Culture

Awestruck

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On Learning on the Clearest Night Only 6000 Stars Are Visible to the Naked Eye
If seeing only 6000 stars with the naked eye
awestrucks us to topple
in drunken ecstasy
Or piss looking up in devout praise of being,
What would happen if we could truly perceive,
comprehend and experience
the zillions
of stars galaxies universes
pastpresentfuture? And if, as scientists agree, we only use
10% of our brain’s potential,
Then the astonishment we sense
is only 10% of the astonishment
we could sense,
And so it would seem that what seems
like dots of light twinkling
in pretty patterns
moving across the black
is really enough to shatter us
like goblets when the soprano
hits the highest note. And if the 10% of the brainpower we do use
is ignorant of 99.9% of the totality
of the Universe,
perhaps a li’l vino in our goblet
ain’t a bad idea—
Perhaps a flask of wine
in deep wilderness night
is more powerful
than the largest telescope. —Antler
From “Verse & Universe: Poems About Science and Mathematics” edited by Kurt Brown.

Culture

Robert Bergman — On Our Art Gallery

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Reviewing Robert Bergman’s photographic portraits in the January/February issue of Tikkun, Peter Gabel writes:
These breathtaking works of art… bring us face to face with other human beings. But unlike most face-to-face encounters in which the outsides of two faces are visible to each other from within each viewer’s subjective isolation booth, the encounters made possible by Bergman’s photos provide sudden moments of the discovery of mutual Presence, in which we are pulled out of our customary withdrawn state, the key symptom of our illness, and into a sacred contact with the humanity of the other behind and through the image of the face itself. I call these works breathtaking because they unfailingly cause an interruption or disturbance of my breathing as I experience the shock, and the relief, of being brought into an experience of mutual recognition with one after another of the human beings Bergman portrays – and I believe they will do the same for anyone who contemplates them at full size in the gallery. In each case the trappings of a social identity are there that convey a definite impression of a particular life’s circumstances – of one or another legacy of suffering and solitude and also of resilience, determination, and effort – but the accumulation of past influences is in every case transcended by an uncanny illumination, a manifestation of the Holy Spirit that conveys a sense of universal vulnerability and at the same time invincible spiritual strength.

Culture

How can we mature enough so we share the salmon?

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Long ago–actually not that long ago, less than two centuries–the peoples of the North American Pacific coast knew how to maintain salmon stocks and share them so everyone had enough. They had the technology to wipe out the salmon as well as we do. They restrained themselves. More on that below. Today, those of us who eat fish wonder what salmon is safe to eat.

General News

Competition vs. Interrelatedness

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I posted Sunday about reading Malcolm Margolin’s book “The Way We Lived” over the break. Here’s another passage that challenges our assumptions about the way the world is. We write a good deal about how our fears skew our vision in Tikkun, but for me Margolin’s take on this connects especially well to a review I did of Joan Roughgarden’s new book “The Genial Gene.” What she talks about there is a deep bias in the modern biological sciences in favor of seeing competition even when the scientific facts point more strongly towards cooperation. Margolin’s whole book is about how one diverse set of peoples in what we today call California lived with different basic assumptions about the nature of the world.

Politics & Society

Good news: the American Law Institute gives up on the death penalty

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Another major step forward, and this one is significant for the long term. From yesterday’s NY Times:
Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it. There were other important death penalty developments last year: the number of death sentences continued to fall, Ohio switched to a single chemical for lethal injections and New Mexico repealed its death penalty entirely. But not one of them was as significant as the institute’s move, which represents a tectonic shift in legal theory. A couple more quotes:
“The A.L.I. is important on a lot of topics,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Culture

Happy New Decade from N. California

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Thanks: Alana and I (the two staff here who do the print magazine production and Tikkun Daily) have both been away the last ten days and it’s been wonderful to see Tikkun Daily continuing on without much attention from us. Thanks to all who posted and to interns who helped behind the scenes before the break. Special thanks to Hamza van Boom who monitored the comments to remove any abusive ones during the critical five days when neither Alana nor I could even do that. (Last week Alana was at work attending a conference, but found she had no wireless access from the conference floor where she was staffing the Tikkun table.)
Song and dance: My wife, Debi, and I took a couple of nights away in Sebastopol, an out-of-the-way bohemian town about the same distance (in driving time and property values) north of San Francisco as our pre-Tikkun home on the edge of the Catskills was from New York City. We felt totally at home there.

Culture

Avatar: the Spiritual Progressive Movie of the Decade?

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So we are deep in “Avatar” here. It came out about a week ago and my son, Rowan, home for the holidays from the USC Cinema School, has seen it three times already. Yesterday he took his mother, his aunt and myself, insisting we had to see it on the giant IMAX screen as well as in 3D. He wasn’t sure we would like the total immersion experience. We were enthralled.

Christianity

The most politically dangerous Christmas carol

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I love a column by John Ortberg in last week’s Christian Century about the song of praise that Mary sang when she was told by an angel that she would bear the son of God. I wanted to link to it for this Christmas week, but it’s one of their few articles not online. Then I found this sermon, “That Mary Sure Could Sing,” that quotes Ortberg’s piece and riffs off it. Here are the opening lines from Ortberg’s piece, followed by some quotes from the sermon. The greatest Christmas carol in history was not written by Irving Berlin or Nat King Cole.

Environment

Global Climate Justice Fast – Tomorrow Thursday

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The Climate Justice Fasters in Copenhagen have been doing amazing work promoting climate justice. This Thursday, they will be joined people across the world for a 24 hour fast in solidarity. We are past the time of procrastination! We need to act to solve the climate crisis now! From the website www.climatejusticefast.com.

Buddhism

A Collective Awakening? Buddhist Reflections on Copenhagen

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David Loy is one of the most socially aware Buddhists that I am aware of. I don’t know that much about Buddhism, despite having various friends who are strong Buddhists. When I read Buddhist magazines, I find myself disappointed that there seems to be so little on social change as Buddhist practice and necessity. David Loy, who is Besl Professor of Ethics/Religion and Society at Xavier University in Cincinnati, is certainly a great exception (and I am not saying there aren’t many others out there, just that I am not aware of them). We have just posted at Tikkun Current Thinking a piece he has sent us about his response to Copenhagen. In it he calls climate change “the greatest threat ever to our species.”