Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/culture/page/135/)
Posts about culture, the arts, the media, book reviews, movies etc.
How would you react if you saw a sign like the one in this image on a bus you were about to board, but change a few words. “Facing Ex-Communication? Eternal damnation for your soul? Is your minister threatening you? Leaving Christianity?”
In 2008, Julio Diaz retrieved his wallet from a mugger by taking the man to lunch. Meanwhile, a cat in the Amazon rainforest lures its prey by crying like a baby monkey. Coincidence? Julio Diaz is a New York social worker. He gets off the subway every evening at six and eats at the same restaurant.
Having infuriated Democrats with her astonishing loss of Ted Kennedy’s long-held Senate seat to a suburban truck-drivin’ pin-up populist, Martha Coakley is back. But this time she’s racking up a series of impressive legal victories for liberals. She has won a $102 million dollar settlement against Morgan Stanley, taken on insurance companies for paying hospitals based on political clout rather than quality, and successfully challenged the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Athough unchallenged by the GOP in her November race for Attorney General, Coakley is campaigning vigorously. Could she be positioning herself to recapture the MA Senate seat from Scott Brown for the Dems?
I recently attended a training session for adults who work with children in our faith community. The training included the signs people should look for that might indicate that a child has been abused. For example, a six year old boy who was always happy, outgoing, and loved playing outside with his friends, suddenly withdraws, only wants to stay in his room, doesn’t want to go to school… Could that be a sign of abuse? Yes.
Almost two months have passed since the June 10th attack on the Gaza Aid Flotilla. As a means of continuing to remember and honor those who died on that day, we have posted a video of the memorial the Network of Spiritual Progressives held during the 2010 conference in Washington D.C.. See the video here:
This June hundreds of members, organizers, and nationwide spiritual leaders joined forces in Washington, D.C., for a weekend conference of discussion, planning, and strategy. One of the many exciting conversations happened in the form of a rally in front of the White House urging Obama to be the Obama we voted for! See the video here:
The difference between “mama grizzlies” and human females in particular and humanity in general is the capacity for rational thought. it is the moral responsibility that comes with that capacity. Unlike the mama grizzly, we are not only responsible to and for our own personal offspring. We are responsible to defend all the children of all the communities, towns, cities, nations and world. We are responsible for both human and nonhuman offspring.
“How do I get my adult children to call me?” This veteran mother and grandmother looked at me as if I were an idiot: “You don’t,” she told me. “Leave them alone. They’re busy.”
Sometimes a review of a book is a good substitute, for those with limited time, for actually reading the book. This may be the case with what appears to be a thoughtful review by Bernard Porter of a new book by Sasha Polakow-Suransky, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa. Although the book does not seem to concern itself with the extent to which Israeli society itself is similar to apartheid South Africa, the reviewer discusses that question in passing, noting disanalogies. Not discussed, so far as I can tell, is whether the term “global apartheid” can be applied to the global socioeconomic system and if so, to what extent Israeli society, like our own, is complicit in it. The review starts by considering the issue of whether Israel did or did not offer nuclear weapons technology to South Africa in 1975 and then continues:
We have known for some time that Israel consistently dissembled, in the 1970s and 1980s, about its wider alliance with South Africa: this is the far more interesting puzzle that Polakow-Suransky’s well-researched, readable and (I think) balanced book sets out to unravel.
I am beginning to wonder if perhaps Obama was right to tackle health care reform as a first initiative. It is difficult to find health care issues to write about these days…our mainstream and alternative media are rightly wrapped up in the crises of the day, the Gulf oil spill disaster, the Afghanistan War and high unemployment rates. Of these, at least two are directly tied to our inability as a nation to confront Big Oil. Frustrated with tepid Congressional efforts to stem the oil tide, I decided to take a small step to wean myself off of oil. I began cooking locally available food: weeds!