Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/emancipatory-spirituality/spirituality/page/9/)
Are those who seek faith healing deluded? Not entirely. Although no amount of faith can regenerate a lost limb, faith can indeed help a person overcome crippling pain. The natural brain mechanisms that allow this to occur are increasingly understood. Believing in a Higher Power—even a fictional one—can cure ills amenable to the placebo response.
Let us hope that Pinsky’s new Selected Poems will help to dispel the more jaded views of his accomplishments. For Pinsky is an important figure. He is also, as Tony Hoagland has rightly observed, “a much stranger poet than is generally acknowledged.”
The Tree of Life is a brilliant achievement in almost all respects, bringing the eternal and the everyday, the macrocosmic and the microscopic, and the physical and the metaphysical into graceful convergences that are awesome to behold.
While it may be true, as Nicholas Boeving states in this issue of Tikkun, that recovery (the blanket term used to describe twelve-step programs) works for only a minority of addicts, that minority is a rather large number: millions around the world. And because recovery is such a large and growing movement, Boeving’s criticisms—which for the most part are valid—only speak to a certain aspect of the twelve-step paradigm.
For most of America, having a disease means having a foreign body assume residence in the biological tissue, multiplying itself and attacking the surrounding healthy tissue. This idea is a direct result of the discovery of microscopy and the bacterial origin of many afflictions. The metaphor here is war, and all good doctors are on the front lines, battling leukemia, eradicating AIDS and other serious illnesses. Sometimes we cause the war ourselves and sometimes we are simply invaded. But where is the infection in addiction? To what can we actually point?
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.
Matthew Fox reviews Peter Kingsley’s “A Story Waiting to Pierce You: Mongolia, Tiber and the Destiny of the Western World.” He writes that in this book Kingsley tells “An earth-shattering, history-breaking story. One that raises whole new possibilities of humans understanding other humans whom we imagine to be so different from ourselves.”
The highest spiritual truths include this one: Don’t Kill Everybody.
edited by Lawrence Fine, Eitan Fishbane, and Or N. Rose
What should Christianity be saying about global capitalism?
Without intending to reify, or circumscribe, I will present a taxonomy of experience that reflects my personal history and observations over forty-seven years, since I and a small group of new friends just commencing medical school in New York City dropped acid (LSD).
Many political pundits dismiss the possibility of world peace. Throughout the history of man, there has always been war and a struggle for power. Yet I suggest that peace is necessary and essential for the survival of the human race in the twenty-first century.
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.