The Great Awe-Wakening

The fact that “awe” and its variants are flooding our vocabulary is a welcoming sign that a fuller and deeper sensibility of “awe” is reemerging in our culture.

Free Associations on the Four Sons

Dusting off my Haggadah several months early, I was once again intrigued with the nuances of the parable. Far from being a simple description of four types of children, I now saw the parable as offering profound insight into the elements that impact the development of the child, and by extension, the formation and potential for transformation of the world.

Passover Haggadah Supplement 2011

Every year Tikkun publishes a Haggadah supplement for Passover. This year we only published the first part of it in the print magazine (the two pages pictured at right) and promised that the entire haggadah would be published online, here, in time for Passover. We wrote:

FOR YOUR SEDER, here is a Haggadah supplement—not a replacement. If you don’t normally do a Seder, you can use this supplement as the basis for an interfaith gathering in your home on April 18, the first night of Passover, or on any of the other nights of Passover until it ends on April 26. The bulk of this supplement can be found online at tikkun.org/passoversupplement.

Toward a Counter-Imperial Faith

Christians in Egypt joined with Muslims during the February 2011 protests that drove U.S.-backed Hosni Mubarak from power. Will U.S. Christians now find the courage to follow their lead and stand with the pro-democracy movements in Egypt, Libya, and beyond?

The Nature of Evil

So why is evil so sexy, and so profoundly glamorous? And why does virtue seem so boring? Why is it that when I told my thirteen-year-old son I was writing a book on evil, he replied “Wicked!”?

Truth

When I began living as a woman, my children’s world split open. As the truth of my gender collided with the truth of their pain at losing the man they loved, it seemed there was no world we could inhabit together — until love taught us that no matter what gender I expressed, I would always be their father.

The Coming of Grace

Literature and literary criticism, by bringing to light lost, silenced voices, makes their existence known, thus enabling that ethical caring attention be paid to them. In recent years I have focused on retrieving the silenced existence of nonhuman animals as beings worthy of such attention.

Prophetic Voices Should Be Bold

I think it is wrong for the voices of moderation to be constrained by an idealistic sense of duty to absolute accuracy, balance, and openness to opposing views. Hmm, ouch, that was hard to write; are we not the people who “eat brown rice and are always nice”?

When Love Trumps Right Belief

Each of us has directives we live by. The directive to love is at the very heart of most faith traditions, along with being the first and foremost standard to live by for many who do not profess a specific religious belief.