Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/page/74/)
The best way to honor John F. Kennedy’s legacy is to muster the courage to walk again through the “dark history” associated with his short but consequential presidency, in order to learn its lessons and discover its hope. Jim Douglass’s “JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters,” which Touchstone is reissuing this month as a trade paperback, is a reliable guide for that demanding task.
The military-industrial complex, more powerful today than ever, imprisons the president. When he accepts the power to kill everyone, the president becomes a prisoner morally and politically to the demands of our national security state. Once the president accepts nuclear power over the world, his permissible movement is confined to a very tight space — tighter than we as citizens might imagine.
At $708 billion, the Pentagon gets nearly 60 percent of our discretionary budget (the money Congress is free to allocate). Meanwhile our schools are in crisis, lacking the money for teachers and books, and social welfare programs are weakening, depriving the most vulnerable members of our community of vital support and health care.
Ad hominem attack is not new in Jewish politics. Intimidation of critics of Israeli policy is as old as the modern State of Israel itself. Hannah Arendt’s experience in the 1960s offers an early example of repressive strategies for the punishment and repression of dissent.
Perhaps no field of biology evokes the fear of loss of the sacred more than neuroscience, the biology of the brain. Yet sacredness and meaning pervade the musings of many neuroscientists. How do we understand the brain in a way that promotes enchantment, and not disenchantment, in day-to-day life?
Tony Campolo’s essay is, in one regard, extremely well-informed and timely, but in another regard dangerously ill-informed about Darwin himself. The basic problem is that Darwin’s theory came in two halves.
Darwin was a racist, and his racist theories have had an enormous impact on American thinking. In terms of science, Darwin’s account may be solid indeed. But value-free? Nothing could be further from the truth — and that’s where the problem lies.
Science is sometimes seen as a cold, heartless enterprise that “disenchants” the world and destroys its mystery and wonder. In his most recent book, Alfred Tauber questions this view of science and seeks to understand the implications of Darwinian evolution for the humanities and religion.
The idea of an inbuilt drive to care and love is really nothing new, of course. It’s only new to us in trying to scientifically grope our way out of what became the prison of the old scientific mindset into the liberation of a new world allied as friend rather than enemy to spirituality.
What’s the greatest mystery facing every person on the planet? Ultimately, it’s some version of the age-old “Where do I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going?” So far, no one has a satisfactory explanation for the existence of nonphysical minds in this otherwise physical universe.
Artists who create icons and sacred music often describe their activity as a form of prayer. I think too that if nature is understood, in some sense, as the work of God, then seeking to discover the ways of nature through science might also be experienced as a form of prayer.
Don’t worry, we are not about to join the creationists with their rejection of evolution and insistence that God planted all those dinosaur bones to test your faith. The fact is that most liberals and progressives, in fact, most people who have completed high school, have been heavily indoctrinated into the dominant religion of this historical period, the religion of scientism, and as can be expected, will feel deeply uneasy — if not feeling that they are outright disloyal — if they consider the possibility that another worldview is not only possible but plausible.
Washington is mired in bitter personal partisan battles. The two-party system seems itself to be lurching out of control and unable to respond thoughtfully to the pragmatic, problem-solving center of the political spectrum.
Sometime in mid-September 2010, President Obama suddenly discovered that twenty months of governing by capitulation to the very mainstream ideas he campaigned against in 2008 was a losing strategy. But instead of acknowledging his errors, he acted as though his liberal and progressive base were betraying him.