Rethinking Religion
Rethinking Religion
The Gift of the Gay Rights Debate
We grow as religious people through an unlikely combination of courage and humility. It takes courage to question one’s opinions, and humility to recognize that we may not be as right as we thought. It is for this reason that spiritual progressives have rightly embraced the movement for equality for LGBT people not as a condundrum, but as an opportunity for precisely the kind of spiritual maturation we seek.
Read more >>
Health
Faith Healing For Skeptics: How the Expectant Brain Relieves Pain
Are those who seek faith healing deluded? Not entirely. Although no amount of faith can regenerate a lost limb, faith can indeed help a person overcome crippling pain. The natural brain mechanisms that allow this to occur are increasingly understood. Believing in a Higher Power—even a fictional one—can cure ills amenable to the placebo response.
Read more >>
Film
From the Beginning of Time to the End of Days
The Tree of Life is a brilliant achievement in almost all respects, bringing the eternal and the everyday, the macrocosmic and the microscopic, and the physical and the metaphysical into graceful convergences that are awesome to behold.
Read more >>
Health
Twelve-Step Healing: Beyond Disease Metaphors and God-Talk
While it may be true, as Nicholas Boeving states in this issue of Tikkun, that recovery (the blanket term used to describe twelve-step programs) works for only a minority of addicts, that minority is a rather large number: millions around the world. And because recovery is such a large and growing movement, Boeving’s criticisms—which for the most part are valid—only speak to a certain aspect of the twelve-step paradigm.
Read more >>
Judaism
High Holiday Workbook
Repentance and Atonement Are NOT Just for Jews: A Note to Our Non-Jewish Readers on How This High Holiday Workbook Can Be of Use to You
Tikkun is not just for Jews—it is interfaith as well as Jewish. This High Holiday workbook is an invitation to all people to join with the Jewish people . . .
Read more >>
Books
The Legacy of Abraham Joshua Heschel
Abraham Joshua Heschel was a singular figure in American Jewish history and, indeed, in Jewish thought. Nearly four decades after his death—his legacy remains towering and majestic in the consciousness of the American Jewish community and beyond. How fortunate, then, that Susannah Heschel has given us a new edited collection, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Essential Writings. Not only does this remarkable collection provide a sense of the breadth of Heschel’s interests and writings, but the ordering of the selections and the insightful introductions highlight the deep coherence of the different dimensions of his work.
Read more >>
Books
Counterculture Hasidism
Holy Beggars is a page-turner that reads like a memoir and weaves together journalism, history, deep Jewish teaching, rollicking storytelling, and poetic tribute. It paints a cinematic panorama of the 1960s in San Francisco, explores the impact of the era of “tune in, turn on, drop out,” and describes Rabbi Carlebach’s expansive musical career.
Read more >>
Islam
Conquering Veils: Gender and Islams
My cause has always been twofold: women’s equality and Islam. For the world to make sense to me, women and men had to be of equal worth and dignity, just as Islam had to be the true religion. Before I encountered the extremist interpretation of Islam, my world seemed wonderfully whole. Afterwards, my world became fragmented. To glue it back together, I had to reconcile sex equality and Islamic piety.
Read more >>
Gender & Sexuality
The Stolen Blessing
The Torah has little to say about transsexuality, but it has a lot to say about people who do hard-to-explain and sometimes terrible things in order to be true to themselves. My personal archetype was Jacob. I had never liked Jacob, but even as a child I recognized his life as an uncomfortably apt metaphor for mine.
Read more >>
Spiritual Politics
Buddhism Engaging: the Zen of Electoral Canvassing
Since 2006 a team of Buddhists based at the Berkeley Zen Center, have been using Buddhist practice to sustain and inform door-to-door political campaigning.
Read more >>
Judaism
Your Inheritance
Rabbi Artson argues here that “The universe, if left to its own devices, will produce goodness, righteousness, decency, all by itself.” That this is true, despite everything we do to the contrary, is an encouragement to us to fight social evil, to give thanks to all who came before us and to feel at one with all people.
Read more >>
Spirituality
The Great Awe-Wakening
The fact that “awe” and its variants are flooding our vocabulary is a welcoming sign that a fuller and deeper sensibility of “awe” is reemerging in our culture.
Read more >>
Judaism
A Brainy Seder: Four Questions that Guide Us to One Brain, One People and One God
On all other Passover nights, we just read the Haggadah but on this night, we will create a special link between spirit and body, blessing and eating by examining Passover through the scientific understanding of our brain. Interpersonal Neurobiology connects our brains, minds and relationships.
Read more >>
Judaism
Free Associations on the Four Sons
Dusting off my Haggadah several months early, I was once again intrigued with the nuances of the parable. Far from being a simple description of four types of children, I now saw the parable as offering profound insight into the elements that impact the development of the child, and by extension, the formation and potential for transformation of the world.
Read more >>
Books
Why Retell the Passover Narrative?
Or Rose reviews Arthur Waskow and Phyllis Berman’s new book, “Freedom Journeys: The Tale Of Exodus And Wilderness Across Millennia.”
Read more >>
