Well, God isn’t personally appearing so far as I know. But we’ll be talking about God as understood by MLK. We will hear insights based on new scholarship, and his theology will very likely surprise you.

Almost every Monday night I interview a Tikkun author. Last Monday my guest was the remarkable writer and psychotherapist Kim Chernin, whose article “The Long Path Out of Denial: Zionism, Heartache, and a New Vision of Israel and Palestine” is in the current Tikkun print magazine. Kim’s ability to connect with people who asked questions on the call was remarkable, and they were by no means all agreeing with her.

The previous Monday I talked about Mahatma Gandhi with Michael Nagler, one of the world’s leading experts on nonviolent political activism. That, too, was one of the best Phone Forums we’ve done.

Both can be listened to here. Their print articles are not yet available online, but will be January 1. Meanwhile, buy a copy on newsstands or online here.

Next Monday we welcome The Yes Men to the Phone Forum! We have written about them here and in the current Tikkun, where Michael Lerner reviews their new movie, which is on general release. So go see it this week if you can and then have the chance to talk with the Yes Men next Monday night. Find out where it is showing by going to this page.

The Phone Forum is a free call, no phone charge to you, and is our gift to those who have subscribed to our print magazine or joined the Network of Spiritual Progressives or donated to us: which are the ways we survive here financially. So if you haven’t done any of those please join us on the Phone Forum for one time if you like, but then please subscribe, donate or join to help us out financially before you listen in again.

Tonight it is someone not yet well known, who has a powerful story to tell about Martin Luther King. The rest of this post is from an email I sent out about tonight’s call:

King’s God: The Unknown Faith of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Someone told me they found Tikkun Daily confusing last week. People usually tell me it’s a beautiful site, so I wanted to know more from her.

I took her on a quick tour of the page — the posts, how to follow one contributor by clicking on their byline so all their posts come up, the photos of contributors on the home page, the art gallery, and the links at top right to the magazine articles. I didn’t even get to the themes you can click on in the “tag cloud” in the right hand column (larger words mean more mentions of the word in the tags that we bloggers add to our posts) or other goodies.

She said she thought it looked fine and it had probably been her ADD that had made it hard to focus long enough to get it.

In an article about internet addiction in the paper yesterday I read that:

Dr. John Ratey, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, uses the term “acquired attention deficit disorder” to describe the way technology is rewiring the modern brain.

In this and the companion piece we learn that 20% of people under age 35 in one poll had ended a relationship because their partner spent too much time on a mobile device. And:

“The more we become used to just sound bites and tweets,” Aboujaoude [director of Stanford University's Impulse Control Disorders Clinic] said, “the less patient we will be with more complex, more meaningful information. And I do think we might lose the ability to analyze things with any depth and nuance.”

Now refer to all those other scary stories you have heard about

It is 8 A.M., on November 12th. Today is a day of celebration; it’s the day when the Charter of Compassion will be released. That’s a document first dreamed of by religious writer Karen Armstrong, and now created by a collaborative group of religious leaders from around the world. I’ve been inspired both by a number of Armstrong’s books, and by the wonderful talk she gave on accepting the TED prize, where she first shared her vision of the Charter. The idea, which is based on the universality of the golden rule to all religions, is to first create a statement expanding on the role of compassion, and then call on all religious groups to endorse the goal of being more compassionate in the world. I decided to be part of this action, and have gotten Tikkun Toronto, the political-spiritual group with whom I work to publicize what I have chosen to do: meet at the labyrinth in the heart of High Park, read the Charter, and walk the labyrinth while meditating on how I can manifest more compassion in the world. There’s only one minor problem: the Charter isn’t out yet. The website has featured a countdown to the day of the release, and here we are on that day, and there’s nothing online. What’s plan B? I find an old poster that shows the different religions’ versions of the golden rule, reformat it so it will fill the blank space on the sign a friend has made, and decide the best thing to do is to relax and to wait. I manage to keep the second part of that decision.

All fifty states are buzzing with news about the $4.35 billion in federal education grants now available for school improvement initiatives.

