Culture

Color Theory: The Most High Art of Peter Lewis

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During a recent inventory count in the bar where I work, I was surprised to see my boss taking sips from various juice bottles in order to determine their contents. He later revealed to me that he is colorblind. This revelation that someone I interact closely with every day literally does not see the world the same way I do made me question some things, the least of which concerned who should count bar juices from now on. I realized that in my role as someone who writes about art I have taken for granted that my experience of color is the same, or nearly the same as everyone else’s. I wonder now in what other ways people experience art differently than I do.

Politics & Society

Highlights from the Feb. 15 Spiritual Progressive Conference

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Hundreds of warm voices rang out Monday at the University of San Francisco as spiritual progressives sang together and debated how best to push our society toward a vision of economic justice, environmental sustainability, ethically oriented institutions, and a foreign policy based on generosity rather than militarism. Hosted by the Network of Spiritual Progressives and Tikkun, the one-day conference in San Francisco included in-depth strategy sessions about how to develop a constitutional amendment to establish that corporations are not persons and how to support Obama while pushing him to live up to his progressive campaign promises. You can read Michael Lerner’s report on the conference to learn more about the proposed amendment and discussions about it. Here are some photos to give a feel for the event itself:

The day was just a foretaste of the visionary analysis and vigorous debate set to take place during the NSP’s four-day national conference, June 11-14 in Washington, D.C. Presenters at the upcoming conference will include dynamic speakers from the conference cosponsors, which include The Nation, Yes! magazine, Peace Action, Pace e Bene, Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Code Pink, the Institute for Policy Studies, the Shalom Center, Democracy Matters, OpEdNews, the Backbone Campaign, the Metta Center for Nonviolence Education, and 350.org.

Politics & Society

Strategy Conference of Liberals and Progressives

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The theme of our conferences on Monday in San Francisco and in DC in June is to support Obama while pushing him to live up to his progressive campaign promises. This is a balancing act that not everyone appreciates. Maybe I can explain a little from my point of view in this post. Yesterday a woman whom I have only met a couple of times, but who would seem to me a natural for this kind of message, gave us a good tongue lashing for our approach. From her point of view it’s divisive, it’s the same as the Nader campaign that lost Gore the 2000 election; it’s another example of the Left criticizing its own so that, unlike the Republicans, we never stand together and never get anything done.

Gender and Sexuality

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from “Building Cultures of Peace: Four Cornerstones,” an essay by author and historian Riane Eisler:
To spread the consciousness that we can, and must, change traditions of domination requires courage. It takes courage to challenge domination and violence in both international relations and intimate relations. It takes courage to actively oppose injustice and cruelty in all spheres of life: not only in the so-called public sphere of politics and business but in the so-called private sphere of parent-child, gender, and sexual relations. It may not be popular, and may even be dangerous to do so, since domination and violence in intimate and intergroup relations are encoded in some religious and ethnic traditions that are our heritage from a more rigid dominator past. But it must be done.

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.

Spirituality

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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This week’s spiritual wisdom is from Reverend Father Thomas Berry (1914-2009):
You see we are at the terminal phase of the Cenozoic, the last 65 million years. We’re not just passing into another historical period, or another cultural modification, we are changing the chemistry of the planet. We are changing the biosystems. We’re changing the geosystems of the planet on a scale of hundreds of millions of years. But more specifically, we’re terminating the last 65 million years of life development. Now a person would say, “Well, where do we go from here?”

Earth-based Religions

Groundhog's Day — Pregnant with Life

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I have a friend who says that February is the longest month of the year. Even though this seems nonsensical, I know what she means. It’s still deep winter, but the holidays are over, the Yule lights have been put away — and there’s nothing much to distract from the bare, white winter landscape except for the frigid deep freeze. The cold keeps us inside more than usual, so many of us get cabin fever, that restless, bored, listless, frustrating desire for something you can’t find unless you flee Wisconsin for the southlands. February is the fallow time of year, with bleak landscapes that can either be beautiful in their stark simplicity or deadly boring because of their lack of color and activity.

Environment

A living biologist more important than Darwin?

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You might think, on this site, that I would be talking up a sacred biologist, someone who combines a spiritual worldview with strong scientific credibility, but I don’t know too many of those (Francis Collins is one). I look forward to seeing more come out of the woodwork as this century progresses. This purely scientific story, though, does have spiritual implications for us. It tells us that the whole biosphere is much more interconnected at the DNA level than biologists including Darwin previously thought. I’m throwing in a related story about our human DNA, which it turns out isn’t so simply human after.

Environment

Do we WANT a breakthrough technical fix on energy?

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Well, of course we do. Some new invention that gets us all the energy we want from renewable sources? Isn’t that the holy grail of environmentalists these days, the only way to stave off global warming? Or is it? Today’s headline news is about nuclear fusion again.

Rethinking Religion

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from American writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862):
I said to myself, — I said to others, —
“There comes into my mind such an indescribable, infinite, all-absorbing, divine, heavenly pleasure, a sense of elevation and expansion, and [I] have had nought to do with it. I perceive that I am dealt with by superior powers. This is a pleasure, a joy, an existence which I have not procured myself. I speak as a witness on the stand, and tell what I have perceived.” The morning and the evening were sweet to me, and I led a life aloof from society of men.