Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/arts-cultural-critique/reviews/page/7/)
Reading Paul Kivel’s groundbreaking book Living in the Shadow of the Cross is by turns invigorating and overwhelming for exactly the same reason—he is shining a spotlight on the often unnoticed but pervasive system of Christian domination in the United States.
Rethinking the new economy will take a prophetic imagination. In What Then Must We Do?, Gar Alperovitz calls us to reimagine our life together.
Edmond H. Weiss reviews Judaism’s Great Debates: Timeless Controversies from Abraham to Herzl by Barry L. Schwartz.
by Antonio González and George S. Johnson
Raphael Cohen reviews Schtick by Kevin Coval.
Thad Williamson reviews Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation by Cynthia D. Moe-Lobeda.
Penny Rosenwasser’s new book is powerful because it goes beyond explaining how internalized Jewish oppression operates to argue that we need to understand and heal from internalized oppression in order to move toward liberation, build coalitions, and stop enacting trauma on other people, particularly Palestinians.
To put the Kennedy assassination in a historical perspective that is both spiritual and political, we here reprint Peter Gabel’s brilliant article on the subject, “The Spiritual Truth of JFK (As Movie and Reality),” originally published in Tikkun in March/April 1992 in response to the original release of Stone’s film.
Arguably the two most immediate—and in my judgment, truest—books from the Great War, in spite of Hemingway’s assertion that there were none, were written by authors who not only never set foot on the battlefield; neither of them was a male.
Harriet Fraad reviews books by Eric Klinenberg, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Hannah Rosin, and Charles Murray.
Thad Williamson reviews What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution by Gar Alperovitz.
Kirk J. Schneider has written a synopsis of human history that he calls a “historical haiku.” He explains how polarized thinking, rather than observing each other and our world in all its complexities through a lens of mystery and awe, is the root cause of why human beings continue to kill each other. He offers us examples of how fear and the absence of curiosity and awe have made us unable to rise above hatred.
The thirteen stories in Lam’s most recent collection, Birds of Paradise Lost, are populated by refugees of the Vietnam War who came to the Bay Area, as well as their children and friends—but each story is a world unto itself. Lam’s characters are haunted by what they have lost, transfixed by embers that still cloud the air with smoke. What Lam explores is the question of whether they can conquer the ghosts, or at least learn to live with them peacefully.
The book’s certainly as nostalgic as Tennyson’s Memoriam, and no less melancholic, but unlike legions of other books written on loss, a sweet irony pervades it and makes the work fittingly beautiful, if not hapless to explain the grief that Elise endures.
Larry Rasmussen reviews Spirituality: What It Is and Why It Matters by Roger S. Gottlieb.