Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/inter-culturalism/page/26/)
About race and ethnicity, combating racism and building love and solidarity across the boundaries.
At The Immanent Frame, Nathan Schneider interviews Terry Eagleton, author of Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, on the inextricability of religion and politics, and the possibility of constructing an iteration of Christianity relevant to contemporary radicals and humanists.
It is the middle of July, and I am carefully layering sheets of pure gold over the statue of Saraswati that will sit in the centre of my altar. It is a finicky task, and while I’m trying focus my concentration, I suddenly notice a question flashing through my mind: what’s a good Jewish boy doing gilding a Hindu goddess for a Pagan altar? I was raised as a Jew, and phonetically memorized enough Hebrew to stumble through a Bar Mitzvah. But I was never part of a Jewish community, and as I never understood Hebrew, the times when my parents dragged me to a synagogue were leaden painful hours, an experience to be dutifully endured rather than anything that opened onto a spiritual path. For twenty years I would assert that I wasn’t Jewish, because I didn’t believe in any of the theology, and it wasn’t until I found myself teaching a World Religions course, doing research on what Jews believe, that I realised how much of the ethical framework which I embraced was Jewish.
Perhaps disappointed that death panels failed to frighten the tar and feathers out of the average American, the right wing appears to have settled on a new meme to undercut healthcare reform: the CDC will force males to undergo circumcision. Loosely based on a CDC report to be presented at an AIDS prevention gathering in Atlanta, Fox News, Reason Online, and The Drudge Report report that the CDC is considering forced circumcision of all males to prevent the spread of HIV. David Harsanyi, a Denver Post columnist and author of Nanny State wrote:
Here’s the problem: Why is the CDC launching campaigns to “universally” promote a medical procedure? If you’re an adult (and nuts) or a parent, no one stands in your way of having a bris. Today 79 percent of men are circumcised already, and even if 100 percent were, the effect on the collective health of the nation would be negligible.
I don’t normally read Thomas Friedman’s op. ed. pieces. But this one — “Connecting Nature’s Dots” — drew my attention, probably because of the word “Nature” in the headline. Practicing Wicca attunes me to nature, since to me it’s sacred.
Organizing as a Healing Process: A Fresh Look at PTSD is a Netroots Nation panel discussion about organizing as a tool for spiritual healing. Panelists discuss historical trauma, genocide and troop PTSD in the context of social justice.
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.
On Nov 11, 2008 (just a few days after the historic win of Barack Obama) the German paper Der Speigel interviewed Professor Niall Ferguson, a historian at Harvard to discuss among other things, Obama’s historical election victory. Fergusen said: “Yes, it was a very moving moment. It was similar to the release of Nelson Mandela. When Obama was born, in 1961, mixed marriages between blacks and whites were still illegal in one-third of the American states
Every time a journalist refers to “post-racial America” and our “post-racial age,” a wave of anger and sadness hits me. How can they say the United States has moved beyond race in this age of anti-immigrant violence, racial profiling, residential segregation, school funding disparities, and the mass incarceration of black and Latino men? We aren’t going to make any progress in fighting racism if we aren’t able to acknowledge that it continues to exist on both the interpersonal level and the structural level. Overt, interpersonal racism is on the decline in many places, but it’s far from dead. At a recent Netroots Nation panel on this topic, blogger Annabel Park shared the following video about anti-immigrant organizing in Manassas, Virginia.
We live, frankly, in frightening times. I was somewhat criticised (correctly) by Helen Shapiro, who has posted comments to this article. Helen emailed me directly, wondering why I would answer so stridently with respect to who sits on the Jewish Court for Social Justice. The stridency was a mistake. I cut and paste from a previous reply to someone else, someone I don’t trust.
A dialogue listserv I subscribe to received several emails about participation in a meeting to assist Carleton University build a dialogue program. One correspondent, a former professor at Carleton now serving as a dean in western Canada, does not trust the administration of Carleton. She suggests our dialogue group talk about participating in Carleton’s initiative, but only after individuals attend (and not as representatives of the dialogue group) and report back to the group. This is dialogue as distraction: we’re willing to talk to each other but not the the Carleton administration! Rah’bahn Shimon was the hereditary leader of Roman Israel, a powerful political office recognised by Rome.