Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/emancipatory-spirituality/spirituality/page/3/)
If the postmodernists celebrated a departure from objective truths, Lyacos offers a vision of subjective return. Though his view is more pragmatic than ideal, Lyacos argues for a new interpretation of God, the Bible, and their roles in contemporary society.
The desire for mutual recognition is not an abstract universal, but a concrete universal manifested in all human situations as an expression of the very meaning of what it means to be a social human being.
Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places
Gary Snyder, in conversation with Julia Martin
Trinity University Press, 2014
Nobody Home presents three interviews conducted by South African scholar and writer Julia Martin with the poet Gary Snyder that take place from the late 1980s to 2010, along with a selection of letters between them covering the same period. Martin was a young academic in apartheid South Africa when she first reached out to Snyder, motivated by her critical work on his poetry and thinking. Martin’s study and practice of Buddhism and her intuitive grasp of Snyder’s importance as a forefather of a growing international movement of spiritual environmentalism provoked Snyder to respond with sympathy and encouragement. They had an instant rapport in letters, which led to the interviews. This is a great period for Snyder, as his thinking about the nondualism of self/no-self and its relation to the world and all phenomena is culminating in his concentration on finishing Mountains and Rivers Without End, one of the crowning works of his generation of poets.
You don’t have to be Jewish to benefit from the spiritual wisdom of Jewish High Holidays!
A God That Could Be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet
by Nancy Abrams
Beacon Press, 2015
Nancy Abrams needed a higher power. As one of the premiere science writers of our time, she found both the Iron Age gods of the Abrahamic faiths and the pseudo-scientific mysticisms of New Age gurus wanting. So she turned to what she knew best: science. What she found is set forth in her important, cogent, and challenging new book, A God That Could Be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet. This is not another book about the clash of science and religion.
To create a present and a future which is Earth-honoring and just to all marginalized and outcast beings, those of us who identify as Hindus must act as wise and determined servants in re-discovering the ecologically-sound wisdom embedded in our collective human history and experience.
The environmental movement is too fragmented. It’s time to integrate our struggles and recognize the spiritual dimension of our political work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
“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.
Rabbi Chaim Richter and I met on death row during my second year of isolation in a maximum-security women’s prison in the Florida Everglades. I was the only woman on death row at the time. Having been wrongfully convicted in the murder of two police officers, I remained under sentence of death for five years until 1981, when the Supreme Court of Florida changed my sentence from death to life imprisonment. After twelve more years of imprisonment, I won my federal habeas corpus and the federal district court overturned my case. Rabbi Richter visited, counseled, and befriended me throughout those long years.