Politics & Society

Irresistible!

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This looks cool. From the film blurb:
“Fierce Light” is a feature documentary that captures the exciting movement of Spiritual Activism that is exploding around the planet, and the powerful personalities that are igniting it. Fueled by the belief that “another world is possible,” the film portrays stories of what Martin Luther King called “Love in Action,” and Gandhi called “Soul Force”; what Ripper is calling “Fierce Light.” It is a power that radiates from the heart and outwards. It is that same grass roots spirit that swept Barack Obama into the White House, in a spirit of community–undeniably hopeful, and full of possibility.

Politics & Society

Unexpected world

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So the predictions were all wrong. This is a fascinating article. “At the turn of this century, the conventional wisdom among demographers was that the population of Europe was in precipitous decline, the Islamic world was in the grip of a population explosion, and Africa’s population faced devastation by HIV/AIDS. Only a handful of scholars questioned the idea that the Chinese would outnumber all other groups for decades or even centuries to come. In fact, however, the latest UN projections suggest that China’s population, now 1.3 billion, will increase slowly through 2030 but may then be reduced to half that number by the end of the ­century.”

Politics & Society

A Home Defense Victory

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I posted last week about going to stand with protesters outside someone’s home because the sheriff was due to evict her. I was thrilled to learn that the effort worked, at least for now. Here’s a report from Ulysses Hillard, a young activist at the Unitarian church who was there:
“This past Thursday I woke up punishingly early (for me) and drove over to West Oakland… All in all about 20 to 30 people gathered. We put made signs and put up banners and we listened to the homeowner tell her story.

Rethinking Religion

Eboo Patel and Dorothy Day

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Just came across this wonderful piece by Eboo Patel about finding his spiritual home in Islam through first being attracted to the work of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement. (Thanks to Islamicate). This made me think of a metaphor Brian McLaren quotes in a recent Radical Grace, about the phenomena Christians are calling the Emerging Church: “we aren’t dealing with a new slice of the pie, so to speak, a new segment or sect or division of the church. Instead, what we’re dealing with is more like the outer ring or layer of a tree. If the northwest side of the tree is Roman Catholic, and the northeast side is Eastern Orthodox, and the southwest side is Evangelical and Charismatic, and the southeast side is Traditional Protestant, what we’re dealing with is a conversation among people who find themselves on that outermost ring.

Politics & Society

Why Spirituality is Needed in Politics

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I wrote this in 2008 before the election, and it appeared in the newsletter of my former congregation. I feel it expresses better than anything else I have written what I am doing at Tikkun. I used to think that the left / liberal tradition was all about struggle, anger, and righteous indignation. That was what fueled generations of oppressed and marginalized people to fight the status quo to free the slaves, reform the factories, gain the vote, enforce standards for safe food and medicine, combat racism, sexism and homophobia, and win all the democracy, rights and social safety nets so far gained. But I have realized that, even more than angry struggle, its success has been borne out of empathy.

Inter-Culturalism

Military evangelists

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For the latest in Mikey Weinstein’s campaign for religious freedom in the US military check out this video “showing that US military forces in Afghanistan have been instructed by the military’s top chaplain in the country to “hunt people for Jesus” as they spread Christianity to the overwhelmingly Muslim population.” If this is all news to you, check out Jeff Sharlet’s lead article in Harper’s this month (online for subscribers only), or mine from last year in the UK’s New Humanist.

Politics & Society

Home Defense

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You and I know the most basic thing we could do on the mortgage crisis. We could go and stand with a bunch of neighbors outside people’s homes when the police come to evict them, and refuse the police entry. We know we could be doing that, don’t we? They did it in the 1930s. That was a major reason FDR changed the banking rules.

Inter-Culturalism

Sri Lanka

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My family has had some close friendships with Sri Lankans over the years, my mother and sister especially. The first Buddhist I ever knew was Sri Lankan. Now we hear terrible things in the news. I get an email with loads of info. I write back after a week or more: “Raj, I didn’t reply because I didn’t know what to say: like the rest of the world you are rightly complaining about, I am too swamped to pay attention to Sri Lanka, or to know how to get my head around the issue.

Environment

Now for the good news

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For someone who is so steeped in the horrors of what we are doing to our environment, Roger Gottlieb is amazingly upbeat and positive. I loved the passion in his review of Poisoned Profits in the current Tikkun and I expected an angry man on our Phone Forum last night. Instead I heard him say that the greatest good news story of recent decades has been the rise of religious environmentalism. Listen to it here. [Roger Gottlieb is professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts.