Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/religion-spirituality/christianity-religion-spirituality/page/22/)
I haven’t been able to post for a while because we are up to our necks in creating a new website for Tikkun and getting out a bumper 25th Anniversary issue for January 1. That goes to press Wednesday and we are working through the weekend. It lifted my whole day to come into work this morning and find an email from my sister with a link to this video. “On Nov.13 2010 unsuspecting shoppers got a big surprise while enjoying their lunch:”
Christmas and Chanukah share a spiritual message: that it is possible to bring light and hope in a world of darkness, oppression and despair. But whereas Christmas focuses on the birth of a single individual whose life and mission was itself supposed to bring liberation, Chanukah is about a national liberation struggle involving an entire people who seek to remake the world through struggle with an oppressive political and social order: the Greek conquerors (who ruled Judea from the time of Alexander in 325 B.C.E.) and the Hellenistic culture that they sought to impose. The holiday celebrated by lighting candles for eight nights (the first night is tonight) recalls the victory of the guerrilla struggle led by the Maccabees against the Syrian branch of the Greek empire, and the subsequent rededication (Chanukah in Hebrew) of the Temple in Jerusalem in 165 B.C.E. However, there was a more difficult struggle that took place (and in some dimensions still rages) within the Jewish people between those who hoped for a triumph of a spiritual vision of the world embedded (as it turned out, quite imperfectly) in the Maccabees and a cynical realism that had become the common sense of the merchants and priests who dominated the more cosmopolitan arena of Jerusalem. The cynical realists in Judea, among them many of the priests charged with preserving the Temple, argued that Greek power was overwhelming and that it made far greater sense to accommodate it than to resist. The Greek globalizers promised advances in science and technology that could benefit international trade and enrich the local merchants who sided with them, even though the taxes that accompanied their rule impoverished the Jewish peasants who worked the land and eked out a subsistence living.
This week’s spiritual wisdom comes to us from progressive activist and novelist James T. Dette, who urges Christians today to reflect on their Jewish roots. A native of New Jersey, Dette has long been active in local and national politics, and has contributed to such publications as The New York Times, Irish America, and Street News. THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JOHN
I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in Passaic, New Jersey, two blocks from the synagogue, Ahavas Israel. Most of my boyhood friends were Jews. My Irish mother played mah-jongg with her Jewish neighbors.
Last weekend I was invited to take part in the 4th annual Faith and Feminism/Womanist/Mujerista conference at herchurch in San Francisco. The theme this year was “Reclaiming the Divine Feminine — pathways to a sustainable world.” Now, I consider myself a feminist in that I support equal rights and protection for women and believe that women have unique experiences that give them a different perspective on life and different needs than men, but I’m not the type to identify myself as a feminist first and foremost. And I’ve never been to a feminist conference. You could probably call me a mainstream feminist.
In the Reformation, religious controversy and gunpowder mixed together on a large scale. Previous religious disputes involved swords, catapults, burnings at the stake, or sometimes just the pulling of beards and the smashing of wine bottles. In the 16th and 17th centuries, however, the whiff of sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate became “the devil’s incense” for theological struggles. In the West, the blog posts have replaced cannonballs as tools of controversy. But in Great Britain on the fifth of November, Guy Fawkes Night keeps alive the memory of the era of “black powder theology.”
Which makes one wonder what Bob Spencer thinks of Guy Fawkes. Fawkes’ plot, in relative terms, would have caused much more damage than 9-11 had it succeeded. Many today, including some Catholics, defend Fawkes, the way some “Polictically Correct” people defend Hamas and Hezbollah. So, I ask Mr. Spencer: What’s your position? Do you condemn “Gunpowder, Treason and Plot”, and the current pro-Guy Fawkes fad?
As part of the preparation for voting—and as incentive to vote—we might do well to contemplate this communion, invoke the wisdom of the ancestors to help us keep faith with the descendants.
Lennon and St. Francis were very different, but they both understood that peace is a personal project. It is a projection, a radiation, an emanation. It is an energy that shines forth from a source and that source is each of us.
This article was written with John Shellito, who served as its primary author. Johnis a student at Union Theological Seminary, interested in how faith communities can resist oppression in economic, ecological, and social spheres. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 2008 and is currently pursuing ordination in the Episcopal Church. “He was never what one might today term a culture warrior, nor could he easily be labeled conservative or liberal,” claims Eric Metaxas in one of many pungent lines from his groundbreaking new biography of Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Yet Bonhoeffer has often been pigeonholed as a courageous radical, working secretly for the assassination of Adolf Hitler during World War II.
Let’s say you’re a doctor in your thirties. You graduated from UCSF School of Medicine, earned a master’s in social medicine from UC Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree from Harvard (the last two ranked second and first respectively among the world’s universities by a Chinese university focused on science). Your husband received his education at Harvard, Stanford and UC Berkeley. Your son is pre-school. You’re in a big city.