Tikkun Recommends   

The Religious Left and Church-State Relations

Steven H. Shiffrin

Princeton University Press, 2009

Religious liberals recognize that attempts to strengthen the ties of church to state are bad for religion — in a free society people turn away from religion that appears to be imposed by the state. But religious values and worldviews are not out of place in politics — what's wrong with the religious Right is not that it is sullying the separation of church and state, but the content of its adherents' politics and their theology. In this study of the Establishment Clause and its concrete impact in contemporary America, Shiffrin, a professor of law at Cornell, argues that religious liberals are more likely to be effective against the religious Right than are secular liberals, and that religious perspectives are a necessary counterpoint to the corporate state and the instrumental and egoistic perspectives that back it up. He warns against secular liberals' resisting serious alliances with religious liberals.

 

How to Do Good and Avoid Evil

Hans Kung and Rabbi Walter Homolka

Rev. Dr. John Bowden, trans.

Skylight Paths Publishing, 2009

Hans Kung is a widely respected Catholic theologian and serves as president of the Global Ethic Foundation; Rabbi Homolka is rector of Abraham Geiger College for the training of rabbis and a professor at Potsdam University in Germany. Together they've put together a helpful handbook of resources for a global ethic drawn from the sources of Judaism in the past 2,500 years.

 

A Gate at the Stairs

Lorrie Moore

Alfred A. Knopf, 2009

Lorrie Moore is such a pleasure to read that we couldn't let the publication of her newest novel go by without using the moment to applaud her. The story of a Midwestern twenty-year-old farm woman whose entrance into college and into a family for whose apparently illegally adopted child she serves as "child care provider" enables Moore to reveal with stunning brilliance how badly our twenty-first-century life needs healing and transformation. Moore is not only one of the great wordsmiths of our time, but also a profound observer and analyst whose provocative ideas are often presented in an offhanded style that refrains from announcing their importance. Her writing awakens, inspires, challenges, delights, and sometimes depresses the reader, even as it reveals the world hidden in plain sight.

 

Dancing In the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression

Morris Dickstein

W.W. Norton & Co., 2009

Morris Dickstein has done an extraordinary job, in this cultural history of the Great Depression, of weaving together his own acute appreciation of literature and movies with a sweeping understanding of the political and social realities of American life. Dickstein is as fluent in the language of the Popular Front and the rise of a leftist culture as he is with Hollywood, as sensitive to the realities in minority communities as to those in white middle and upper class ones, and as deft an explicator of the hidden messages in the dancing of Fred Astaire as of those in the darker side of movies by Frank Capra. Often overturning accepted readings of American culture, Dickstein tells the story of a society moving from an initial sense of crisis and personal isolation, as the Depression shattered the illusions of capitalist expansion in the 1920s, to an emerging dream of community, a vision of interdependence that developed in both the political and cultural consciousness of the American majority. His richly detailed descriptions are sure to lure many to revisit the books and movies that make that era so relevant to our own.

 

Fire and Ink: An Anthology of Social Action Writing

Frances Payne Adler, Debra Busman, and Diana Garcia, eds.

University of Arizona Press, 2009

This anthology of poetry and prose offers a perspective on contemporary experience that is rarely reflected in the popular media or in public policy. You'll find here many names that are familiar — Adrienne Rich, Alice Walker, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Robert Hass, Leonard Peltier, Mahmoud Darwish, Carolyn Forché, Arundhati Roy, Thich Nhat Hanh, Naomi Shihab Nye, David Barsamian — and also many new voices who illuminate the pain, the suffering, and the hope that has been emerging globally in the past decades. Equally exciting: the editors of this rich and important collection have been building a Creative Writing and Social Action Program at California State University at Monterey Bay, so we can look to their graduates for important work in the future!

 

The Life You Can Save

Peter Singer

Random House, 2009

Ethicist Peter Singer provides a powerful argument as to why each of us in America (and by implication all other advanced industrial societies) should personally donate to aid agencies, when by doing so we can prevent suffering and death without giving up anything nearly as important. Americans have a vastly inflated sense of the amount their government gives in foreign aid (it's actually less than one-tenth of one percent of our federal budget). Certainly, none of us can solve the problem of global poverty, but we can make a difference. You can restore a person's sight for about $50 or give a young woman with an obstetric fistula her life back for about $450. Isn't that worth doing, even if you are the only person doing it? (And fortunately, you won't be.) So while working to pass the Global Marshall Plan, we should, Singer argues, give a higher percentage of our own incomes to private aid agencies — and he has set up a website to help you find the right place to give such donations: www.thelifeyoucansave.com.

 

Eternal Life: A New Vision

John Shelby Spong

HarperOne, 2009

Former Episcopal Bishop of Newark, New Jersey, John Spong is one of the great truth-tellers of the Christian world, and in this remarkable, easy to read, and deeply profound book he shows how severely befuddled humanity has become by cleaving to religions that promise personal survival in a future heaven (or hell). Spong urges ridding religion of heaven and hell and, indeed, moving beyond all forms of organized religion. Yet he is a deeply religious thinker, and if the old formulations no longer work, the retired bishop is not afraid to pioneer new conceptions of eternal life, rooted in part in biblical faith yet consistent with the most advanced science. In a powerful epilogue he grapples with the ethical and spiritual issues that emerge as people begin to claim for themselves the right to die in dignity, without the suffering that so often comes from some degenerative diseases.