Culture

"Quest" Mentoring, Not Spiritual Direction

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We’ve started a new program named “Quest” at First Unitarian Society (FUS). FUS created Quest in order to help members who want it to develop a deeper commitment to their spiritual journey. Some of the introductory writings about the program describe it as “a journey toward wholeness, holiness, and peace.” It’s a very exciting two-year “pilgrimage,” and I’m blessed to be a part of it as a mentor to two women who are participants. Today one of my partners contacted me.

Buddhism

Between Heaven and Earth: A Brushstroke by Barbara Bash

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“At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” — Harold Rosenberg, art critic, who coined the term “Action Painting” in 1952 (later called Abstract Expressionism). Standing barefoot atop a long, white strip of paper laid out on the ground, the artist holds a mop-sized paintbrush dipped in black paint. She quiets her mind, remembering everything and then letting it go, her whole life, the entirety of existence.

Culture

Samuel Bak's Icon of Loss

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There’s a fine article about Samuel Bak by Ezra Glinter on the new Zeek website (about which more at the end of this post). Bak’s extraordinary paintings have appeared a number of times in Tikkun, which is where I first became aware of them. I had not read about the artist before, and found Glinter’s article fascinating. Bak was a child in the Vilna Ghetto under the Nazis and was saved from extermination more than once by his parents’ ingenuity and, I assume, chance (his father did not survive). His current exhibition, Icon of Loss, at the Pucker Gallery focuses on a famous photograph of a small Jewish boy in the Warsaw Ghetto with hands raised as a Nazi points a gun at him.

Culture

'Baby Einstein' May Harm Your Child

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Amazing victory by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood which I was writing about here only two days ago. Disney is giving refunds on their Baby Einstein videos because, to put it simply, they didn’t work. Read all about it in the New York Times here. Some quotes:
The videos – simple productions featuring music, puppets, bright colors, and not many words – became a staple of baby life: According to a 2003 study, a third of all American babies from 6 months to 2 years old had at least one “Baby Einstein” video. Despite their ubiquity, and the fact that many babies are transfixed by the videos, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time at all for children under 2.

Culture

Brainwashing Children — American Style

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What is our true religion today? What ideology do we allow to proselytize to our children every day, from every side, constantly? Check this out:

This is from a new documentary “Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood.” It features several members of  The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood including the campaign’s co-founder Allen Kanner, who writes a regular column for Tikkun magazine. Check out recent columns of his on corporate advertising in public school classrooms and protecting your child from capitalism.

Culture

Engage The Other!

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If you are in Northern California or want an excuse for a visit, consider coming to the Engaging The Other conference in San Francisco (San Mateo to be precise) November 12-15. Michael Lerner and Huston Smith give the keynote speeches on the first evening, Thursday the 12th. Michael needs no introduction here. Huston Smith, the site delightfully tells us, is “internationally renowned as the world’s leading philosopher, scholar, and author on world religions, and has devoted his life to the study of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Hinduism, all of which he believes in.” We also learn that his book The World’s Religions has been the most widely-used textbook on its subject for a third of a century — selling over 2,500,000 copies worldwide.

Culture

Jewish SF

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Let’s face it, when it comes to science fiction, Jews wrote the bible. And they wrote a lot else besides. Ursula Le Guin says that the Frankenstein myth (and Mary Shelley) are the mothers of invention of science fiction, and she may be right (she usually is). But the Frankenstein myth is a variant on the Golem story, the story of a man created without a human soul, and it goes back over a thousand years in Jewish folklore before Shelley created her version, on that dark and stormy night in Switzerland. Isaac Asimov, the dean of the golden age of American science fiction, (or (better) speculative fiction, or (best) SF) was of course Jewish, born in a Russian shtetl.

Culture

The Yes Men Strike Again

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CNBC interrupted its usual program today for a shocking bit of breaking news: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had decided to stop opposing the Kerry-Boxer climate bill and instead “throw its weight behind strong climate legislation.” What great news! Could it be true? In this case, it wasn’t: the Chamber’s supposed about-face was concocted by the Yes Men, a clever group of activist pranksters whose new movie, “The Yes Men Fix the World,” hits theaters nationwide this week. By snookering numerous media agencies, the Yes Men managed to shift the public’s sense of the possible.

Culture

The philosopher-citizen

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At The Immanent Frame, eminent philosopher Charles Taylor reflects on the life and work of his colleague Jürgen Habermas:
Jürgen Habermas is known in the world of analytic philosophy primarily as a moral and political philosopher. He has striven against a slide which has often seemed plausible and tempting for modern thinkers, that towards a certain relativism or subjectivism in morals. The difficulty of establishing firm ethical conclusions in the midst of vigorous debate among rival doctrines, particularly when these disputes are contrasted to those among natural scientists can all too easily push us to the conclusion that there is no fact of the matter here, that ethical doctrines are not a matter of knowledge, but only of emotional reaction or subjective projection, that the issues here are not cognitive. […]
The alternative route which he explored was that which makes the rationality of ethical conclusions a function of the rationality of the deliberation which produces them. A deliberation is rational if it meets certain formal requirements.