Articles
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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Spiritual Progressive Analysis
We Are One Body: A Christian Perspective on Justice in the City
Understanding our common connections doesn’t in itself solve the problem. When we are feeling the pinch of scarcity, human beings become territorial.
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Spiritual Progressive Analysis
Islamic Law and the Boundaries of Social Responsibility
The face of the Other should strike doubt and obligation into any person of conscience, forcing us to continue asking, “Am I doing enough?” This, of course, threatens an infinite obligation: other people’s traumas, precarity-inducing misfortunes, addictions, and struggles will never cease, especially in the city.
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Books
The Magic of Organizing?
In Harry Potter, the wizarding world and the world of Muggles—the ordinary, boring, unmagical people—are at first kept separate, barely impacting one another. In Moriarty’s book, there aren’t two worlds, only one. Magic isn’t a counterculture. It is everyone’s folk culture.
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Spiritual Politics
Justice in the City
The obligation to accompany another is an obligation to cross boundaries. In accompanying the dead, the boundaries that are crossed are those between life and death.
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Poetry
New Poems in an Ancient Language
The Israeli poet Admiel Kosman shifts his voice adroitly between ancient and modern, while never seeming quite settled in either. There is a persistent restlessness; nothing is ever straightforward or taken for granted. The poems wrestle with God, spiritual practice, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the place of a poet’s work in society, the relationship between masculinity and femininity, and the baggage of tradition borne by the Hebrew language itself.
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Poetry
A Poet’s Meditation on Force
Army Cats by Tom Sleigh Graywolf Press, 2011 In Army Cats, American poet Tom Sleigh takes on the topic of the 2007 Lebanese Civil War not as an excuse for wanton journalistic rubbernecking, but as a catalyst for a series …
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Israel/Palestine
Why Yair Lapid’s Electoral Success Is Not Really a Centrist Victory
Both Israeli and foreign media have repeated the same prevailing narrative about Israel’s election—a narrative in which the Israeli center has returned to full strength and the Israeli right has taken a whipping. But in fact the right is in a comfortable position to forge a ruling coalition. The two current hard-right parties together won forty-two seats, a formation far more stable than the center-left parties with their forty-eight seats. Further, those hard-right parties have purged themselves of any vestige of center-right leaders of the past.
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Environment
Rights of Nature and an Earth Community Economy
The “Rights of Nature” approach promotes a structure of law that recognizes that our living planet has rights of its own. If a Rights of Nature legal framework were implemented, activities that harm the ability of ecosystems and natural communities to thrive and naturally restore themselves, would be in legal violation of nature’s rights.
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Art
Art and Science: A Marriage Made in Heaven?
At the turn of the past century, Vienna—even more than Berlin, Paris, or London—stood out as the European city most friendly to radical innovation of every kind. Helping us to understand this era, which introduced the modern world that we inhabit today, is Eric Kandel’s book, The Age of Insight. Neuroscience, Kandel argues, can help to close the traditional gap between scientific and nonscientific forms of inquiry.
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Film
Lincoln: A Review
Lincoln comes from the cameras of Steven Spielberg, probably the most influential storyteller in modern cinema, and certainly one of the most vexing. But when the subjects aren’t pure make-believe, his movies tend to run aground on real-world complexities that flighty imagination can’t handle on its own.
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Books
Torah Stories for Young Children
Alison Greengard and Carol Racklin-Siegel’s series of Bible stories is a thoughtfully laid-out reading experience, but one that also comes with limitations. In contrast, The Bedtime Sh’ma: A Good Night Book and Modeh Ani: A Good Morning Book, both adapted by Sarah Gershman with illustrations by Kristina Swarner and also published by EKS, are lyrical and engaging books for both the youngest listeners and early readers.
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War & Peace
Psyche and System: The Peace Movement Evolves
The fact that the streets are not crowded with protest does not mean the peace movement has grown weary or gone to bed. I passionately believe that something far more dynamic is emerging. We are learning that peace is never a quick-fix.
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Christianity
Whose War on Christmas? The Corrosive Power of Cheer and Commerce
Here we go again. “School Bans Santa over Religious Concerns.” “Christmas Concert Cancelled in Hawaii.” “Charlie Brown Violates U.S. Constitution?” The War on Christmas is afoot! Fox News is correct – there is a sustained effort under way to discredit the sacred truths of this holy day. The only problem is that they have fingered the wrong culprit.
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Interfaith
Beyond Interfaith Marriages to Multifaith Marriages
Self-definition is that glorious arrangement of you being you. “Interfaith” is not something a marriage or a person can be. We are still in the twenty-first century and we have parochial homes. A cradle Christian doesn’t stop being a Christian because she marries a Jew nor vice versa. Self-definition is normal, possible, obvious—and intimately necessary.
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