Obama and Duncan announce education grants.

The Obama administration released the final rules for its Race to the Top competition Wednesday, outlining how states can prove themselves worthy of the grant money. States that experiment with charter schools, track student gains over time, use standardized tests to evaluate teachers, and overhaul struggling schools by dismissing teachers en masse are poised to rake in the most money. California and Wisconsin have already sought to become more competitive by changing their laws to allow teacher pay to be linked to student test scores.

It’s great that our executive branch is finally funneling some money toward education — what a welcome change from the last administration! But I can’t help but remain wary of Arne Duncan’s latest exploit, given his track record of inviting the Pentagon into Chicago schools and handing struggling public schools to private contractors.

Here’s what I really want to know: how serious is Duncan when he talks about educational innovation? Might there be an opening for a deep and substantive shift in educational policy right now — a shift away from educational programs that feel oppressive and irrelevant, and toward ones that are instead riveting, joyful, socially engaged, and empowering?

How did I miss this? The Wall Street Journal is advising men that they can get more sex if they do more housework.

One husband, Mr. Chethik says in an interview, reported that his wife enjoyed flowers or a candlelit dinner out; but “if he wants to be sure of a romantic evening, he goes for the vacuum cleaner.”

Another husband, a St. Paul, Minn., accountant who describes himself as happily married for 20 years, says housework reflects a deeper bond. Although he does plenty of housework, “to me it’s not the dishes, laundry, vacuuming (or Viagra) that matters,” he writes. Sharing chores reflects a “willingness to hold my wife’s needs and wants on a par with my own. For us, the key to intimacy is the sharing and minimization of selfishness.” His wife, a nurse, agrees, saying that “doing the household chores is certainly part of the sharing.”

Did I copy that right? Was that the “minimization of selfishness”? In the WSJ?

Judith Warner has the perspective and I got to the WSJ piece from her excellent rumination on women’s happiness.

In a comment to Rabbi Lerner’s post Kucinich Denounces Health Care Sell Out by House Dems, Jill Schmidt asked:

I don’t get why insurance companies aren’t for a bill that will get them 21 million more clients. If anyone out there gets it, please reply.

Jill poses an excellent question that is shared by hard-working, thoughtful Americans from coast to coast. Fortunately, Goldman Sachs revealed the answer in a perverse ten page report posted in its entirety by Huff-Po reporter Sam Stein. (Kudos to Sam for his excellent work!)

The Goldman report projects Earnings Per Share (or EPS, a measure of the profits allocated to an individual share) for the five largest insurance companies currently traded on Wall Street: Cigna, Humana, Well Point, United Health and Aetna. Goldman Sachs views health care, not from the perspective of an individual seeking care, but from the point of view of a prospector assessing the potential of an undeveloped mine.

I think the hardest interactions in my life have been the ones where I expect similarity, and then I’m confronted with difference. This can occur anytime. But in my life, it happens most often when I’m confronted with a man who seems like a touchy-feely guy, and then turns out to be anything but.

The problem sometimes happens at the semantic level, where words I think have obvious overtones — whether of judgement, of criticism, or other kinds of negativity — are seen by my counterpart as having no such nuances. Sometimes it happens when the man I assume to be my (feminist) ally turns on me for what seem like (masculinist/macho) reasons. And sometimes it’s just about interactional style. You know, men want to fix the problem, while women want to smooth the process.

Today I had one of those interactions. And I’ve got to say, it pushed me to the edge of my tolerance. My emotions were screaming — “What the hell is going on?” while my intellect was trying to calm me down — “If you believe what he says, then you have to deal with him in ways that are unfamiliar.” Fortunately for all of us (I believe), my intellect won out. But my emotions are still jangled, and I have to bring them into harmony with my mind. So here goes:

“Recipe for Failure.” That’s the prediction made in the Washington Post’s glossy magazine Foreign Policy (FP) this month about the attempt to curb Global Weirding at the upcoming Copenhagen conference. FP claims the article’s author, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, is “the foreign-policy world’s leading predictioneer.” His predictions, based on rational choice theory, have by his account been stunningly successful: “According to a declassified CIA assessment, the predictions for which I’ve been responsible over the years have a 90 percent accuracy rate.” The first part of the article, listing his successes, is a good read. By the time he gets to Global Warming, I’m more than ready to take his opinion seriously.

