Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/page/85/)
Posts about politics and social change, from a spiritual progressive perspective
Although I had no specific expectations, what I encountered in Bethlehem was still unexpected…. This, like so many places in our current world in permanent transition, is a city of paradox and co-existing contradiction.
I am a Contributing Scholar for the State of Formation, an online program of the Journal of Interreligious Dialogue. Earlier this month the State of Formation sent me and a few other scholars to the National Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. What’s the big deal, you ask? I’m Muslim who grew up in Pakistan, and I had never thought much about the Holocaust until this visit.
The human rights movement takes the place “where morality and ethics are failing,” says Israeli author activist Amos Gvirtz. “This is the unknown success of the human rights movement.” He fears the time is running out for Israel to convince the world that their methods for dealing with Palestinians are justified in violating international human rights law.
The United States of America was founded on Christian justifications for oppression. But when clergy and lay people pronounce their conservative dogma on sexuality and gender expression, race, women, on other religions and on atheists, they must expect opposition to their ideas and to their dominant group privileges, to their interpretations of scripture, and to their constructions and revisions of history.
My faith tradition teaches me that when one suffers we all suffer, that we are only as whole as the most broken among us. Let’s be sure we don’t think the fight is over when we get a living wage for all workers.
Now we are faced with the problem of so-called radicalization. How are young people from Europe and the United States indoctrinated with and by the glamor and mythology of the Islamic State and its promise of a caliphate? The way to counter the indoctrination of young Muslims is to stop associating their religion with terrorists. We ought to challenge the discourse that makes them the dangerous Other.
Placing wholeheartedness at the center could build much more virtuous cycles between personal change and political action. Placing wholeheartedness at the center of our relationship to work could build much more virtuous cycles between personal change and political action. Author and researcher Elena Blackmore examines the role of empathy in economic transformation.
Now in the wake of a Boston jury’s conviction of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev we have the opportunity to detour out of the perennial cycle of violence and vengeance. Let all these senseless murders serve as a catalyst to bring people even closer together.
Why should a “corporate” business card trump one that reads “non-profit?” Once those monies from products are made, the dividends received and the stocks sold — where next and how best can these resources be put to work?
We will be lobbying Progressive House of Representatives offices on April 22-24 to encourage people of compassion and sanity to support the Global Marshall Plan Resolution. Even if you cannot be in Washington, D.C. we can still use your help!