Christianity

Openness about brokenness … and joy

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I have been lucky this summer to be a partial witness to an upheaval at a church in Oakland. I have written here before about what this church has meant to me:
For some months this winter I was feeling more emotionally and spiritually depleted than I think at any time since my early twenties … I am an ex-Christian who does not enjoy Christian services. So it’s a great surprise to find myself saying that the experience that has most helped to revive me in recent weeks has been going to First Congregational Church in Oakland. There is an openness about our brokenness and failures at that church, combined with a warmth and joy, that is unlike anything I have experienced before.

Culture

Production Time at Tikkun

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We are in the last ten days now of producing the next print issue of Tikkun. We’ve been getting compliments on how good the magazine has been looking graphically lately (for which our thanks especially to Sabiha Basrai, our designer — seen here with her colleagues at Design Action, and don’t neglect to run your cursor over their faces for a tiny surprise). That’s despite the fact that every recent issue it seems I get to a point where I say to myself, OK, well this time we just won’t have time to make it look good so we’ll have a plain vanilla issue, if only we can just get the words right. That’s where I have been the last three days, except we are even further behind than usual. I’m only writing this post because I started to breathe a little easier last night, and am thinking that maybe our amazing team can pull another one out of the hat after all.

Culture

Get Out The Truth About Glenn Beck

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I just received this from the people at Color of Change (above: photo from their website):
Glenn Beck was just on the cover of TIME magazine. Instead of telling the truth about Beck–that he repeatedly race-baits, lies and distorts the truth–TIME raises the question of whether Beck represents a legitimate voice in American politics. It’s absurd, and it’s not just TIME. In article after article, reporters seem afraid to call out what Beck is actually doing, and they often neglect to mention the very real backlash against Beck, including the fact that more than 62 companies have stopped advertising on his show. You can help.

Culture

Experiential Learning

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Beautiful writing here from Kim Chernin, from a piece in our archives before my time, that I just happened to read. I very long ago wrote a doctoral thesis about experiential religion, if that isn’t a contradiction in forms (I guess it was) and have been delighted by Chernin’s wrestling with experience and ideas each time I have picked up something by her: her novel The Flame Bearers especially, which is a brilliant evocation of experiential religion, but also her memoir on the women in her family, and one of her books on eating disorders. This passage makes me think of my son, 21 next week, who plays guitar in a rock band which performs some of his own compositions though he doesn’t read music, but who is finally now taking a music theory class at college: from my way of thinking, that is the right way round to do it much more often than we imagine it is. Obviously, I loved books, but weren’t there other kinds of learning I also cherished? …

Buddhism

When Government Employees Truly Care

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Imagine that government services were designed and delivered by people who really care. Wouldn’t that have been so attractive we would have had universal healthcare by now? But what does it mean to really care for the people who receive government services? My friend Chase knows what it means for her in her office. She is a member of the covenant group my wife and I joined at our Unitarian Universalist Church.

Humanism

When Must the Secular and Religious Work Together?

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There is huge scope for the secular and the religious to work together! We are currently missing far too many of those chances. Believers and nonbelievers tend to look down on and mistrust each other. The emphasis on belief, creed, and ideas — the ways we understand and describe our experience of the world — tends to overwhelm an emphasis on our actual shared experience, and on ways we could care about and for each other, and pursue shared goals. Look at how various atheists have been promoting Islamophobia.

Politics & Society

Was Kosovo the Good War?

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A riveting to and fro has developed around David Gibbs’ article “Was Kosovo the Good War?” in the July/August Tikkun. Responding on our site Roger Lippman, the editor of Balkan Witness, has strongly objected to what he considers Gibb’s anti-Serb attitude Gibbs’ argument [my apologies: Roger Lippman tells me I misrepresented his view, see the end of this post]. Lippman is a long-time social change activist and in 1970 was a co-defendant, with Michael Lerner and others, in the Seattle Seven conspiracy trial of anti-Vietnam War activists. He writes:
One could refute Gibbs’ misstatements one by one, but the overall point is that he seems determined to blame anyone but the Serbian aggressors for the Albanian plight…

Judaism

Podhoretz and Lerner

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Zach Dorfman thought I should make my long comment on his post into a post itself. Here it is with an introduction. It gets longer and longer. This concerns a new book by Norman Podhoretz, the leading neo-con before there were neo-cons. Podhoretz may bore the pants off longtime Tikkun readers but new ones may like to know that Michael Lerner started Tikkun in 1986 (here’s the first issue) in large part to provide a leftwing Jewish counter to Podhoretz’s conservative Commentary magazine.

Christianity

Jewish in identity, Christian in faith, and Catholic in religious practice

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That’s how Meredith Gould describes herself. The Pew people tell us that 28% of Americans have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion – or no religion at all. If you count people shifting denominations within Protestantism it’s 44%. Who better than these people to teach their religion of choice how to avoid insulting their religion of origin? But I’m not sure how many do.