But his opinion is that we have already reached the high point of global government attempts to regulate greenhouse gases in this century! His reasons include the impossibility of getting everyone to sign on to cutbacks, so that it will fall to some countries to make sacrifices that others refuse to make, which won’t happen on any large scale because that’s not what governments do. Today’s countries who are growing fast out of poverty have no incentive to cut back. They won’t until they have overtaken today’s rich countries. At that point they will embrace climate regulations to stop poorer countries coming up behind them. But that will presumably be sometime next century (see his graph above). His last lines explain why he is nonetheless optimistic:

I would like to introduce you to a new blog by a group of us who are partly associated with the Tikkun community: the Project for Integrating Law, Politics and Spirituality. Nanette Schorr, Doug Ammar and I will be sharing duties of blogging, and will be posting items by others. Nanette introduced the blog on August 24 with this post:

I’ve been asked to be the first writer to kick off the new spiritlawpolitics blog. I’m really happy to be contributing on a website dedicated to our new legal culture; a culture characterized by social justice, individual and social healing and community participation. The spiritlawpolitics initiative was founded back in 1996, as part of a larger “politics of meaning” movement whose aim was to create a “new bottom line” in American society which reflected these values. The Project’s focus is still on the importance of supporting such initiatives as they emerge in the society. Exciting changes are happening in the law, but they can only fully take root if they are grounded in changes in consciousness and social practice which embody these values on a larger social level.

One of the initiatives we’ve long admired and supported is the movement broadly called “restorative justice.”

Renate Stendhal has written a fascinating and moving article in Scene4 magazine this month about the Stumbling Stones — cobblestone memorials — that Germans have individually payed to have installed outside the homes from which people were taken by the Nazis. On a trip to Hamburg, looking for the house where she once lived, she found one of these stones. It read:

Here lived Olga Misch, born Heller. Year of birth 1880. Deported in 1942. Theresienstadt. Murdered on 7/8/ 1942.

Stendhal opens by referring to Kim Chernin’s new book, from which we have published a long excerpt in the current Tikkun.

“Everywhere a Guest, Nowhere At Home: A New Vision of Israel and Palestine,” is the title of a new book about the very human capacity not to see what is in front of one’s eyes. The author, Kim Chernin, patiently, relentlessly, pursues the process of fighting her own blindness. What is it in us, she asks, that sticks to denial, rearranges the painful image, fiercely holds on to amnesia when the knowledge is already there? In her book the invisible knowledge comes into view like the snaps of a camera. She arrives at the unthinkable thought: could it be that the same paradoxical not-seeing, not-knowing has taken hold in Israel that we remember only too well from Germany, where every good citizen swore not to have known what was happening right in front of their eyes?

Sometimes, seeing happens by chance. You stumble right into it. A book falls open in your hands, you overhear a conversation, you find yourself outside your comfort zone and suddenly freeze: for one moment your eyes are open.

It happened to me last month on a trip to Germany, the home country where I never feel “at home”.

Read the whole piece here.

“I feel that it’s irresponsible to beat the drums of revolution if you’re only half-informed.” — Christopher Reiger

A small sample of the images of the natural world, or rather the destruction of the natural world, gracing the walls of art spaces today feel like warnings being shouted in hopes that disaster might yet be averted. But so many others appear to reflect cynicism and celebration of cruelty’s surprising beauty, merely revealing how aesthetically interesting it can be to explore the narrative of impending ecological destruction and the doomed existence of animal and plant life. It is a bother to me that I cannot usually decide which is which, or how to feel about either.

