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.

Christianity

My Education in Wake County Jail

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I got locked up once when I was in seminary. It was the dead of winter, and for some months a group of Christian peacemakers in North Carolina had been organizing civil disobedience to public executions at the state prison in Raleigh. Four or five times they had arrested and booked us, then let us out in the night on a promise to appear in court. Finally, the DA had enough. He asked the magistrate to set our bonds at $5,000 each.

Christianity

On the difference between conflict resolution and nonviolent conflict

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I have to say that I love the comments going on on my last post, about conflict resolution and how to do conflict. The question I would like to ask is this: Were Gandhi and MLK in the conflict resolution business? Yes they were, in the long term. India and Britain, American blacks and whites, could only resolve their conflicts by the establishment of justice. But to get that justice (and the struggle is ongoing), their movements had to bring the conflict, that was being absorbed in pain by the oppressed, to the doors of the oppressors, into their media and their faces.

Christianity

It Is True! You can make someone straight(er)

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Dr. Rick, as he is known to his patients in Ethiopia, lives his life based on his favorite saying from the Talmud: “Saving one life is like saving an entire world.” For over 20 years, Dr. Rick Hodes has been helping people facing cancer, heart disease, and other ailments, but one of his greatest gifts is helping straighten out people’s spines, going beyond “saving one life” and actually granting his patients new life. I became aware of Dr. Rick after meeting award-winning photo-journalist Mark Tuschman at Synergos, a monthly salon put together by the wonderful people who helped my company with a complete marketing facelift. Mark sent me a link to some of his photographs of Ethiopian Jews, a collection which I found riveting. You can see those pictures by clicking here.

Christianity

Good Deeds on a Small Scale #3

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I’m fascinated by the germination of good deeds. Where do they begin? How do they grow from a mere idea to an actuality? On the 26th of January, I caught up by phone with José Chavez, a custodian in the San Jose, California, Unified School District who’s been instrumental in creating a library for the village school in Limón, Michoacán, Mexico, where he grew up. (I learned of his project through a librarian friend who was soliciting books in Spanish.) Not only did he lead the library project, but he helped (physically) build a concrete plaza and paved areas in the village.

Christianity

The New Evangelical Partnership: Cancel Haiti's Debt

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This is great and hugely promising. There’s a whole generation of young evangelicals out there who are different in certain ways from their parents. Gary Dorrien was talking about this on Monday night on the Tikkun Phone Forum (and I hope we can get the recording up soon). Young evangelicals are more accepting of gay relationships for example. They are also more focused on world poverty.

Christianity

Resources for the Radical Dr. King

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The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty. – Dr. King

If Americans permit thought-control, business control, and freedom control to continue, we shall surely move within the shadows of fascism. – Dr. King
Video interview with Dr. King (apologies for the 30 second ad at the start, it’s worth waiting it out):

We don’t talk about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. enough.

Christianity

MLK, the Social Gospel, and an invitation to meet Gary Dorrien on tonight's Tikkun Phone Forum

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It’s extraordinary to me how such a polarizing figure as Martin Luther King has apparently been embraced by the whole society, with street and school names and a national holiday. Conservatives like the Heritage Foundation hold lectures and symposiums honoring his legacy. He is surely a much more radical figure than any of other people who are so widely celebrated by the American mainstream in its holidays and public life. I could understand it a little more easily if he had “only” stood for full inclusion of African Americans in capitalist society, so that he would have measured it a complete success if there ever came a time when African Americans were rich, middle class and poor in the same ratio as whites, and had no more glass ceiling to the U.S. presidency and boardrooms than whites (a day that is still very far off, of course, despite our current president — as Pastor Lynice Pinkard said in church today about Obama, “Audre Lorde told us that we can never dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools”). The conservatives who praise MLK, apparently think this is what he did stand for.

Christianity

The Sacred Feminine at the Parliament of World Religions

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I’m surprised that almost none of us blogged about the Parliament of World Religions (PWR) in Melbourne, Australia (12/3 – 12/9). I realize that the US Congress was still discussing the health care bill, Obama had just given his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and the Copenhagen Climate conference was underway. So we all have good excuses. Here at Tikkun Daily, we heard from Dave Belden, who wrote about Rabbi Michael Lerner’s workshop on the spiritual progressive movement. And Rabbi Lerner also wrote about the great disappointment world spiritual leaders at the PWR felt at Obama’s speech in Oslo.