Culture

Babel and the Mustard Seed Movement

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It was one of those moments that make or break meetings, the kind of moments that cause meeting facilitators to hold their breath and pray. We were “just” checking-in, just getting started with the gathering. The participants–all leaders of one sort or another within nonprofit social change organizations in the East Bay area of Northern California–were sharing what they’d been working on, thinking about, or struggling with in the month since the group’s first meeting: new programs, questions about the tone of a policy campaign, struggles to lead with integrity–that sort of thing. Then, near the end of the check-in round, one woman shared the depth of her agony as she struggled to follow God’s call within the institutional expectations of the organization for which she worked. There was something in the way she spoke, something in her refusal to tidy up her feelings, to be “upbeat” or casual or mater-of-fact, that plunged the group into new territory.

Culture

On Michael Jackson

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Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, the symbol, the carrier of an extraordinary charisma, touched the lives of people all over the world. Veterans of the Iraq war speak of seeing children moon walking in Baghdad. A reporter speaks of a child in Central America asking him about Miguel Jackson. We are familiar with his music that calls us all to care about making the world a better place. Healing the world is a personal moral responsibility.

Culture

Humanists as cultural agents

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“Aesthetic education… is a necessary part of civic development,” writes Doris Sommer today at The Immanent Frame. Drawing on lessons from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s WPA program to Bogotá, Colombia, she makes a case for how culture ought to be conceived as a powerful vehicle for social change and for how humanists can play a leading role as “cultural agents”:
Without art, Victor Shklovsky writes in “Art as Technique,” “life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war….And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life.” In this spirit of freedom from anaesthetizing habit we can, and urgently should, take up the torn threads that tie humanism up with civic education.

Culture

Lord Krishna Dances In

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The Hindu Lord Krishna began to dance his way back into Salma Arastu’s paintings, years after her conversion to Islam. How and why did it happen? I wanted to tell this story in “Painting Past Borders,” my article in the July/August issue of Tikkun, but didn’t have the space. Looking through Arastu’s beautiful art book, I became curious about her “Blue God” series. Like the rest of her work, the lyrical lines in this series echo the flow of Arabic calligraphy, which the artist studied after leaving behind her Hindu past and embracing Islam.

Culture

Is this heaven?

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As I (the Russian/Gypsy/Gay/Jew) stood with my Armenian-American friend Julie next to my Asian-American life-partner Derrick, and looked out across the park at boys, girls, men, women, old, young, every color of the rainbow and every hue in between, dancing together, eating together, playing together, laughing together….. I wondered, “Is this heaven?” Of course the line came to me from the wonderful movie Field of Dreams, where Kevin’s long-dead baseball-loving father comes out of the corn fields onto the baseball field his son has built in the middle of nowhere, and seeing the wonderful field asks “Is this heaven?” “No, it’s Iowa.” Well I was having my Field of Dreams moment.

Culture

"For Once, the Yes Men Say No"

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Protesting Israeli policies, The Yes Men have withdrawn their highly acclaimed new film from the Jerusalem Film Festival where it was scheduled to be shown. They — Andy Bichlbaum & Mike Bonanno — sent me their explanation, which has also appeared on Common Dreams:
Dear Friends at the Jerusalem Film Festival,
We regret to say that we have taken the hard decision to withdraw our film, “The Yes Men Fix the World,” from the Jerusalem Film Festival in solidarity with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign. This decision does not come easily, as we realize that the festival opposes the policies of the State of Israel, and we have no wish to punish progressives who deplore the state-sponsored violence committed in their name. This decision does not come easily, as we feel a strong affinity with many people in Israel, sharing with them our Jewish roots, as well as the trauma of the Holocaust, in which both our grandfathers died. Andy lived in Jerusalem for a year long ago, can still get by in Hebrew, and counts several friends there.

Culture

Tikkun and Lerner in the Blogosphere

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The great thing the blogosphere has made possible is the publication of independent voices to a worldwide audience, without having to get through the gatekeepers of the old media. That is music to the ears of all outliers from mainstream thought. Like us. The downside is that all manner of scurrilous opinion (that is, ones we don’t agree with, but also, ones that don’t have to live up to the usual journalistic fact checking standards) can get aired. The only way to counter factual inaccuracies in this new world is for citizens to pounce on them and correct them, in comments and on their own blogs, and in wonderful Wikipedia and like collective constructs.

Culture

Shmah: a Hope for Harmony

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Montreal-based artist Erik Slutsky is not a religious man, but viewers of his paintings might be tempted to jump to a different conclusion. Many of his paintings prominently feature Jewish imagery: a colorful menorah, a figure clad in Jewish regalia crying a prayer to the heavens, a woman wearing a star of David necklace. Look more closely, and you will also see Christian crosses and Muslim crescents accompanying the Jewish symbols in his paintings. Born to a secular Jewish family, Slutsky grew up attending Protestant schools, where he was just one student out of many “singing nice little hymns every morning, and prayers and stuff like that.” “I come from a totally non-religious background,” he says.

Culture

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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As civilization advances, the sense of wonder has declined. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Humanity will not perish for want of information, but only for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. — Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man

Christianity

Liberal Saints

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A nice coincidence that the Unitarian magazine UU World is featuring a church that has a series of portraits of liberal saints (such as Gandhi, at right), just at the same time that Tikkun is featuring a different one. Both sets of saints include people from other religious traditions. The Christian one in San Francisco by Mark Dukes is a much larger project and so includes a wider range. The difference is styles is striking. [brclear]