The Future of God — and Secularism

The future of God depends on the future of secularism. Most people will hear in that sentiment a prediction about the growth of secularism: If secularism grows, belief in God will commensurately shrink. If secularism stagnates, the world will continue to believe in God in 2100.

A Universe Struggling to Become Aware?

Without the compassion that arises when we realize our nonduality — empathy not only with other humans but with the planet — it becomes increasingly likely that civilization as we know it will not survive the next few centuries.

Mubarak’s Ouster: Good for Egypt, Good for Israel

The inspiring triumph of the Egyptian people in the nonviolent overthrow of the hated dictator Hosni Mubarak is a real triumph of the human spirit. It is disappointing, then, that what should be a near-universal celebration has been tempered by the right-wing Netanyahu government in Israel and its supporters in the United States.

Healing Is Not a Business

Of the advanced nations, the United States has the highest number of preventable deaths. Why is this? It’s because we are the only advanced nation that thinks of patients as consumers and health as a commodity to be bought on the market. It’s because we have tried to fit medicine into a business model.

Conversation on Vegetarianism

An exchange between Tikkun reader Ruth Eisenbud and Michael Lerner, in response to Daniel Brook’s article “The Planet-Saving Mitzvah: Why Jews Should Consider Vegetarianism” in the July/August 2009 issue of Tikkun. magazine.

A Labor Leader Loses His Way

Four years ago when several key labor unions formed Change to Win as an alternative umbrella organization to the AFL-CIO, many of us hoped that a new vision of the labor movement was being born–one that would go beyond the economics-only focus of industrial unionism and see unions as an important social context for building a greater sense of community and a new universal vision of a society based on empathy and compassion for other human beings.

God without God

The atheists have all the best arguments. They find the religious world utterly indefensible, both morally and intellectually. Thankfully the God the atheist denies is not the God that people of true faith affirm.

Israel 60 Years Later

How do you deal with two peoples who are suffering from PTSD? Well, we know what you don’t do. You don’t try to coerce them into situations in which they perceive themselves as vulnerable to re-experiencing the insecurity and pain that caused the trauma in the first place.

How Jewish was Jesus?

There is a consensus among Biblical scholars that Jesus and the New Testament can only be understood in the context of the ancient Jewish sociocultural system. However, Christian theologies over the centuries have largely developed in synthesis with Greek philosophy.

The Israel Lobby

The overbearing power and McCarthyite tactics wielded by the American Jewish establishment against critics of Israeli government policies has made critical discourse about U.S. support for the Israeli government extremely difficult. As a result, it is all too easy to buy into the arguments put forward by the book “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” that the ‘Israel Lobby’ is primarily responsible for the tragic course taken in U.S. Middle East policy.