Culture

On Evolution, Vaccination, and Global Warming: The Cost of Magical Thinking

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When I was a teenager I believed that science was the route to all the best answers to the most important questions. I would have applauded Sir Ernest Rutherford’s dictum: “There is physics and there is stamp-collecting.” It took the sixties to loosen up my views, to help me recognize that there were things not measurable by science, but true none the less. Love and literature were two early examples; the power of spirituality came later. Today my views are closer to what Stephen Jay Gould called Nonoverlapping Magisteria , the perspective that there are areas of expertise over which science holds sway, and other areas over which it does not, and that wisdom can best be reached through exploring both.

art

Go See "For Colored Girls"

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My heart and mind are full of this movie today, after my wife and I saw it last night. Until I read this review in our local paper by Mick LaSalle, I was wondering how Tyler Perry, whose Madea movie trailers are enough to make me never want to see the movies, could possibly do justice to this womanist play. LaSalle’s review reassured me. I’m no movie reviewer and what I have to say here is a personal take that will include a possible spoiler, so it would be best to read that review instead if you haven’t seen the movie yet. I do urge you to go.

Earth-based Religions

How I Became a Pagan

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Paganism. The name itself has a certain wild and crazy sound to it, a sense of scribbling wildly outside the lines of the establishment. Much as I’d like to claim that aspect of the word, that sense of neo-medievalists dancing naked in the spring moonlight before they copulate in the furrows so that the crops will come again this year, that isn’t me, and it isn’t my paganism. I’m an urban middle-aged man, ex-school teacher, born and raised Jewish. What has brought me to a spiritual place where I can assert my religion is pagan, (or primal, to use Huston Smith’s more encompassing term) ?

Gender and Sexuality

Coming (and Being) "Out" as a Spiritual Path

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For those of us who have come out of the closet, National Coming Out Day – which is being internationally celebrated today – is a good reminder of the spiritual journey each of us have undergone since the fateful day we decided to say, “Enough. I am who I am, and from today onwards I will live by it.” The idea that coming out is a defining spiritual moment in a person’s life is not something you’ll find in mainstream LGBT discourse. Understandably so, of course: those who control religious discourse in America and elsewhere have done a tremendously effective job at turning gay people against organized religion. Ask a gay guy if they believe in God and an overwhelming majority of them will say, “I don’t think so,” or “No, I don’t.”

art

Collaborative Art Fractures Prison Walls

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The image of a hand pressed against thick glass, fingers outstretched, made its way onto Evan Bissell’s canvas because it still haunts one of his collaborators, a young woman named Chey who saw it as a child visiting a jail. “My dad used to do that when I’d visit him,” she wrote in a note to viewers of the “What Cannot Be Taken Away: Families and Prisons Project” at San Francisco’s SOMArts space. “The glass was so thick that you couldn’t feel any warmth.” The collaborative art exhibition, which seeks to open our imaginations to new ideas about why harm happens and how harm can be repaired, is itself a hand pressed to the glass of the prison system, a warm-hearted attempt to create new flows of communication and empathy between people shut inside and people shut out. The project grew out of months of written dialogue between four fathers at San Francisco County Jail #5 and four teenagers whose own fathers are or were previously incarcerated.

Culture

The Tea Party, a Middle Class Mob; and a Return to the Fifties

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In April, I was riding the DC Metro to the Capitol Mall, when several Tea Party demonstrators got on and sat a few seats away from me. The first, a young white man, wore red-and-white striped shoes with blue tops and other Uncle Sam garb; the young, white woman with him carried a hand-made sign on which was glued an old document titled “The Constitution” and the words, “Miss me yet?” Their origins, judging by hair, clothes, accent, and where they got on seemed to be lower middle class church goers. Not rich. Not sophisticates.

Empathy

Finding Inner Peace In an Age of Strife: A Few Good Quotes

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A friend of mine collected these. I find them helpful, and thought maybe others might find them helpful, too:
“What have I got to fear from my enemies? I carry my Paradise in my heart; it goes where I go.”- Ibn Taymiyya
“Be kind; for everyone you meet is fighting such a hard battle.” – Philo Judaeus
“God made all of us, and we all come from one woman, sucked one bubby; we hope we shall not quarrel; that we shall talk until we get through.” -Chief Holata Mico to Gen. Wylie Thompson, Oct, 24,1834, in Seminole treaty negotiations
“Man never reaches so high an estate, as when he knows not whither he is going.”

Judaism

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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This week’s spiritual wisdom is a poem for Yizkor written by Simcha Raphael, Ph.D. Yizkor is the set of memorial prayers said during religious services on Yom Kippur, Shmini Atzeret, Passover, and Shavuot. It is usually said for a parent, spouse, or child that has died. This introduction or intention (kavvanah) for Yizkor comes from the unpublished manuscript of “Kaddish Echoes – Poems of Night Time, Poems of Mourning.” This poem was also published in the High Holiday Machzor of the Reconstructionist Press Jewish Views of the Afterlife (second edition). YIZKOR VISION
In the crisp autumn air
I went to say
Yizkor prayers today
One of those holy days
Four times a year
We gather in community
Mourners threaded by
Memories of heart and mind
A direct line
To loved ones
In the world beyond.

Empathy

Bishop Gene Robinson Speaks About Obama and "The Left"

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A few weeks ago, the congregants of Temple Beth Shalom in Santa Fe were honored by a visit from Bishop Gene Robinson who delivered the evening’s d’Var Torah. Bishop Robinson is the first openly gay Episcopal Bishop. He was invited to Santa Fe as Grand Marshall of the Gay Pride parade. When Rabbi Marvin Schwab learned from a colleague at St. Bede’s that Bishop Robinson might be barred from speaking in an Episcopal Church, he invited him to deliver the Friday Night D’Var Torah at Temple Beth Shalom.

Christianity

Glenn Beck and Justice

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As one who has been vilified by Fox News commentator Glenn Beck, I had to tune in Saturday and listen to his speech in Washington, D.C. (almost as one who cannot help but to look at a car accident as they drive by on the freeway). During his “revival,” Beck gave his usual banter regarding the beauties of Capitalism and runaway consumerism, the dangers of anything with the word “social” in it, and how we should fear the coming financial apocalypse by “battening down the hatches” and “get everything you can while the getting’s good.” However, it was not his usual verbosity that gave me pause — that caused me to be in “shock and awe,” if you will. It was his statement on civil rights:
We are the people of the civil rights movement. We are the ones that must stand for civil and equal rights.