Environment

Can There Be a Spiritual Response to Presidential Politics?

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What I’m looking for is a spiritual response that can coexist with very different political views; providing, of course, that the different political views don’t depend on outright group hatred, violent aggression, or brute selfishness. Given that condition, I believe it is possible for people of spiritual good will to disagree about (for example) tax policy, responses to conflicts in the Middle East, energy policy, and even abortion rights. (And I say this as someone with highly defined politics, views so far to the left I fall off the planet occasionally.) Such spirituality is compatible with organized religion, with no religion, with reverence for God, goddesses, spirits, nature, or simply life.

Rethinking Religion

Defending Vodou in Haiti

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While perception of Haiti as synonymous with Vodou reigns in public imagination especially abroad, within the republic the religion is under attack again. Vodouists and supporters from all over Haiti and its diaspora will take to the streets of Port-au-Prince today, October 17, to protest against a governmental decree that jeopardizes religious autonomy in the country.

Earth-based Religions

Did the Flood Actually Happen?

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When it comes to the Bible, most spiritual progressives are not literalists – particularly when it comes to the seemingly nursery rhyme stories of Bereishit, the Book of Genesis. If we place any credence at all in the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Babel and the Flood, it is likely through the Joseph Campbell-inspired lens of a mythologized history that reflects our inner genealogy as much as it does external or historical fact. But what if the story of Noah and the Flood, as caricaturized and smoothed over as it may be (the ants come marching two by two…), were a preserved fragment of real historical experience?

Earth-based Religions

Happy Birthday, Occupy Oakland! Now where do we go from here?

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Occupy Oakland showed us, in a concentrated, bite-sized for the media way, all that is the most desperate and the most beautiful in our culture: the veterans without their promised benefits, the homeless addicts, the laid off school teachers. We saw people living together, in public spaces they had reclaimed as the commons, planting gardens to feed themselves and helping save one another’s homes by putting themselves at risk of violence and arrest. We saw the savage means that the government, police forces, and corporations were willing to resort to in order to protect their interests and also the impunity with which they do it.

Judaism

Torah Commentary: Bereishit- Being and Prayer

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…the Word is the Word,
the Word shows the extent of our
Verbal incapacity,
Cut off from reality,
The sound of these words serving us deceptively. Yet the value of imagery,
What we put into these words… Antonin Artaud
The message of the opening passages of the Torah is a message about being. As Rashi points out with his very first comment, the narration of the creation is meant to teach us not basic lessons in science and cosmology, but rather something about our being in the world. As this question of “Being” is so fundamental an aspect of contemporary discourse, it is worth addressing, right at the Beginning.

General News

Sorting It Out: Yoga, Politics & Off the Mat, Into the World

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The Yoga service organization Off the Mat, Into the World recently garnered some heavy criticism (see: It’s All Yoga Baby, The Babarrazi, Nathan Thompson on Elephant Journal & Salon.com)  for co-organizing and participating in the Huffington Post’s “Oasis” at the Republican and Democratic Conventions. Receiving a hefty sum of $40,000 from the HuffPo, Seane’s yoga group spent a year organizing and co-curating this “Oasis,” a super plush center in the midst of the “madness” that provides “private and group yoga classes, massages, mini-facials, makeup refreshes, sleep consultations, meditation and healthy snacks.” Why? They “want the politicians who are making decisions on our behalf to be centered and well-rested, not harried and sleep deprived.” While I certainly understand the concerns raised by the numerous bloggers I think the issue is more complex than it has been made out to be.

art

Movie Depicts Sweetness of Simple Faith

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It’s Sukkot, the seven or eight-day autumn holiday (depending upon how you classify Simchat Torah) in which religious people eat their meals in a loosely constructed booth (a sukkah) gaily decorated with plant materials. “Ushpizin” is a charming seriocomic Israeli drama, made in 2004, depicting a particularly tempestuous Sukkot in the lives of a Hasidic couple in modern-day Jerusalem. Liberal Jews have strong feelings about the limited cultural vistas and the unhealthy political influences that we see on Israeli policies from this quarter–more perhaps in the intrusion of religion into the affairs of state and civil life than on attitudes toward peace-making, where the Haredim (ultra-Orthodox) are often confused with the national-religious camp. But this film reminds us of the positive spiritual dimension to the Haredi lifestyle. Dramatic changes of fortune are seen as divine intervention, an answer to their devotion and a part of their ongoing dialogue with God.

Judaism

1. A Brief Meditation- Between Yom Kippur and Sukkot 2. The Social Space of the Sukka

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A line in Neila caught my attention at the end of Yom Kippur. It reads:
“our remains will be naught but dust, thus God has given us many prayers”. Recognizing the emptiness of the confrontation with that void, that abyss of non-existence, we are given the chance to utter words which suggest a meaning for existence, prayers for life, for the existing world and the people which inhabit it. We know we are alive because we can still pray, still dream of beautiful things. This brought to mind R. Pinchas of Koretz’s line, that it is our swaying during prayers which cause the winds to blow (the winds which then cause the grass to grow).