If we worship anything, it should be the power of liberation. The first commandment warns us away from wealth, status, and other false gods.
2015
Sharing Empathy, Sharing Power: A Catholic Take on Debt and Jubilee
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If we are going to demand just and fair debt relationships no longer hijacked by power plays, perhaps we need to instill in our systems and ourselves an understanding of childhood and adult development and build toward a capacity for perspective-taking.
2015
Fulfilling Our Debt to Humanity: A Hindu Perspective on Jubilee
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Once we expand the definition of debt beyond material considerations, the idea of Jubilee becomes more than just debt cancellation—it becomes a broader push to institutionalize the fulfillment of our debts to humanity and Mother Earth.
2015
Jubilee and Debt Abolition: An Introduction
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What would it mean to take seriously the Torah’s call for the cancellation of all debts and the equal redistribution of property every fifty years?
2015
Adapting Ancient Ethical Principles in Modern Times
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How might we update the Bible’s call for the periodic redistribution of wealth? Could we use estate taxes to create a trust fund for every child?
2015
Sabbatical Year and Jubilee in Twenty-First-Century America
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A campaign to reinstitute the Sabbatical Year and Jubilee in industrial societies could fundamentally transform the global capitalist system.
Editorials & Actions
The Struggle for the Soul of Islam
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Who Is A Muslim? An Intense Struggle within the Muslim World for the Soul of Islam
By Dr Abdul Cader Asmal for New Age Islam
15 Dec 2014
Well before Cheryl Bernard concocted her whimsical compartmentalization of Muslims into arbitrary categories (1), and Nathan Lean cautioned Muslims not to be defined by non-Muslims (2), there was and is an intense struggle within the Muslim world for the soul of Islam. This review attempts to analyze the claims of the various sects and movements within Islam, to find the common denominators that bind them together, to identify the conflicting views that tear them asunder, to acknowledge the heinous acts that cast them outside the pale of Islam, and to end up hopefully with a definition of who really is a Muslim! A Muslim is an adherent of Islam, a monotheistic religion that is the complete universal and final version of a faith that has been revealed through many prophets including Abraham, Moses, Ishmael, Isaac, Jesus and finally Mohammed. “Muslim” is an Arabic word meaning ‘one who submits to God’. Muslims believe that God is eternal, transcendent, and absolutely One.
Articles
Jewish Education During the Nazis as Spiritual Resistance
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“Somehow Nazism and Martin Buber worked together to give a lot of us a much deeper feeling for what Judaism offers.”
2014
Made by God, Broken by Life: Developing an African American Hermeneutic for Disability
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I believe it’s time to develop an African American hermeneutic for approaching disability language and metaphors of brokenness in religious discourse.
Editorials & Actions
Yearning for a World of Love and Justice
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We live in a world filled with loving and caring people. We all crave a world filled with love and care. Yet most of us doubt that we can experience a loving and caring world beyond our own private lives and homes. Why? Because the ethos of the capitalist marketplace, which places greatest value on money and power, has infiltrated our personal lives, shaping our unconscious and conscious beliefs about “human nature.”
In the economic marketplace we are taught to look out for ourselves, maximize our profits, and do what we need to do to get ahead, even at the cost of people we care about.
Activism
Radical Sanctuary: Faith Groups Rally Around Migrant Youth
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All over the country, people in communities of faith are on the front lines of a renewed and growing movement pushing for basic aid and a path to legalization for some 11 million migrants living in the United States without legal status.
2014
High Holy Days in the Hospital
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“On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed. Who shall live and who shall die, who shall perish by fire and who by water, who by Roman soldier and who by cancer…”
“No, that’s not how it goes,” I wearily chided myself from my hospital bed. I knew I was making up my own words. But alone in the wee hours of the morning, as the High Holidays approached, that was the best rendition of the Unetanah Tokef (the central prayer of the High Holiday service) that I could muster. And my brother Jeffrey later told me that spending the eve of Yom Kippur with me in the hospital was the most meaningful Yom Kippur of his life.
2014
Illness and Innocence
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Why do many of us feel guilty when we catch a cold or grow a tumor? Is it because so many religions depict illness as divine punishment?
2014
Crip Time
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“I live life in slow motion. The world I live in is one where my thoughts are as quick as anyone’s, my movements are weak and erratic, and my talk is slower than a snail in quicksand,” writes Australian author and activist Anne McDonald, reflecting on her perception of time. “I have cerebral palsy, I can’t walk or talk, I use an alphabet board, and I communicate at the rate of 450 words an hour compared to your 150 words in a minute—twenty times as slow. A slow world would be my heaven. I am forced to live in your world, a fast hard one.
2014
Who Can Be Commanded?: Disability in Jewish Thought and Culture
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Recently two dear friends asked me to advise them about their pregnant daughter, who just discovered that her fetus has Noonan syndrome, a genetic condition that can result in heart defects, unusual facial features, short stature, and learning problems. The pregnant daughter wanted to keep the child, but her husband was afraid that the child would have a difficult life and was concerned about possible consequences for the rest of the family. My friends presented the possibility of abortion in this case as a Jewish legal question. May a person, they asked, decide over life and death? What is our responsibility to act on this, and where are the limits? My reply:
Though such children have a difficult path to follow, yet it is a life with many possibilities for fulfilment.