Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/art/page/10/)
On 3 April, Howard University laid off eighty-four staff members, including E. Ethelbert Miller, a Howard alum and director of the university’s African American Resource Center. Though it doesn’t make the largest financial impact, cutting staff at the reeling university leaves the largest public impression that the institution is getting serious about costs, doing the hard thing for the greater good.
I am a Contributing Scholar for the State of Formation, an online program of the Journal of Interreligious Dialogue. Earlier this month the State of Formation sent me and a few other scholars to the National Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. What’s the big deal, you ask? I’m Muslim who grew up in Pakistan, and I had never thought much about the Holocaust until this visit.
I met Lish half a century ago in a high school classroom in Millbrae, California. His kindness helped me survive four years as a strange, arty, activist teenager in a suburban world I found entirely incomprehensible, the first adult I met who looked at me and saw something other than an annoyance or a perpetual misfit.
Last Friday, on the first night of Passover, I was asked to share a teaching on Moses, who led our people out of slavery in Egypt. A friend suggested I share it with you:
The idea that always arises for me when I think of Moses and many other leaders of spiritual or political revolutions is Amilcar Cabral’s concept of “class suicide.” Cabral was the revolutionary socialist leader of the national liberation movement that freed the Portuguese colony of Guinea-Bissau. “Class suicide” describes the act of dying to the privileged class of one’s birth – for instance, by taking a step with no return – and thus sacrificing one’s own privileged position and power in favor of full identification with the oppressed. In either political or spiritual history, a large proportion of such trailblazers were born into privilege.
I haven’t the faintest idea how to sum up the more than 500 stories uploaded to the People’s State of the Union website since late January. They came from story circles – a hundred people in a church basement or a handful in someone’s kitchen – organized in more than 150 places around the U.S. They came because people resonated with the USDAC’s assertion that “democracy is a conversation, not a monologue.”
My big TV-watching time is in the mornings while I exercise. I save up episodes of series I’d never give 100 percent of my attention, usually detective shows (and never medical ones). But there is one family drama in my queue: Parenthood. Yesterday morning I caught up with the final episode. As the characters’ lives fast-forwarded through the finale, my tears started to fall.
It’s easy to think of spiritual practice as something separate from ordinary life: the time one spends on a meditation cushion or chanting prayers. But for me the most powerful spiritual practices are things I seldom put in that category. Is facilitating a discussion a spiritual practice?
In a time when debts have reached unprecedented levels and people are suffering under this burden, how can people of all faiths – as well as our contemporary secular societies – be inspired by this radical biblical vision? The Winter 2015 issue of Tikkun features people putting the concept of Jubilee into action in the fight for debt abolition.
I’ve been a fan of the proposal to make police wear body cameras, but yesterday’s decision not to charge New York police officer Daniel Pantaleo in the chokehold death of Eric Garner has reminded me to question my own confidence in documentary truth.
Gone Girl is a hit with audiences, but its message is troubling for women and sexual assault survivors.