years in the United Church of Christ, it pains me to see how many people at the gate in need of a healing touch have been driven away from that touch by his identity theft.

2014

Judaism – A Personal Affirmation

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Judaism is the diversity of what different Jews do, creating a fusion of body, heart, mind, and emotion into a single unity that is greater than any of its parts. That unity is a Jew. That dynamic harmony is Judaism.

2014

Names of God

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Fourteenth-century mystic and activist Meister Eckhart says “all the names we give to God come from an understanding of ourselves.” If he is correct, then as humanity’s self-understanding and understanding of the cosmos evolve, then clearly our God-names will evolve in response. Rabbi Arthur Waskow reminds us that the Book of Exodus is also known as the Book of Names because God goes through two name changes within its pages. Why is this? In his article “When the World Turns Upside-Down, Do We Need to Rename God,” Waskow suggests it is because “the old Name cannot inspire a new sense of reality … God is different when the world is different.”

So where do we go for new names for God? The ancient texts of Buddhism say: “God has a million faces,” and ancient Hindu texts discuss “the one Being the wise call by many names.” Thirteenth-century Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas is much wilder—he says that every creature is a name for God—and no creature is.

2014

God Is Mystery: Motherhood and Islamic Mysticism

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In trying to answer questions about God for my six-year-old daughter, I have to think of the simplest, most convincing but also truest way to explain complex phenomena. And in that parsing of deep theological conceptions of God, I have rediscovered Him.