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.

Humanism

What the New Humanism offers spiritual progressives

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We have been talking with our friends at Tikkun for some months about a new online magazine that is now well launched. Tikkun Daily asked us to introduce ourselves to you. Rick Heller is our editor and he has written the following to explain why “spiritual progressives” may appreciate what our authors have to say. Rick Heller writes:
Readers of Tikkun and spiritual progressives are cordially invited to peruse the new online magazine, The New Humanism, a publication of the Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy. Secular humanists get a little nervous around the word “spiritual” because we don’t believe in the supernatural, but to the extent that it refers to positive emotions like love, joy and empathy, we’re spiritual too.

Humanism

Religion, law, and the politics of human rights

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New at The Immanent Frame: Talal Asad and Abdullahi An-Na’im both stand at the forefront of the challenging and constructive exchange taking place today between European and Islamic traditions of political, legal, and religious thought. At a recent event organized by Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, the two scholars traded questions and criticisms concerning the concept of human rights. Moderated by José Casanova, the discussion addressed the intrinsic limitations and historical failures of the language of human rights, as well as its formidable capacity to challenge autocratic and state-centric distributions of power, creating openings for democratic contestation and political self-determination. A short excerpt of the exchange has been posted at The Immanent Frame and a complete transcript is available for download here (pdf). You can also watch video from this event at here & there.

Buddhism

Interfaith Youth Conference: What a Thrill!

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In one room, young Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus, secular humanists, and others cluster in a circle to learn strategies for facilitating constructive interfaith discussions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Down the hall, more young people — bareheaded or wearing headscarves or kippot — crowd together to discuss multifaith intentional living communities, learn about the Baha’i faith, create videos about youth-led interfaith activism, and train to volunteer as advocates for undocumented immigrants. Talk about a rich space for conversation. All this happened during one morning of the Interfaith Youth Core’s 2009 conference, which took place October 25-27 at Northwestern University, just north of Chicago. The conference brought high school and college students engaged in interfaith work together with religious leaders, politicians, and authors interested in interreligious cooperation.

Humanism

When Must the Secular and Religious Work Together?

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There is huge scope for the secular and the religious to work together! We are currently missing far too many of those chances. Believers and nonbelievers tend to look down on and mistrust each other. The emphasis on belief, creed, and ideas — the ways we understand and describe our experience of the world — tends to overwhelm an emphasis on our actual shared experience, and on ways we could care about and for each other, and pursue shared goals. Look at how various atheists have been promoting Islamophobia.

Humanism

Caspar Responds: Humanist Religion IS a No-no

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Over at the New Humanist blog, Caspar Melville writes:
That nice Dave Belden over at Tikkun magazine has paid me the compliment of disagreeing with a piece I wrote for the Guardian’s Comment is Free site, in which I argue against Dave’s notion that humanists need to organise themselves like religious communities, have services, rituals, build a community that sort of thing. Dave thinks I am too individualistic and we will never heal the world if we can’t build a strong ‘base’. He may well be right. His perspective, I think, would be that being a humanist implies a desire to improve the world – for humans and other animals – it’s a commitment to a kind of activist attitude. (This is well expressed in Tikkun’s strapline, they want to ‘mend, repair and transform the world’).

Humanism

Why Is Humanist Religion a No No?

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I am happy to find myself being quoted on the Guardian website by Casper Melville, editor of the New Humanist. Belden (who is now managing editor at the non-denominational spiritual US magazine Tikkun), in a piece entitled Is it time for humanists to start holding services? wrote that while humanism had done well to meet the philosophical challenges set by religion, it did less well reproducing the kind of “vibrant social connections” that religion provides. He was rather stirring, in fact… Caspar has a go at demolishing my argument–that humanists need to build congregations–in the kindest way, intelligently and entertainingly.

Humanism

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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This week’s spiritual wisdom was written by Harold W. Becker, president and founder of The Love Foundation, Inc:

From the laughter of children at play to the golden rays of the sun beaming through the sky at sunset, the eternal song of love permeates all creation. Each beat of our heart pulses to this rhythm in a majestic and graceful dance connecting us to everyone and everything. Life is magnificent when we quiet our outer selves and become fully present and aware of our own loving essence. To know this grander love is to go beyond the sensation of a first kiss or a mother’s tender touch in time of need. Although these extraordinary expressions reveal the existence of love, there is so much more.

Culture

So Light, Like the Mind

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I stumbled on a moving story the other day — a story that disrupted my humdrum mood and reminded me of the radical wonder of life in this world. At the time I was searching for videos of Merce Cunningham, the brilliant and playful modern dance choreographer who passed away on July 26. Having trained seriously in Martha Graham’s modern dance technique as a teenager, I’ve always thought of Cunningham as some sort of immortal uncle. I was feeling sad about his death. Here’s the story:
Helen Keller had struck up a friendship with Martha Graham and used to visit her dance studio.

Culture

Soul Talk Radio

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Just imagine how it would affect this country if Religious Left radio became as popular as the many broadcasts of the Religious Right … I know it’s unlikely, but I let myself envision that scenario for just a second after meeting radio host Chuck Freeman, a minister from the Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Church in Austin, Texas. As the co-founder of the Austin chapter of the Network of Spiritual Progressives and the founder of the Free Souls Project (a nonprofit organization that aims to use mass communication tools to open new conversations about spirituality, democracy, and ethics in the public square), Chuck is on fire with excitement about creating new spaces for spiritual progressive speech. I just listened to his interview with Islam Mosaad and I’m looking forward to checking out more podcasts from his radio show (click on “free podcasts”). Here’s a bit of text from his website about the mission of Soul Talk Radio:
We live in a culture where words, and specifically religious teachings, are often used to harass and bludgeon us, thus slamming the door of “the kingdom” in our faces.