Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/articles/page/50/)
Why be Jewish? Why join temples? Why bother to introduce our children to Jewish ideas and practices? Answers to these questions vary from person to person and from age to age, but the questions persist. The questions seem as perpetual as the Jewish people itself.
In the United States as in Israel, much of the hawkish fearmongering against Iran comes from the Right. How can the moral panic theory explain that? Moreover, the same kinds of fears now directed toward theocratic Iran were aimed, just a few years ago, at the secular government of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
On the same day that millions of people watched Lebron James announce he was going to Miami, twelve jurors in Oscar Grant’s case decided that, unless he can put a ball through a hoop, a black man’s life is worth little in America. Two decisions — both resulting from five hundred years of white supremacy.
Why has President Obama let us down? How come he lied to us? Why has he not kept his campaign promises? These are questions I frequently hear from people who attend my speeches and book signings.
The best way to honor John F. Kennedy’s legacy is to muster the courage to walk again through the “dark history” associated with his short but consequential presidency, in order to learn its lessons and discover its hope. Jim Douglass’s “JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters,” which Touchstone is reissuing this month as a trade paperback, is a reliable guide for that demanding task.
The military-industrial complex, more powerful today than ever, imprisons the president. When he accepts the power to kill everyone, the president becomes a prisoner morally and politically to the demands of our national security state. Once the president accepts nuclear power over the world, his permissible movement is confined to a very tight space — tighter than we as citizens might imagine.
At $708 billion, the Pentagon gets nearly 60 percent of our discretionary budget (the money Congress is free to allocate). Meanwhile our schools are in crisis, lacking the money for teachers and books, and social welfare programs are weakening, depriving the most vulnerable members of our community of vital support and health care.
Ad hominem attack is not new in Jewish politics. Intimidation of critics of Israeli policy is as old as the modern State of Israel itself. Hannah Arendt’s experience in the 1960s offers an early example of repressive strategies for the punishment and repression of dissent.
Perhaps no field of biology evokes the fear of loss of the sacred more than neuroscience, the biology of the brain. Yet sacredness and meaning pervade the musings of many neuroscientists. How do we understand the brain in a way that promotes enchantment, and not disenchantment, in day-to-day life?
The intuited contingency of nature and the felt certainty that it didn’t have to be this way have led humans ever since they could think to ponder the question, where did it all come from?
Tony Campolo’s essay is, in one regard, extremely well-informed and timely, but in another regard dangerously ill-informed about Darwin himself. The basic problem is that Darwin’s theory came in two halves.
Darwin was a racist, and his racist theories have had an enormous impact on American thinking. In terms of science, Darwin’s account may be solid indeed. But value-free? Nothing could be further from the truth — and that’s where the problem lies.
Science is sometimes seen as a cold, heartless enterprise that “disenchants” the world and destroys its mystery and wonder. In his most recent book, Alfred Tauber questions this view of science and seeks to understand the implications of Darwinian evolution for the humanities and religion.
The idea of an inbuilt drive to care and love is really nothing new, of course. It’s only new to us in trying to scientifically grope our way out of what became the prison of the old scientific mindset into the liberation of a new world allied as friend rather than enemy to spirituality.
What’s the greatest mystery facing every person on the planet? Ultimately, it’s some version of the age-old “Where do I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going?” So far, no one has a satisfactory explanation for the existence of nonphysical minds in this otherwise physical universe.