Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/emancipatory-spirituality/spiritual_politics/page/8/)
Chanukah was the first recorded national liberation struggle against Greek imperialism, and Christmas celebrates the birth of a hoped-for messiah to free the Jewish people from Roman imperialism. Both Judaism born of slaves in Egypt and Christianity born of a movement of the poor and powerless were in their times the “Occupy” movement that confronted the powerful and those who served them.
Climate change and extinction are both too narrow. We need to move beyond ecological concerns to reach out to the ever-larger proportion of society focused on eradicating injustice and poverty. We need to reach out to those who now live in fear of losing their livelihoods and homes.
We grow as religious people through an unlikely combination of courage and humility. It takes courage to question one’s opinions, and humility to recognize that we may not be as right as we thought. It is for this reason that spiritual progressives have rightly embraced the movement for equality for LGBT people not as a condundrum, but as an opportunity for precisely the kind of spiritual maturation we seek.
When my teacher and mentor at the Jewish Theological Seminary Abraham Joshua Heschel told me and others that he had been “praying with his feet” when he participated in the Selma Freedom march in 1965, he confirmed for many a way of overcoming the dichotomy between my religious practice and my radical politics. In many ways, the anti-war movements of the Sixties and early Seventies of the last century felt like that kind of community prayer. I had that experience again at my various visits to Occupy Oakland, most intensely this past Wednesday, November 2, 2011.
Repentance and Atonement Are NOT Just for Jews: A Note to Our Non-Jewish Readers on How This High Holiday Workbook Can Be of Use to You
Tikkun is not just for Jews—it is interfaith as well as Jewish. This High Holiday workbook is an invitation to all people to join with the Jewish people . . .
September 11 does not have to be a day of patriotic rage. Every year it also presents an opportunity. This summer the Metta Center for Nonviolence launched a bold project to use the most recent anniversary to heal and repair, to draw out our latent capacity for reconciliation, and in so doing build the foundations of a long-term campaign that will confront the war system itself.
Some remember Martin Luther as an inspiring resistance theologian. Others see him in a negative light due to his indefensible stance against the peasants in their revolt in the 1520s, which he entitled, “Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants,” and particularly due to the anti-Semitic rantings he published in his declining years. While not seeking to apologize for these unconscionable writings, I am nevertheless interested in discussing some of his insights that may resonate for progressive people of faith.
A report on the child abuse scandal in the U.S. Catholic Church — released in mid-May and reported in the Guardian — “concluded that the permissive society of the 1960s was to blame for the rise in sexual offences by priests.” Why are conservatives still so focused on the 1960s? Why are they so deeply interested in invalidating the experiences of that epoch? Why do they hold on so deeply to the cultural struggles that emerged in that period?
Since 2006 a team of Buddhists based at the Berkeley Zen Center, have been using Buddhist practice to sustain and inform door-to-door political campaigning.
The sort of raucous celebration of Osama bin Laden’s killing that took place outside the White House and in the media erodes our moral and spiritual center. Self-defense is sometimes necessary in this violent world, but let’s remember that a strategy relying on killing the “bad guys” is as futile as trying to end malaria by killing every mosquito on the planet. Drain the swamps of hatred! And violence isn’t the path for that! Now that Osama is dead, lets get our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan NOW!
There may be nothing more devastating than the phenomenon of “generational betrayal.” The clash between what we had grown up believing and what we experienced destroyed our individual internal moral universes and fatally divided our generation.
Some years ago I met a man who, over a single cup of ginger-mint tea, shook my deepest assumptions about the process of moral conversation. His name was Samuel Prana.
The highest spiritual truths include this one: Don’t Kill Everybody.
What should Christianity be saying about global capitalism?
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.