Earth-based Religions

The Information Age? Meet John Michael Greer.

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I am reading The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World, by John Michael Greer, a book I recommend (it has somewhat bizarrely cheered me up) and hope to find time to describe here. Meanwhile, here’s an excellent review. Searching for the author I was astonished to find pics of him as a druid in full regalia — I came across a hint of that in the book but it is otherwise secular ecology, sociology and future vision with nary a Green Man. Trolling his blog I came across this quote which seemed too good not to repost, seeing that I am swamped with words here at Tikkun, and hiking in the hills last weekend was mourning how little I really understood about the lansdcape I was walking through:
Our time, as the media never tires of telling us, is the information age, a time when each of us can count on being besieged and bombarded by more information in an average day than most premodern people encountered in their entire lives. Now it’s important to remember that this is true only when the term “information” is assumed to mean the sort of information that comes prepackaged and preprocessed in symbolic form; the average hunter-gatherer moving through a tropical rain forest picks up more information about the world of nature through his or her senses in the course of an average day than the average resident in an industrial city receives through that channel in the course of their lives.

Politics & Society

Israel at the US Social Forum: the eclipse of anti-racist Zionism

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Tikkun readers naturally want to know what happened on Israel at the US Social Forum. The chief thing that I was aware of (apart from a minor issue of a canceled workshop about which I just posted) was the equation of Zionism with its rightwing manifestations and with current Israeli policies. As if there was no such thing as leftwing, anti-racist Zionism. I didn’t mention Israel in my first piece about the Forum, because I wasn’t tracking the issue well myself and indeed am highly diffident about writing about Israel at all. That may sound odd for a Tikkun staffer, but as a nonJew, brought in to help with the interfaith outreach of the magazine, I have learned how little I know about Israel/Palestine compared to the experts.

Politics & Society

July 4th Thoughts on Rightwingers Celebrating Leftwing Victories

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At the US Social Forum there was a curious brouhaha, which has been fairly widely reported on the web, over a workshop organized by the vehemently pro-Israel group Stand With Us. As a workshop on LGBTQI rights in the Middle East it looked as if it would fit right in with the Social Forum’s worldview, until it became seen as a way to extol the virtues of Israel compared to its neighboring states and thereby justify Israel’s occupation. It was canceled, with this explanation by the USSF. Stand With Us objected. If you want to know more about Stand With Us, Tikkun ran an article last September by David Theo Goldberg and Saree Makdisi, The Trial of Israel’s Campus Critics, that was strongly critical of it.

General News

Happy Nonviolent 4th of July

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Martha Roden, of Fort Collins, Colorado, who has done great work for us as a volunteer making parts of our Network of Spiritual Progressives website reader-friendly, sent me this today in response to Michael Lerner’s An Interdependence Day Celebration for July 4:

I wanted to let you know that our neighborhood Mennonite Church is hosting an “Alternative Fourth of July Celebration” and I thought I’d share the announcement with you [see below]. I believe that more and more faith-based and secular-based organizations are coming to the same conclusion: war doesn’t work, it never has, and doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results is insanity. Who wants to be insane? When people tell me that war and violence are “human nature,” I simply respond, “No, they’re not. They’re human habit.”

Culture

A Conspiracy of Love

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Beautiful article in our local paper about Dean Ornish (at right with his family), “the nation’s pre-eminent proponent of adopting a healthy life to reverse chronic diseases.” Since founding the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in 1984, he has run trial after trial looking at whether lifestyle choices involving diet, exercise, meditation – and even love – can be as powerful in treating disease as drugs, radiation, chemotherapy and surgery. “In my 33 years, in everything we did, people thought we were crazy,” said Ornish, a self-described hugger who exudes a doctor’s natural air of concern. “People said the tests must be wrong or that this could only happen in California. But we have proven that lifestyle is treatment, not just prevention.”

General News

Writing of the World

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On her “visual blog” Barbara Bash offers us this taste of summer “on a Nantucket Beach.” We have profiled Barbara’s beautiful work here before, and on our art gallery. This is the first image in a series of six from the beach. After the jump I am putting in the second and sixth, but you can see the rest on her blog True Nature, here.

Politics & Society

Tikkun at the Social Forum: Video

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Free Speech TV interviewed me at the Social Forum. They are on cable and increasingly web-based. I can’t work out how to find all their Social Forum coverage on their website: maybe one of you can work that out. I think I’ve only been on TV about three times in my life and I find myself too embarrassed to watch this, but am told it is watchable. freespeechtv on livestream.com.

Politics & Society

The US Social Forum in Detroit

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I spent last week at the US Social Forum in Detroit. I have got used to seeing a preponderance of baby boomers at left demos and conferences, but this was different: tons of young people, and a wide range of everybody. That was super-encouraging. These days the US Social Forum is the largest massing of radical grassroots activists on the left in this country. There have been annual World Social Forums since the first one in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001, and this is the second specifically US Social Forum, after one in Atlanta in 2007.

ESRA

A Report on the Network of Spiritual Progressives Conference, June 11-13, 2010

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Here’s our official Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) report, followed by ideas for attendees and those who wished they could have been there about how to do pursue the ideas and work. If you would like to buy recordings of the conference or parts of it, please go to this page at ConferenceRecording.com. The NSP/Tikkun conference was a terrific success. 500 people gathered at the Lutheran Church of the Reformation in Washington, D.C. and heard some of the most amazing speakers address the question of what is the nature of the political and spiritual crisis that we are facing in the world today, and what to do about it. NSP co-chair (and Catholic Benedictine Sister) Joan Chittister led off with a powerful appeal for compassion as a central theme and NSP chair Rabbi Michael Lerner explained how the Global Marshall Plan and the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment were ways of giving substance to the central theme of the conference: Creating the Caring Society–Caring for Each Other and Caring for the Earth.