Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/culture/page/138/)
Posts about culture, the arts, the media, book reviews, movies etc.
When I work with couples, I feel like I am under the Big Top. There may not be elephants, clowns, or trapeze artists (not literally, anyway) but there are definitely three rings. The work is exciting and keeps me on my toes. As counselor/ringmaster I have to be aware of what is happening in all three rings at all times. The ring on my right features one person and the ring on the left, the other.
Keith Ellison is a congressman from Minneapolis and the first Muslim to be elected to Congress. Below is a video of his speech at the 2010 NSP conference in Washington D.C.
Being an atheist in America means being less than human. I know from personal experience, not from being an atheist but from being raised Christian in a conservative Christian town and holding negative biases about atheists. Like many others I thought that a belief in God was the foundation of morality, that Christians were superior to others and that atheists were a threat to believers. I didn’t, however, reach this conclusion consciously after weighing the facts and examining the issue independently. But rather it was something so ingrained within the culture that it permeated the social conscience.
“There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-kld’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs.” UPDATE: I’ve written a post here at Tikkun Daily looking more closely at JRR Tolkien as an alternative to Ayn Rand– see here. UPDATE 2: John Rogers, screenwriter, film producer, comedian and comic book writer, is the original author of this statement.
Who are these guys? Whatever are “business class refugees”? And, most of all, why should I care?You should care because this album, Business Class Refugees, is a new and extraordinary music, created internationally, in ways that simply haven’t been possible till now. It comes out thirty years after “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” the pioneering Byrne / Eno collaboration which used electronic ambience, and world music behind sampled vocal tracks, but assembled painfully in the studio through analog trial and error. Kartick and Gotam, known as K&G, also weave a beating net of electronic ambience, but overlay it with a stunning selection of Indian and south Asian musicians as foreground.
From liturgy to ideology, Yiddish literature and the mass immigration to the United States, Eastern Europe birthed many of modern Jewry’s most important intellectual and social trends. Its impact on Jewish history is on par with that of Medieval Spain and al-Andalus, and even in some respects the period of the great Talmudic academies in Baghdad. Yet its incredible history and derivate lessons have been largely limited to books and those familiar with them. The People of the Book have long allowed their expansive history to be confined by the medium through which it was presented. This trend has become particularly stark in recent years, as the Internet has expanded the ways in which history and knowledge can be transmitted, as well as the audience with which it can be shared.
The idea of a culture of peace understands that peace is more than an end to violent conflict. Peace is a way of being in the world. It is a thought process. It is its own logic. It is a context of interpretation. It is how we know what is rational or not. A culture of peace understands power dynamics differently and chooses power sharing rather than a power over model. A culture of peace grows from the idea that violence is not inherent in the DNA of human beings. It is a learned behavior. If we learn violence, we can unlearn violence. We can learn peace.
Dennis Hopper had an unfortunate gift for self-marginalization. He played the buffoon, the drunk, the druggie, the sex addict whose foolish behavior obscured a serious sensibility. When he died on May 29 at the age of 74 from prostate cancer, his life was once again in chaos. On his deathbed, he was divorcing his wife of 18 years, getting a restraining order to keep from seeing her. The mainstream writers, with their unfailing instinct for the superficial, remembered him as a “Hollywood bad boy,” a “rebel,” a “hellraiser.”
In May of 2010, a group of northern New Mexico middle school students helped to train the 2nd 45th Agricultural Development Team of the Oklahoma National Guard techniques of organic permaculture farming. The youngsters showed troops how to milk goats, clean eggs and care for bees in preparation for their deployment to Afghanistan in September, 2010. The three week training was coordinated by the Pojoaque, NM-based Permaculture Institute. These children from my community are the only youngsters who have ever trained US troops. The Oklahoma 2nd 45th Agricultural Development Team is a battalion of guards formed to assist Afghanistan to rebuild the small farm infrastructure indigenous to that country prior to the Soviet invasion and subsequent simultaneous rise of poppy farming and the Taliban.
Edwin Rutsch just sent me this link to a video he took of Michael Lerner at a recent event. If you want the one minute version of what the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) is about — the elevator pitch — go to minute 3:15 below, and go to around 5:50 for Michael’s take on moving social energy towards hope and love. Later in the piece he outlines the ESRA (Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the constitution) and the Global Marshall Plan, the two key proposals of the NSP that are a focus of our DC conference this weekend. Leadership Conference at Ella Baker Center – Michael Lerner – 3of5 from Edwin Rutsch on Vimeo. Michael’s work — and this video is a good example — constantly challenges me to think about the differences between personal spiritual transformation and collective activism for creating a caring world.