Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/culture/page/74/)
Posts about culture, the arts, the media, book reviews, movies etc.
Sigfried Gold suggests there is an abundance of spiritual wisdom that can be gained by approaching fundamentalists with humility, care, and curiosity, and provides us with the seven best reasons to do so.
As religions continue to cling to dogma, creeds, and outmoded expressions of the spiritual for the sake of “preserving tradition,” they dig their own graves. Secularists and skeptics have successfully and rightfully driven a movement that has led to an unprecedented level of appreciation for reason and science in the world today. While this is very healthy, however, it would be a shame for us to fully embrace secularist ideology (or any ideology, for that matter).
Stephen Phelps asserts that personal transformations are a crucial precursor to American political transformation. In order to fix the current system that quickly labels and ostracizes a person deemed “criminal”, we must practice forgiveness, understanding, and empathy.
My vision is of a world in which needs are routinely met, in which the experience of need satisfaction is the norm rather than the exception. Considering how far this vision is from what we mostly know in our modern world, the question of the possibility of meeting human needs takes on a great deal of significance.
Amy B. Dean explores the issue of Jewish support for immigration reform with a new angle: Rather than simply following the teaching to welcome the stranger, or out of a sense of obligation to the legacy of American immigration policy that welcomed Jews in past centuries, some Jewish activists are organizing for immigration reform with the idea that their fate is bound up with the fate of new immigrants–in other words, out of a sense of solidarity.
It’s not often that we come across a vision that really moves us. When I came across “Spirit Matters” it “arrived in [my] life at exactly the right moment,” as Michael Lerner’s preface suggested it had.
Are the artist and their art so inextricably connected that support of one means support of the other? Many would say yes, and find Orson Scott Card’s blatant homophobia as grounds to boycott Ender’s Game.
My question is about any attempt to create fundamental change using a model of change that focuses primarily on individuals changing their behavior or ideas.
Why can’t we upcycle our abundant creativity, so that all our efforts to dream and enact a more vibrant, loving, and just future feed into new and better ways of doing it, rather than counting them as failures and dumping them into history’s landfill?
When I can choose to relate to people, I am exercising choice instead of habit or obligation. I want my choice to be based on care and respect for the other person at the same time as holding tenderly my own vulnerability and caring for my needs. When I am able to do that, then even the most faltering moments of confusion become opportunities to transform my consciousness and align it with living into a future possibility.