Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/archive/page/23/)
The online exclusives below are freely accessible articles that are part of an ongoing special series associated with Tikkun’s Winter 2015 print issue, Jubilee and Debt Abolition. Many of our most provocative articles on this topic appeared in that print issue, which is only accessible to subscribers.
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.
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?”
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.
It is my belief that we cannot organize our lives or our thought around only what is certain. That is nothing, or next to nothing. And of course, we should not organize our lives and our thought around chance ideas that we happen to like.
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.
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.
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.
To call God a perspective by which we contract the cosmos mindfully does imply that we participate in God, in the perspective of God.
Feminist theologians agree that the old view of a male God has got to go. But the debate gets heated when we talk about what should take its place.
Sites of public and higher education are under a massive assault. Let’s respond with an imaginative new discourse of critique and possibility.
The most mature faith is not all “sweetness and light”—it is a grappling with holiness that also addresses the abrasiveness of the biblical God.
Another Way of Seeing: Essays on Transforming Law, Politics, and Culture by Peter Gabel. Review by Kim Chernin.
The Network of Spiritual Progressives is excited to welcome Rev. J. Alfred Smith Sr. as co-chair and Cat J. Zavis as executive director.
While I appreciate these serious, thoughtful responses to my book by Roger Gottlieb and Kim Chernin, I do not quite see myself reflected in their respective descriptions of the role of spirit (Gottlieb), or the role of hope (Chernin). My claim is that these are not abstract ideas that I attribute to human reality, but that they are concretely revealed by that human reality if we will but embrace “another way of seeing” that makes the presence of both spirit and hope visible in that human reality. The central idea of my book is that human beings are not actually “individuals” in the liberal sense of our existing in separate spheres as disconnected monads, but are rather inherently united by a social bond, a “fraternity” as the present pope calls it, that seeks to make itself manifest in the world through the experience of “mutual recognition.” Because of the legacy of the Fear of the Other that has shaped our cultural conditioning throughout history thus far—a fear reflected in our own individual lives through the social formation of our individual egos—our cultural memory inclines us to see the other as a threat. But coexisting with this fearful impulse in every human interaction and at every moment transcending the fearful impulse, is an unconditioned, wholly original, spontaneous movement toward a new and sudden recognition of one another in which we would become fully present to each other, and in which we would more fully realize ourselves as the source of each other’s completion. {{{subscriber}}} [trackrt]
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