Articles
Rethinking Religion
The Path of the Parent: How Children Can Enrich Your Spiritual Life
Children are naturally mindful. They always live fully in the present, and the world is a fantastically real and interesting place to them.
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An Alphabet
Air, element we take inside and send back altered, Be lucid: show us the swift’s passage in twilight, the earliest stars; Calm the undervoice that yammers what is the point? Dishevel our hair, carry away our hats and umbrellas. Even …
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Morning Blessings
For Rabbi Burt Jacobson Blessed is the dog’s tongue Shamanic prayer flag Binder of vapor Harbinger of light’s arrival. Blessed is the brain stem That battled entropy All night on my behalf. Blessed are my nether, pleasure parts That double …
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Spiritual Politics
A Spirituality of the Commons: Where Religion and Marxism Meet
Confronted with such a “patchwork” reality, progressives (be they religious or not) have to learn to discern the different elements. They cannot just dwell on the conformist and deactivating dimensions of religion but have to take the “sigh of the oppressed” seriously.
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Three Views on Israel/Palestine: A Convenient Hatred, Our Harsh Logic, and Wrestling in the Daylight
By Phyllis Goldstein, Breaking the Silence, and Brant Rosen
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US Politics
Inciting Violence in This Culture of Violence
The massacre of the Sandy Hook schoolchildren last month offered yet another painful proof that the creation of violent minds is big business and that, in its many aspects, the business of violence has become a far too accepted part of the fabric of contemporary life in the United States.
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Democracy
Get Money Out of Politics
Why should we be surprised if tens of millions of potential voters do not show up at polls? They’ve already seen that it is not they but the rich who will shape the ideas of candidates in both major political parties. It’s not that donors get absolute power to shape the votes and policies of each elected official, but that together as a group those donors shape a universe of discourse about what is plausible in politics and what is “realistic”; within that framework, politicians make choices that may at times offend one section of their donor base in order to please another section.
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Spiritual Politics
Searching for Solidarity in an Atomized Society
We desperately need to build up an ethic of accompaniment. But we must do it while consciously understanding ourselves to be operating in a profoundly countercultural context.
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Politics & Society
Trauma as a Potential Source of Solidarity
Every city has its neglected corners, filled with people who need much more than a spontaneous moment of generosity and the handing out of some spare quarters. Like Cohen, I believe that we must witness the experience of the Other and “assimilate Other into same”—to actually identify aspects of ourselves in those we might normally ignore or disdain.
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Moses: A Stranger Among Us and From Plagues to Miracles
by Maurice Harris and Robert Rosenthal
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Politics & Society
Community Reparations to Transform Community Desolation
Why do so many well-meaning people struggle so much with how to support poor community members and their houseless neighbors? How do the conceptions of collective responsibility from the Talmud that Aryeh Cohen sites become distorted or lost? What seems to be missing from many of these narratives is a direct look at systems like capitalism, colonialism, and their requisite bedmate: what I call the “cult of independence.”
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Nicaragua: Surviving the Legacy of U.S. Policy
Photography by Paul Dix, Edited by Pamela Fitzpatrick
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Rethinking Religion
Healing the Miser Within: The Kabbalah of Giving and Receiving
The Hebrew term for gratitude, hakarat hatov, literally means recognition of the good. Recognizing the good one has received from others is indeed the force that inspires gratitude and the desire to give back.
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Rethinking Religion
Beyond the Limits of Love: Building the Religious Counterculture
The signature orientation of liberal religion has rather been one toward increasing personal freedom from religious strictures. The joke is that the Ten Commandments have been demoted to “ten suggestions.”
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