Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/archive/page/39/)
Too many liberals and progressives blame voter support for reactionary and ultra-conservative politics on the supposed mean-spiritedness, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, or stupidity of those who vote the other way. By slipping into this easy mindset, we fail to perceive the real yearning so many of us have for a life filled with love, caring, and generosity.
Ignorance of major world religions comes in many forms today, but Lawrence Swaim’s particular version is still stunning. It is almost as if Swaim skimmed pop or even comic books on Christian theology and early church history and fashioned a reckless rant from their raw materials. Of the many historically and argumentatively strange things in his essay, his call for Christians to get rid of the symbol of the cross is the most bizarre. Getting rid of the cross is tantamount to getting rid of Jesus—which is to say, of Christianity itself.
There is at the heart of Christianity a disturbing doctrine that has the uncanny ability to overwhelm cognition, and—when internalized by the believer—the ability to traumatize. I refer to the belief, held by most Christians, that Jesus Christ, the prophetic figure of Christianity, was crucified to redeem the world, and that this plan originated with God.
Where did we come from? What should we do here? Where are we going? As long as human beings ask these questions, we will need metanarratives—accounts of cosmological and biological evolution that place the human species in the context of what we know about the universe as a whole.
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Politics alone will not solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—a deep, collective, psychological healing must also occur to sustain a lasting peace. I believe Palestinian Christians are uniquely situated to facilitate this healing process.
by Sayed Kashua (translated by Mitch Ginsburg); Yosef Gotlieb
by Avraham Burg; Jonathan Sacks; and Naftali Rothenberg
by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone; Starhawk; the Dalai Lama; and Joan Chittister
After a week at Burning Man or many hours spent with mutiplayer online role-playing games, are we more or less ready to engage in the task of tikkun?
Eager for Tikkun’s take on the 2012 election and other current events? Read the timely articles on our web magazine site (tikkun.org) and the blog posts on Tikkun Daily (tikkun.org/daily).
The mainstream media have frequently framed their discussions about U.S. and Israeli policy toward Iran as a debate between U.S. President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about whether to strike Iran immediately or to wait to see if sanctions work. This narrative has set the framework for a march toward war by excluding from the discourse the nonviolent option: that we not use coercion to achieve our ends.
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It is probably impossible to imagine ourselves in the place of the Jewish survivors of World War II and the Holocaust immediately after the war, but this is exactly the task that Yehiel Grenimann, the son of survivors, set for himself. Yanosh and Eva, his central characters, were hidden on the Aryan side of Warsaw, thanks to their connection with the Polish nationalist underground. Yosef Borowski, known as Bora, the third major protagonist, was a partisan leader during the war. The novel begins with the entry of the Soviet army into Warsaw and ends with Yanosh and Eva’s imminent arrival in Australia.