Chana Bloch. Photo by Peg Skorpinski
Potato Eaters
Chana Bloch
My grandmother never did learn to write. “Making love” was not in her lexicon;
I wonder if she ever took off her clothes
when her husband performed his conjugal duties.
2014
Work Your Quirk: The Power of the Disability Art Community
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When I first joined Interact Theater Company, I had recently been in a motorcycle accident and lost the use of my right arm. The question was posed, “If there was a pill to take away your disability, would you take it?” I was surprised to find that I was the only one in the circle who said yes. I looked at my fellow performers and wondered if I would ever be able to accept my new self.
2014
Holy Access
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I am lying comfortably on the table in my acupuncturist’s office. Mellow music plays in the background while my acupuncturist soothingly talks me through my treatment. As we chat casually about the different approaches between Eastern and Western medicine, she suddenly stabs me with a metaphorical needle, puncturing our trust: in the same calm tone she has been using all morning, she tells me that, within Chinese religions, physical illness and disability are often understood as “a result of mistakes made in a previous life—a disability is an indication of a lesson that one’s spirit needs to learn.” Inaccurately conflating the rich diversity of Chinese philosophical and religious systems of thought under the single blanket of “Chinese religions,” my white acupuncturist has simultaneously disseminated incorrect information and made me feel inferior and unmeritorious. Her suggestion that I am to blame for my disability jolts me back to a similar experience from the previous year, when I was traveling with my guide dog, Papaya, and needing to catch a connecting flight. An airline employee assisted me with the transfer while discussing the unending bounties of Jesus’s love.
2014
A Promised Land
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How to keep the promise of a promised land? Not only a name, a place, a flag. It’s an end to wandering in the wilderness,
the wilderness inside ourselves. It’s singing sweeter than scorpions. It’s touching everywhere softer than snakes.
2014
On Violence, Joy, and Justice: The Poetry of C.K. Williams
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All at Once
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014
by C.K. Williams
Writers Writing Dying
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012
by C.K. Williams
On Whitman
Princeton University Press, 2010
by C.K. Williams
In his preface to On Whitman, C. K. Williams says only Shakespeare compares with Walt Whitman in providing him an “inexhaustible” source of inspiration. Yet “with both, but particularly with Whitman, I need a respite, surcease, so as not to be overwhelmed, obliterated. This is more raw than Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence,’ more primitive.”
On the dust jacket for the Whitman monograph, Michael Robertson calls Williams “one of our most Whitmanesque poets.” The idea of Williams as a Whitman for our time is not wrong, but it is incomplete and potentially misleading. Yes, Williams arrived in his third collection of poems at a long, sinuous free-verse line that reminds one, at first glance, of Whitman. Yes, one finds in Williams great sympathy for the suffering of others and a willingness to open poetry to a wide range of human experience, including parts of it many of us would rather not see.
2014
You Talking About Me? – Disability as a Personal, Social, and Political Construct
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Currently evolving are some key foundational trends that have great promise for more humanizing and just attitudes and practices for individuals with disabilities, their families, and society as a whole.
2014
When Strangers Read My Body: Blurred Boundaries and the Search for Something Spiritual
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The encounter was not all that different from others I’ve had on the street—a rupture in my peace of mind. It was well past midnight, and I walked the streets alone, delighted to bask in the warmth of a productive day. A figure came into focus, dressed in colors dark as the night. At first the stranger’s words were muted by the music blaring through my headphones—my temporary barrier against the many interlocutors who feel entitled to interaction once they notice my limp. This visibility is something I cannot hide, and I don’t attempt to do so.
2014
Embracing Difference: Native American Approaches to Disability
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Most U.S. progressives share the view that the destigmatization of “disability” is a positive thing. Translating that vision into widespread social practice, however, is proving difficult to do. The U.S. mainstream has much to learn from Native American communities, many of which have lived experience with non-stigmatizing approaches to differences in community members’ talents and abilities. Western knowledge systems establish opposition concepts such as day/night, good/bad, and able/disabled. These dichotomies form the basis of Western social hierarchies by establishing certain identities as superior and others as inferior, and they shape how people with disabilities are defined and treated within Western communities and institutions.
2014
Spiritual Progressive Faith Formation
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Sounding the Trumpet: How Churches Can Answer God’s Call to Justice
by Brooks Berndt and J. Alfred Smith Sr.
A Pair of Docs Publishing, 2013
For forty years, J. Alfred Smith Sr. served as the senior pastor for the Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland, a church with a national reputation for its ministry of black empowerment and liberation. Anyone who has been in Rev. Smith’s presence has likely been altered by the experience. He is a profound and eloquent person who carries within himself a joyful spiritual confidence coupled with a deep concern about the abiding presence of social injustice in our world. I would say that it is a relief to be around him because he affirms in his being the central message that we all long to hear—that hope and wisdom are reconcilable, that we can see the world exactly as it is with its suffering, pain, and injustice, and still feel with a full heart that we can transcend what is toward what ought to be. In his new book Sounding the Trumpet: How Churches Can Answer God’s Call to Justice, he has joined with Rev. Brooks Berndt to try to convey—through an exchange of letters between Rev. Berndt and himself—how a church can seek to become a force for social transformation.
2014
Confronting the Corporate Expediter: Building the Religious Counterculture
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So I’m at a dinner party chatting with the guy sitting next to me, and he asks me what I do for a living. I tell him all about ministry, and then I ask him what he does for a living. “I’m an expediter,” he says. “An expediter,” I say, “I’ve always been curious about this. What exactly is an expediter?”
“I help companies do their business.
Activism
A Wrenching Look at Alzheimer’s
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In her book, Slow Dancing with a Stranger, Comer details her excruciating journey through the maze of Alzheimer’s, an unforgiving disease. Through this book, she is changing the conversation from acceptance of what is to demanding what should be.
Activism
On Busboys and Poets, Andy Shallal, and D.C.’s Progressive Visual Culture
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These restaurants and cultural centers are important sites for artistic expression, providing artists additional opportunities to disseminate their works and to gain more exposure beyond the traditional avenues of commercial galleries and museums.
Articles
Blue, Texas
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I was eating two slices of Oscar Meyer bologna that I’d topped with a squiggle of yellow mustard and squeezed between two slices of white Wonder bread. But he held a bulging thing housed between two dense slices of dark bread, a sandwich that was both pungent and foreign, about as unreal as anything I could recall.
Articles
Consciously Loving My Neighbor as I Love MySelf
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Everything in the world is moving (and always has been moving) towards expansion and fulfillment of our potential – which is to become ever more like the One who created us. Wars, tragedies, miseries are swallowed up in this larger movement toward Higher Understanding, which is pounded out on the anvil of our suffering and ignorance. In this, my first article in Tikkun, I’ve chosen to share my painting which interprets the story David and Goliath, along with my commentary. As I suggested above, it offers a wonderful illustration of the essence of the most important battlefield of all, namely the battle within us to win our soul.
Culture
Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye
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Kindness
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.