Net neutrality is not just for techies. The digital roots of the Black Lives Matter movement show why we must fight to keep the internet open to all.
2015
Jacob Chose Hospice: A Critique of Invasive End-of-Life Care
|
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
by Atul Gawande
Metropolitan Books, 2014
What does the Torah have to say about end-of-life care? Its most striking story on this topic appears in the last four chapters of Genesis, which describe the hospice death of the Jewish patriarch Jacob. After Jacob became ill, he summoned his children and grandchildren, and requested burial in the Caves of Machpeleh, alongside his parents (Isaac and Rebecca) and his grandparents (Abraham and Sarah). He gave blessings to his sons, and “when Jacob finished instructing his sons, he drew his feet onto the bed; he expired and was gathered to his people” (Gen. 49:33). He suffered no invasive medical interventions, he was surrounded by his family and was able to bless them, and he died a peaceful death.
2015
What Can Replace Prison?
|
Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison
by Nell Bernstein
The New Press, 2014
Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better
by Maya Schenwar
Berrett-Koehler, 2014
If you have the capacity to read one book on prisons this month, which should you choose? For many people I would say without hesitation: Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2012). It is a stunning book. Or it was for me. Call me naïve, but it had never occurred to me that the cancerous growth of the prison system since the 1970s might have been a response to the success of the Civil Rights movement in the ’60s.
2015
War with Iran: The Disastrous Aim of Israel and the Republicans
|
But it’s actually the last thing the United States or Israel needs.
2015
A Scientific View of God
|
A God That Could Be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet
by Nancy Abrams
Beacon Press, 2015
Nancy Abrams needed a higher power. As one of the premiere science writers of our time, she found both the Iron Age gods of the Abrahamic faiths and the pseudo-scientific mysticisms of New Age gurus wanting. So she turned to what she knew best: science. What she found is set forth in her important, cogent, and challenging new book, A God That Could Be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet. This is not another book about the clash of science and religion.
2015
Rethinking Agriculture: Protecting Biodiversity Amid Climate Chaos
|
Biodiverse systems are more resilient to climate change. As the oceans rise, we must hasten to stop the spread of monocultures and protect biodiversity.
2015
Making Nonviolent Statecraft into a Self-Evident Truth
|
The precedents and models exist to make the case for nonviolent statecraft in the United States, but we need to make this case so self-evident that the war options become plainly absurd.
2015
Spiritual Evolution and the Law
|
One way to view the inexorable march of biological evolution is as the development of the neurological capacity necessary to recognize this universal inner presence more and more fully. And not just in humans.
2015
The Spiritual Dimension of Social Justice: Responses to Peter Gabel
|
Tikkun received a number of letters and essays in response to Peter Gabel’s Summer 2015 print article, The Spiritual Dimension of Social Justice: Transforming the Legal Arena. We publish them here in full. To join the conversation, write letters@tikkun.org. Essays
A Response from the River Jordan
by John Henry Schlegel
A Reply to Peter Gabel and John Schlegel
by John Farago
Spiritual Evolution and the Law
by Bruce Peterson
The Problem is that Life is Imperfect
by James P. Gray
History and Transcendence
by Gary Peller
Letters from Mika Dashman and Glen T. Martin. If you appreciate these free web-only articles, please help us continue publishing important work by becoming a print subscriber or offering a donation.
2015
A Response from the River Jordan
|
The myth of Sisyphus may imply that the best that we humans can expect is that, when tired from endlessly rolling the rock back up the hill, we may gather together at the River Jordan and weep. I wish Peter were right, but I still doubt that it is possible to overcome the otherness of the Other, except briefly, randomly, undependably.
2015
Pastoral Prose Poetry
|
Urban Pastorals
Clive Wilmer
Worple Press, 2014
In this short, rich book of prose poems, Clive Wilmer renews the pastoral tradition by eschewing romantic idealizations and coming into contact with the living image of an Eden corrupted by natural processes. Those processes, which connect us to the mystery of life and spirit, include both the workings of memory and the mechanisms of civilization. Wilmer’s memories are of a midcentury South London childhood “injured by enemy bombs”; of wooded commons where trees were “the very image of freedom in community”; of discoveries of Shakespeare’s power and Louis Armstrong’s musical “good place, where the leopard lies down with the kid”; and of art as “the expression of man’s pleasure in labour.” These memories form a groundwork for his warmly drawn and enigmatic human portraits, which enliven a religious vision that is convincing for its glowing clarity and sense of scale. Also recommended: Wilmer’s New and Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2012).
To view Tikkun Recommends as a PDF, click here.
2015
Christianity for the Postmodern Mind
|
Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age
James Carroll
Viking, 2014
The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World
Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu
HarperOne, 2014
James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword unveiled to many Christians the sordid way that Christian institutions transformed Jesus’s message of liberation into a doctrine to support imperial domination and the persecution of Jews. In this newer book, Carroll attempts to reclaim the prophetic voice of Jesus that is rooted in Jewish messianism: “Recovering that sense of Christian Jewishness, like recovering the Jewishness of Jesus, defines the essential work that Christians must do in a post-Auschwitz world.” Throughout this powerful and insightful presentation of the ways a Christian can be “faithful to the classical tradition of Christian faith while simultaneously limiting assertion about (Jesus) to a modern—or postmodern—mind,” Carroll reads Christian texts from a contemporary perspective, in light of the distortions that led to the destructive misuse of these texts in the past. Contemporary Christians can take special pride in the work of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the outspoken Christian activist whose challenge to apartheid won him the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize. Tutu became the chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which sought to lead his country beyond the pain and anger that had festered under racist oppression. This beautiful and insightful book should be part of the school curriculum in every country of the world.
2015
What Does Sustainability Feel Like?
|
The phenomena we embrace are embraced precisely because of their exuberance—justice, prosperity, and sustainability. Our failing is that we reach for them with tools that will never capture their essence, be they words, statistics, or dollars.
Home Page Featured
Hope in the Age of Climate Consequences
|
We can be hopeful without expecting victory. We can ask what the Earth requires of us in this very moment and just take the next step.