The push for $15 per hour at SeaTac was about more than just paychecks—it was an interfaith, values-based struggle against power inequality.
Rethinking Religion
A God That Could Be Real
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Unconscious evolution of God-ideas is inevitable, but conscious evolution of God-ideas has been harshly discouraged. This must change, or else we’ll never be able to bring our best knowledge into the process of rethinking God for our time.
Culture
Small Father
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Crispy on the crust, moist, nutty, with dhana giro baked in, Mom’s stuffing is like a cross between her juicy lamb kababs and perfectly golden cornbread. At eight years old, I was there beside her at Publix the night she first asked a woman in the poultry department for help. That woman and another then explained, patiently, respectfully, how to clean and stuff a turkey, how to prepare the gravy.
Editorials & Actions
Between Madness and Truth
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Between Madness and Truth:
What our inner trickster can teach us. From HaAretz By Gabriel Bukobza
Our socialization requires that we tame our impulses, but we pay a price for this suppression. That’s why cultures have created characters that live outside the conventions – for us to learn from. A fundamental stage in a child’s development is the ability to regulate bodily wastes. Understanding that the place for this is the toilet bowl and not the bed or elsewhere shows acceptance of the principles of reality. Being weaned from soiling and wetting symbolizes the onset of the internalization of the rules of culture – and particularly of the recognition of one of culture’s essential distinctions: between dirt and cleanliness. Anthropologist Mary Douglas noted in her book “Purity and Danger” that dirt is “matter out of place”: An egg on your plate is breakfast, but on your tie it is dirt.
Editorials & Actions
Updated version of Mourning the Parisian “Humorists” Yet Challenging the Hypocrisy of Western Media
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Mourning the Parisian “Humorists” Yet Challenging the Hypocrisy of Western Media
by Rabbi Michael Lerner
As the editor of a progressive Jewish and interfaith magazine that has often articulated views that have prompted condemnation from both Right and Left, I had good reason to be scared by the murders of fellow journalists in Paris. Having won the 2014 “Magazine of the Year” Award from the Religion Newswriters Association, and having been critical of Hamas’ attempts to bomb Israeli cities this past summer (even while being equally critical of Israel’s rampage against civilians in Gaza), I have good reason to worry if this prominence raises the chances of being a target for Islamic extremists. But then again, I had to wonder about the way the massacre in Paris is being depicted and framed by the Western media as a horrendous threat to Western civilization, freedom of speech and freedom of the press, I wondered about the over-heated nature of this description. It didn’t take me long to understand how problematic that framing really is. When right-wing “pro-Israel” fanatics frequently sent me death threats, physically attacked my house and painted on the gates statements about me being “a Nazi” or “a self-hating Jew,” and called in bomb threats to Tikkun, the magazine I edit, there was no attention given to this by the media, no cries of “our civilization depends on freedom of the press” or demands to hunt down those involved (the FBI and police received our complaints, but never reported back to us about what they were doing to protect us or find the assailants).
Christianity
Re-inventing the Church by Berit Kjos
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Below I’m presenting the view of what I take to be a reactionary writer who resists all the changes that have taken place in the Christian world’s thinking in the past 150 years. What I find intriguing is that her arguments are really against ethical relativism–and on that point I agree with her, particularly how that relativism becomes a slippery slope toward subordination to the capitalist marketplace and its ideals (though she doesn’t make that point even while quoting from market mystifiers like Drucker). What she completely misses, and thereby distorts, is that many of the modernizers of the church whom she is resisting were actually doing precisely what Jeremiah (whom he quotes) advocated–a return to the old ways of the Bible. The major critique of liberation theology is that the old fashioned Church that has been under assault in the modern era was itself an abandonment of the Bible and its old ways–its powerful call for social justice and care for the poor that the Church and most other established religions have managed to honor more in solemn intoning of those values than in actually living them. So the modern liberation theologians, and their current embodiment in Pope Francis, are the ones who are rejecting the accommodation of the Church to the realities of the powerful (the principalities) and insisting on a return to the (implicitly) Jewish ethics that call for redistribution of wealth every fifty years (the Jubillee) and forgiving of all debts every seven years, and of “loving the stranger” (which in today’s world means everyone on the planet, not just your own nation or religion).
2015
A Buddhist and Interfaith Response to Debt Capitalism
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In order to alleviate mass suffering, there is a spiritual urgency for the interfaith community in the United States to bring attention and public awareness to this global issue of debt crisis and jubilee.
Articles
Growing Toward God: Jewish Movement through an Axial Age
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Just as plants are heliotropic beings that grow toward the sun, we humans are theotropic beings that grow toward God. And just as a tree doesn’t have to understand the sun to feel it and be fed by it, we don’t have to understand God to be nourished by subtle sacred influences.
Editorials & Actions
Tariq Ali: France Tries to Hide Its Islamophobia Behind Secular Values
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‘France Tries To Mask Its Islamophobia Behind Secular Values’
The Pakistan-born British commentator seldom minces words. PRANAY SHARMA INTERVIEWS TARIQ ALI
Pakistan-born British commentator Tariq Ali seldom minces words. As a political activist, journalist, writer and film-maker, he has courted controversy and ruffled many feathers. But over the years he has also built up a huge base of followers and admirers much beyond London, where he stays. The firebrand leader of the 1960s campus movement, now all of 71, shows no signs of mellowing with age.
2015
Romance in the Torah
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The Books of Jonathan: Four Men, One God
Gary Levinson
Self-Published, 2014
If you are itching to get away from the contemporary world, here’s a fun and steamy route: a hot gay love story based in part on an imaginative reconstruction of the relationship between Jonathan (the eldest son of King Saul) and Saul’s antagonist, David, who eventually overthrows Saul and becomes the founder of the dynasty that by legend is destined ultimately to produce the Messiah. Author Gary Levinson explores questions of faith and nationhood in a historical novel that provides a fun escape from the frustrations of the present even as it smashes any romanticization of the past.
2015
Transcending Market Logic: Envisioning a Global Gift Economy
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The act of mothering shatters the market-based expectation of equal exchange. Building on that model, let’s build a global gift economy.
2015
Building an International Bank for Right Livelihood
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It’s time to create an alternative to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund—a global bank that prioritizes sustainability, not growth.
2015
Buddhism and Debt
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What resources does Buddhism offer toward Jubilee? To achieve the Buddhist goal of release from karmic debt, we must annul economic debt.
2015
Embracing the Radical Economics of the Bible
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The spirit of the Jubilee laws is clear and relevant: to prevent the emergence of a permanently impoverished underclass.
2015
Reading Death
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To Mourn a Child: Jewish Responses to Neonatal and Childhood Death Edited by Jeffrey Saks and Joel Wolowelsky and Kaddish: Women’s Voices Edited by Michal Smart and Barbara Ashkenas. Review by Erica Brown.