Christianity

Weekly Sermon: Breaking Ground

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It’s funny about Jonah. So many people make it out to be a fish story. All the talk, all the wonder, all the ridicule drives straight at the ridiculous notion a man in the ocean could really be saved by a whale. Or, to quote rather more famously, Oh Jonah, he lived in a whale [2x] / For he made his home in / That fish’s abdomen . . . but it ain’t necessarily so. The story of Jonah is not about that fish. And the book is so short, so easy to read—just four chapters—that we ought to wonder: Has church focused on the unbelievable word in the book in order to not hear the undesirable word of the book?

Christianity

Weekly Sermon: Break Through To Beloved

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This Sabbath afternoon, the church will be packed with people who don’t go in for church, but who will come here to hear proclaimed good news to the poor, release to the captives, and new eyes for the blind. The eyes of all will certainly be fixed on that film! Look, what Jesus felt impelled to say on his first day of work, and what thousands on thousands of our citizens long to hear proclaimed, are one and the same word. Release! But here this morning, we’re fewer than that throng will be this afternoon. What has the morning to learn from the afternoon about breaking through to the future? We’ll try an answer to that question presently, but first, let’s learn a little more from our Jewish brother Jesus.

Judaism

Finding and Building Jewish Community in Germany

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The many branches of Judaism confuse me and I dread being asked by non-Jews to explain what it means to be Reform or Conservative, let alone Renewal or Reconstructionist. I’ve looked up the definitions but they just don’t resonate with me. The affiliation of a synagogue means far less to me than the sense of community that comes from sharing Jewish rituals and traditions with friends and family.

art

Sadaf Syed: Breaking Stereotypes One Photo at a Time

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As a photojournalist, Syed wants to show society how “covered” women can relate to more secular American women. Syed wanted to expose readers to these powerful women’s personal lives. “I want them to see themselves,” says Syed.

Christianity

Weekly Sermon: Considering Adoption

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Here in the beginning of the year, we are going to hear what might be called “the beginning of the gospel.” These are the voices of the New Testament’s first authors, Paul and Mark. Paul was writing 15-20 years before Mark. Mark, most experts say, set his gospel down about 70 A.D. – 10, 15, even 25 years before the other gospels, Matthew, Luke, andJohn. Listen now to the first words of Paul’s letter to the Romans…

Culture

Feminist Spiritual Politics: Getting Personal About Gun Control

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The feminist mantra, the personal is the political, has always struck me as incomplete. It was Teilhard de Chardin who first said “we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” The ‘personal is the political’ assumes an incomplete worldview, a cosmology of separation where the individual is forced to turn to the political as the end we seek – as though we were fundamentally political beings.

Buddhism

Torah Commentary: Beshalach- Eating and Abjection

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Kristeva, in her Powers of Horror, describes the powerful sensation of food loathing as an evolution of desire into abjection-
…loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung…the repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage and much…The fascinated start that leads me towards and separates me from them… food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection… ‘I’ want none of that element… ‘I’ expel it … I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself… There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being…

Christianity

A Pray-In for the Climate

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On an alarmingly milder-than-normal January day this month, about 100 religious leaders representing Jewish, Christian, Catholic, Islamic, Native American, Buddhist traditions gathered in the historic New York Avenue Presbyterian Church before processing in a silent march two blocks to the north side of the White House for a “pray-in for the climate.”

Judaism

Torah Commentary- Perashat Bo: Dazzled By The Dark; Interpretation and Freedom

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Rabbi Yosef Haim, better known as the Ben Ish Hai (born about 1834), wrote in his Aderet Eliyahu that the ‘plague’ of darkness we encounter in this week’s perasha is the last that Moshe and Aharon are responsible for (he builds around a Talmudic dictum that a prisoner liable for lashing can only receive a number divisible by 3, hence the maximum of 39, and thus the plagues have to be 9), while the tenth one, that of the killing of the firstborn, was a separate entity brought about by God alone, not in the category of plagues.

Spirituality

Once You Knew

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How can we develop the capacity to face the extent of global destruction without becoming paralyzed? How can we find inner peace and take care of our personal responsibilities while doing our small part to bring hope and healing to the world?