Culture

Mona Caron's Utopian San Francisco

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“We need some more visions about how in the light of impending disaster we can still strive for a better reality. I am neither a scientist nor an engineer. I am simply an artist. My job as a visionary is not only to focus on what is feasible today, but instead to imagine further, more ideal possibilities, and to inspire people to aim higher.” — Mona Caron
In 2006, the San Francisco Bay Guardian commissioned San Francisco muralist Mona Caron to illustrate the section headings of their annual “Best of the Bay” issue, where the editors ask readers to go online and vote for the best the city has to offer.

Judaism

Big Jewish Mother

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It seems that everywhere I look these days I see more about the BDS, (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement. Today I was sent links to the debate here in Toronto over the about to open TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival). The festival, a perennial jewel in TO’s cultural crown, is the centre of a huge row between those who support a boycott over the festival’s choice of Tel Aviv for the first “city-to-city” showcase and those who oppose it. Both are powerful statements; both are well worth reading before deciding. The richness of the internet is a two edged sword: it allows us to find more people who share our views, and it allows us to not have to submit ourselves to the idiocies of anyone who has a different view.

Christianity

Cakes for the Queen of Heaven — Women's Empowerment

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This fall I’ll be teaching “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven” again. Shirley Ranck wrote this groundbreaking curriculum about women in Western religion in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but it was first published in 1986. The fact that it took the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) at least five years to put it out says a lot about this pioneering course. The UUA is notoriously liberal, even progressive. But this class pushed the buttons of Unitarian Universalist’s still largely male hierarchy, and they delayed publication.

Culture

What's Hot in Tikkun's Sept/Oct Issue?

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Overcoming Speechlessness, by Alice Walker
One particular Rwandan genocide victim’s story rendered Alice Walker, peerless writer of human experience, speechless. Visiting Gaza this year after the invasion, she struggled to speak again about atrocity. In print for the first time, her stories of Rwanda and Gaza. Has Obama abandoned you and his own vision of a caring society? Or does he need us to be much more forceful in pushing for it?

Culture

Breaking the Trance: The Culture-Jams of Beverly Naidus

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“Advertising can be seen as a trope. Its multiple metaphors can sell you ecstasy, joy, something else besides the actual product.” –Beverly Naidus

The work of artist Beverly Naidus takes many forms. She is an accomplished site-specific installation artist and painter. But it is her work in a medium referred to as “culture-jamming” that has brought her to our attention at Tikkun. Editor’s Note: to see more of Naidus’ work, visit Tikkun Daily’s art gallery, which is currently featuring Naidus’ series “What Kinda Name Is That?”

Culture

Crusade for Women or Women's Crusade?

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Today after returning from a delightful vacation in the Adirondacks, I’ve been immersing myself in the Sunday NY Times Magazine. This week to my utter astonishment, the entire magazine section of the Sunday Times has been devoted to the international issues surrounding women’s rights. It’s entitled “Saving the World’s Women.” The cover story, “The Women’s Crusade” by husband-and-wife team Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, begins by enumerating several of the causes for women’s oppression in China, South Asia, and Africa — sexual slavery, lack of employment opportunities, lack of education, even lack of food and medicine for girls (but not for boys) — and how some of the women affected by these issues have turned their lives around through microfinance. These are wonderful stories, inspiring and perceptive about women’s situation in the developing world.

Culture

Dissident Discipleship: A Force That Gives Us Meaning

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Kathryn Bigelow’s film THE HURT LOCKER is an explosive device buried deep in a somnolent country. Marketed as an action movie (“As tense and compelling an action drama as you are likely to see all year,” claims critic Eric Snider in his review on films.com), this intense on-screen portrait of a three-man Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Iraq is actually a subtle critique of a deadening and unendurably trivial stateside culture, and it raises some questions we need to be asking ourselves. The film begins with this quote from the book WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING by former NEW YORK TIMES war correspondent Christopher Hedges: “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” In this sense, the film is about an addict, Sergeant William James, who gets his “meaning and purpose” fix by dismantling explosive devices at great risk to himself and the other two members of his unit. The almost unbearably tense dismantling scenes stand in stark contrast to the scene that struck me most in the film: a long, slow shot of one of those seemingly endless supermarket aisles of sugary cereals, where James, now back in the United States following the end of his tour of duty, has been sent by his wife on a quest for breakfast food.

Culture

So Light, Like the Mind

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I stumbled on a moving story the other day — a story that disrupted my humdrum mood and reminded me of the radical wonder of life in this world. At the time I was searching for videos of Merce Cunningham, the brilliant and playful modern dance choreographer who passed away on July 26. Having trained seriously in Martha Graham’s modern dance technique as a teenager, I’ve always thought of Cunningham as some sort of immortal uncle. I was feeling sad about his death. Here’s the story:
Helen Keller had struck up a friendship with Martha Graham and used to visit her dance studio.

Christianity

Mass on the San Carlos Apache Reservation

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Julia Dean and A. Jay Adler have been traveling across the country for the last eight months telling the story of life on Native American reservations through photography and writing. “It seems to us that Native Americans don’t get talked about a lot in America unless you live next to a reservation or have anything to do with Native Americans,” Dean says. “As journalists, we are just trying to do a little something about it.” You can read more about their project in my previous blog post on their work and on their blog, The Sad Red Earth. This week we’re featuring another of Dean’s photo essays, The Catholic Church.

Culture

My Family Mythology

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(I’ve been away for a month, and it’s great to be back. One place I was was at my annual family meeting, and that seemed a story that belonged here)
In the beginning it all seems the same. As a child, I thought all families were like my family. They all celebrated birthdays. My friends all had parents like mine, and (as this was the 1950s) all the parents I knew were a mother and a father.