art

Collaborative Art Fractures Prison Walls

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The image of a hand pressed against thick glass, fingers outstretched, made its way onto Evan Bissell’s canvas because it still haunts one of his collaborators, a young woman named Chey who saw it as a child visiting a jail. “My dad used to do that when I’d visit him,” she wrote in a note to viewers of the “What Cannot Be Taken Away: Families and Prisons Project” at San Francisco’s SOMArts space. “The glass was so thick that you couldn’t feel any warmth.” The collaborative art exhibition, which seeks to open our imaginations to new ideas about why harm happens and how harm can be repaired, is itself a hand pressed to the glass of the prison system, a warm-hearted attempt to create new flows of communication and empathy between people shut inside and people shut out. The project grew out of months of written dialogue between four fathers at San Francisco County Jail #5 and four teenagers whose own fathers are or were previously incarcerated.

Buddhism

The Meaning of Bodhicitta, and Other Reflections from Femme Conference

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There are Buddhist prayers that say, “May I become a bodhisattva who is willing to stay in a hell realm for eons if it will help even one being.” Though Buddhism isn’t usually associated with the belief in hell, most Buddhist traditions in Asia speak of various heavenly and hellish realms of possible rebirth. An enlightened person who gave up the rewards of Nirvana to help people not just on earth but in hell would be an unselfish person of the highest order – a bodhisattva. Most of spiritual progressives, and a number of modern Buddhists, only ever use hell as a metaphor. This weekend at the third national Femme Conference in Oakland, a secular activist whom I greatly admire, Kate Bornstein, used the metaphor of hell in a way unexpectedly evoked for me the image of secular bodhisattva.

Buddhism

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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American Buddhist nun Pema Chodron is our source of spiritual wisdom this week. Pema Chodron is a respected teacher in the Shambala tradition. She is also the founder of Gampo Abbey, a Buddhist monastic community in Canada. These quotes come from her book When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times:
“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh.

Buddhism

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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This week’s spiritual comes from Vietnamese Buddhist monk and leader in engaged Buddhism Thich Nhat Hanh. Both poems come from “Call Me By My True Names: The Collected Poetry of Thich Nhat Hanh.” WALKING MEDITATION
Take my hand. We will walk. We will only walk.

Buddhism

Nuns, Invisibility, and the Question of Buddhist Activism

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There is a huge movement going on in Buddhism today, one that could make Buddhism the only major world religion with gender equal access to ordination in nearly all denominations. All over the Buddhist world, women are battling for full ordination of nuns, something that is now only consistently available in one tradition and is hotly debated in the others. It’s also shockingly overlooked outside of these debates. Consider an audience member’s question during a wonderful presentation by David Loy and Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi at the recent NSP conference. A long-time activist who’d been involved in Buddhism for a decade and a half wondered why most Buddhists aren’t also activists.

Buddhism

Food for thought for Quran-bashers

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Sometimes as a Muslim I feel suspect that the simplest, most effective way to begin to answer the many burning questions Westerners have about Islam and Muslims isn’t to give them a Quran or even the most erudite and engaging book on Islam. For many living in our postmodern world, such a discussion needs to start far closer to home, with a crash course in Western religious history and the basic ideas of the Judeo-Christian Tradition. Not only is that often a necessary remedial measure, but in this day of –to borrow an inspired metaphor once applied to U.S.-Iranian relations–“mutual Satanization” I think it is for many probably the only way to begin this critical conversation. As an undergrad studying French in the early 1990s, I took a class on the Francophone literature of Quebec. Until recently in most Western societies literature was riddled with references to and assumptions of familiarity with the Bible, and this was especially true of Quebec’s literary output thanks to the province’s tradition of being *plus catholique que le pape*.

Buddhism

Meet HuffPost's New Religion Editor, Paul Raushenbush

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On February 24, Rev. Paul Raushenbush issued a call for articles entitled “Dear Religious (and Sane) America” to inaugurate the launch of the Huffington Post’s new religion section. According to the article,
HuffPost Religion is dedicated to providing a provocative, respectful, and hopefully productive forum for addressing the ways in which religion intersects our personal, communal, national and international life. HuffPost Religion will demonstrate the vibrant diversity of religious traditions, perspectives and experiences that exist alongside and inform one another in America and throughout the world. Huffington is clearly trying to expand its reach and become one of the big players in religion media, much as it already has in politics, popular culture, and even business. Based on initial responses to the section, it appears to be well on its way.

Buddhism

A Collective Awakening? Buddhist Reflections on Copenhagen

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David Loy is one of the most socially aware Buddhists that I am aware of. I don’t know that much about Buddhism, despite having various friends who are strong Buddhists. When I read Buddhist magazines, I find myself disappointed that there seems to be so little on social change as Buddhist practice and necessity. David Loy, who is Besl Professor of Ethics/Religion and Society at Xavier University in Cincinnati, is certainly a great exception (and I am not saying there aren’t many others out there, just that I am not aware of them). We have just posted at Tikkun Current Thinking a piece he has sent us about his response to Copenhagen. In it he calls climate change “the greatest threat ever to our species.”

Buddhism

How to Reclaim Christmas, Chanukah, and Other Holidays

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Red-and-white striped poles spring up in the vacant lot on my block every year, even before I’ve fully digested Thanksgiving dinner. Topped by floodlights, these oversized candy canes tower over the neighborhood, a blinding reminder that Christmas is coming. Next time I check, the tree sellers will have finished setting up shop there, erecting their bristling forest of dead pines under the dazzling lights. Paired with the blitz of “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” ads that tend to flood my inbox and mailbox, this surreal invasion of my neighborhood always makes me feel like Christmas is breathing down my neck. How did the commemoration of a homeless baby’s birth turn into this garish and materialistic extravaganza?