Tikkun Recommends
The History of White People
Nell Irvin Painter
W.W. Norton, 2010
Nell Painter has written one of the most important books ever on the social construction of the notion that there is a "white" race. Interrogating the historical, anthropological, biological, and genetic data, she endorses a growing conclusion among biologists and geneticists who no longer believe in the physical existence of races -- though they recognize the continuing power of racism (the belief that races exist and that some are better than others). But while the argument for the interrelatedness of all human beings is strong, the flexibility of the concept of "whiteness" (or at least of "nonblackness") has allowed the white American middle class to adopt a multicultural ethos and embrace diversity in suburbs and on college campuses while continuing to see blackness as fundamentally synonymous with poverty. According to the author, "Poverty in a dark skin endures as the opposite of whiteness, driven by an age-old social yearning to characterize the poor as permanently other and inherently inferior."
The Dice Game of Shiva
Richard Smoley
New World Library, 2009
Richard Smoley subtitles this book "How Consciousness Creates the Universe," and presents a powerful if sometimes playful challenge to scientism. He draws upon spiritual wisdom and ancient mythologies, yet states his central points in ways that are independent of their origin: "The world arises when a self perceives an other, just as an infant begins to become conscious by distinguishing what is self versus what is not." He goes on to argue that there is no place where consciousness is not present. Smoley believes that civilization as a whole is moving toward the goal of exploring consciousness, whether this manifests through psychological introspection, neurological research, or work with artificial intelligence. This important book should be read by anyone who thinks the universe can be explained solely by a materialist astrophysics or by randomness and contemporary versions of evolutionary theory that have not yet integrated a spiritual-consciousness-related vision of how evolution works.
The Naked Now
Richard Rohr
The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2009
Daniel Berrigan: Essential Writings
Selected and introduced by John Dear
Orbis Books, 2009
These two Catholic priests -- Father Richard Rohr and Father Daniel Berrigan -- have been among the most significant thinkers in the Catholic world in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and they have much to teach people of all faiths. Father Rohr, a frequent contributor to Tikkun and Sojourners, subtitles his new book "Learning to See as the Mystics See." It is an exciting and extremely accessible introduction to the Christian contemplative tradition and its stunning insights. He warns those who would seek to be religious leaders that it is only transformed people who have the power to transform others. Moreover, to overcome ego, there are two main paths: love and suffering. Love "is the only way to initially and safely open the door of awareness and aliveness, and then suffering for that love keeps that door open and available for ever greater growth."
Father Berrigan -- the great Catholic hero of the peace movements of the 1960s who never gave up while others faded back into the struggle to "make it" economically, and who has endured as a great light for all humanity -- has certainly lived the path of love and suffering described by Rohr. Father John Dear, a Network of Spiritual Progressives leader who has inspired many spiritual activists with his willingness to go to prison to challenge the forces of evil, has done a beautiful job of assembling Berrigan's deepest reflections. We follow Berrigan as his understanding of the Bible leads him to challenge the war in Vietnam, cofound and chair Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam, and eventually go to jail for his nonviolent resistance to the warmakers. The book also chronicles Berrigan's collaborations in Paris with Thich Nhat Hanh, his move back to the United States and new civil disobedience against the warmakers, and his prolific career as a writer whose Catholic liberation theology continues to resonate with the most ethically alive young Catholics in the twenty-first century.
The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives
Gilbert Achcar
Metropolitan Books, 2010
Historian Gilbert Achcar recognizes that "it is not possible to look toward a peaceful future until accounts have been settled with the past and its lessons assimilated." This book makes an important contribution to that understanding by helping Westerners understand how the denial of the Holocaust in Arab discourse developed as Palestinian suffering increased. Achcar understands the denial of Jewish suffering as anti-Semitism and doesn't excuse it, but by contextualizing this denial in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, he shows that this is an anti-Semitism that developed in response to Arab suffering and was not the cause of that suffering.
After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory
John Casey
Oxford University Press, 2009
Ever since the emergence of class societies, human beings have wondered what social order comes next after the current realities of pain and oppression. Beliefs in some form of afterlife, immortality, the human soul, and either retribution or a just reordering of social realities have given people a compensatory vision to counter the harshness of daily life. John Casey's definitive study of the wide variety of beliefs in the afterlife draws primarily on Western visions, which are often very different from each other while surprisingly similar to some of the views that emerged from Eastern societies. Casey invites us to consider ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and Israel, the Greeks and Romans, Christians and Mormons, the rise and fall of heaven and hell, and much more.
Yoga, Karma, and Rebirth
Stephen Phillips
Columbia University Press, 2009
Stephen Phillips takes us deep into the world of yoga, and through that into Eastern approaches to life and death. Yet the goal here is not to find a way to preserve one's individual identity in future incarnations, but to transcend the illusions of individual existence -- to disidentify with the "I" so that one may more fully identify with the good of the whole of all being and hence practice the dharma (the right way to live). Reincarnation allows for psychic development through a series of lives, and becomes the path to being part of the
