Culture

I Will Always and Forever Be Your Friend

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Yesterday was a bit of a hard day. I had to do end-of-the-year tax payments and the gozintas and gozoutas for the year weren’t looking very good. Some other stuff was going on that really had me down. Sigh. I had to open up my old email software to find the message from our accountant so I could print out the quarterly payment forms. When I clicked on my “personal” folder it opened to a message from my friend Anna which she wrote to me back in 2004.

Christianity

From a Jew on Christmas Eve

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At the last Tikkun gathering that I attended back in February one of the speakers talked about how Jews and Christians are united in their discomfort about the fact that Jesus was Jewish. So I laughed with everyone else, and have shared this insight with many others since, and still see that I personally love it that he was Jewish, because I feel a sense of connection with him that is rendered more meaningful this way. Which almost begs the question: how would a Jewish woman born and raised in Israel develop a sense of connection with Jesus? Loving No Matter What
The year was 1991. I was having a fight with a friend during and after a back-packing trip.

Culture

The Politics of the Present Imperfect

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It is a time of year when many of us take special occasion to reflect on whether we’ve been living our lives the way we mean to, whether our communities and our society as a whole have become a little more sane-minded, more sustainable, more beautiful, a little more just in the past year. In my experience this exercise often leads to heartburn and nausea: the gap between the way things are and the way I hope for them to be is so vast as to seem impossible to bridge.Health care reform didn’t turn out nearly as well as many of us hoped. The DREAM act failed for unconscionable unreasons. Climate legislation isn’t even on the table. The Bush tax cuts for the super-wealthy were extended, at the expense of desperately needed social services.

Culture

Moment of Zen: In Defense of “Jibber Jabber” – Reconsidering Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity.

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In conversation with the staff here, Tikkun intern Eamon O’Connor has been developing his critique of the famous rally and of the left critics like Medea Benjamin, Chris Hedges and more than a few Tikkun readers and writers who, in vigorously dismissing the rally, missed something crucial about it. This is about how to engage people in political discourse in the future, not just about what happened at the last election. By Eamon O’Connor
Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity may have come and gone in popular consciousness, and most people will remember it as little more than a hybrid media spectacle/ Halloween party thrown by our nation’s most popular political satirist — a Be-in for a generation raised on a diet rich in irony. The event left many progressives shaking their heads, wondering why worthier causes couldn’t garner the same attention, or attendance. After heaving a collective sigh of frustration, or indifference, we went along with our business.

Media Tools

A Promise and a Threat: WikiLeaks’ “Anonymous” and the Shaping of Online Protest

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About two months after Malcolm Gladwell’s notorious (and notoriously dismissive) proclamation, “The revolution will not be tweeted,” we find ourselves in the middle of the Wikigate scandal. There is a metaphysical lesson in there, I’m sure. Now that WikiLeaks — legitimately or otherwise — has leaked a massive amount of confidential information, and now that different agencies of control — legitimately or otherwise — are trying to punish its founder and indirectly intimidate those who might attempt something similar in the future, a different kind of battle is being shaped: the battle over who gets to control the digital space. From our point of view, this mean means: who gets to voice their opinion online and how will online protest techniques be shaped? How can we make them have the largest impact possible?

Culture

Videos from Network of Spiritual Progressives Conference up online!

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We are beginning to put videos of some of the speeches from our conference in June up online. To get you started we’ve got some great speeches by Rep. Keith Ellison, Lester Brown, Sister Joan Chittister, Gary Dorrien, John Dear, Rev. Dr. James Forbes, and a Q&A with Rabbi Lerner, Peter Gabel, and Sister Joan Chittister. More to come after the new year . . .

Culture

Receiving Feedback as Spiritual Practice

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Crossposted from The Fearless Heart. This week I finished teaching a 5-session phone class called Feedback without Criticism. The first 4 sessions were about giving feedback, and last night’s session was about receiving feedback. After last night’s session I have so much compassion for the untold millions who are regularly on the receiving end of both formal and unsolicited feedback which is so hard for them to receive. As a continuation to earlier posts on the topic of feedback, today I want to take a closer look at the role of self-acceptance in receiving feedback, as well as offer a few more tips to those who routinely provide feedback.

Culture

The Wikileaks Infowar

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“There is a war between the ones
who say there is a war
And the ones who say there isn’t.” (Leonard Cohen)
“Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.” (Hillary Clinton, 1/21/10)
Wikileaks has raised a range of fascinating and related issues, starting with the extraordinary information that has been revealed. But should that information have been revealed? Is Julian Assange a hero, a rapist, both, or neither?

Christianity

Requiem for a Holy Tree

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The veneration of trees pre-dates Christianity and no doubt all organized world religions. The tree is a source of life, offering shelter, food, habitat, fuel, soil preservation and enrichment—not to mention breathable air.

Empathy

On Making It Better

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It had to happen sooner or later: critiques of the “It Gets Better” campaign. But not from antigay religious conservatives; oh no, that would be too easy. Instead, the critique appears to be coming from the left, and it comes down mostly to the following: the campaign is too assimilationist; it only really supports white middle-class young gay men and its vision for them is that they will turn into Dan Savage, though perhaps with fewer insights about how to write a sex column. Left out of the equation are women, queers of color, transyouth, and poor LGBTQ young people, according to these critiques (well-represented by Jasbir Puar’s piece, which ends by claiming that the campaign might be making things worse for queer youth who don’t fit the wealthy white male profile). Then there’s Danah Boyd’s research on how teens in general don’t conceptualize bullying the way adults do, with the consequence that well-intended adult attempts to address teen bullying are falling on largely deaf teen ears.