The recent work of Christopher Reiger is an exception. Reiger’s paintings feature imagery of beasts and flora intermixed with symbols of technology, science, industrialization, and human presence. Although emanating a potent awareness of the state of affairs of our embattled ecosystem, his work feels less like a condemnation than an invitation to a deeper understanding of humanity’s community with nature.

(“Without Maps Or Manifest,” 2009, watercolor, gouache, sumi ink and marker on arches paper)

Visit Tikkun Daily’s Art Gallery for more of Christopher Reiger’s work.

Everyone who has lived through the last few decades knows what has been going on. Every institution in American life, and many throughout the world, have been reorganized in the interests of raising profits.

Let us start with the corporations. They previously served several ends including public service and obligations to their employees, to their communities, and to their nations, as well as making profits. Not any more. Downsizing, speed-up, reliance on part-timers: whatever squeezed a bit more profit out took precedence over all other considerations.

In publishing, the push to organize everything in terms of profitability has meant a concentration on a few pieces of schlock and an increasing reluctance to go with quality. In news, it has meant the reduction of journalism (too expensive) and the increase in entertainment (which brings in ads). In universities, it has meant more money for bio-tech and less for the arts and humanities, more part-timers, fewer tenured positions. In pharmaceuticals, it has meant the patenting of pieces of the biosphere and the maintenance of artificially high drug prices. In the schools it has meant testing, teaching for the tests, and an orientation to training for jobs. In immigration it has meant the selling of human organs, of babies, and of massive population transfers, only technically “illegal.”

There weren’t very many American Jews stationed at Dachau during the war crimes trials after the camp had been liberated. Odd duty, to say the least for a Jew, guarding German officers who had tortured and killed so many Jews, escorting these Nazi officers from their cells to the courtrooms, listening to the testimony about their crimes.

This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from Archbishop Oscar Romero, who urged along the nonviolent struggle for justice in El Salvador until his assassination in 1980:

It helps now and then to step back and take the long view.
We can’t do everything and there is a sense of liberation in that.
We can do something, and we need to do it well.
We plant the seed that one day will grow; we may never see the end result.
We provide the yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.

(Photo courtesy of FlickrCC/Franco Folini.)

Washington, DC – In the immediate aftermath of the 5 November Fort Hood killings, some media commentators, alerted by gunman Major Dr. Nidal Malik Hasan’s Muslim name, immediately described the murders as a manifestation of his religious beliefs, reinforcing many Americans’ fears about Islam. In a moment like this one, the topic of religious freedom might be one we wish to avoid, but protecting it is essential to preventing another such tragedy. All Americans — both Muslims and non-Muslims — now have a role to play in ensuring that the country moves forward productively and peacefully.

Soon after the attack, Muslim American individuals and organisations, such as Dr. Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) and the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), responded by unequivocally condemning the murders as reprehensible and outside the domain of Islam.

According to CAIR, “No political or religious ideology could ever justify or excuse such wanton and indiscriminate violence. The attack was particularly heinous in that it targeted the all-volunteer army that protects our nation. We Muslim Americans stand with our fellow citizens in offering both prayers for the victims and sincere condolences to the families of those killed or injured.”

The attack has spurred Muslim organisations to urge non-Muslims to refrain from viewing the incident through the prism of religion.

We have been talking with our friends at Tikkun for some months about a new online magazine that is now well launched. Tikkun Daily asked us to introduce ourselves to you. Rick Heller is our editor and he has written the following to explain why “spiritual progressives” may appreciate what our authors have to say.

Rick Heller writes:

Readers of Tikkun and spiritual progressives are cordially invited to peruse the new online magazine, The New Humanism, a publication of the Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy. Secular humanists get a little nervous around the word “spiritual” because we don’t believe in the supernatural, but to the extent that it refers to positive emotions like love, joy and empathy, we’re spiritual too. Humanism is a philosophy of life that is socially progressive. Although humanists are atheists, agnostics, skeptics, or otherwise non-religious, not all non-religious people are humanists. An emphasis on compassion distinguishes humanism from the libertarian atheist philosophy of Ayn Rand, while a respect for democratic processes separates humanism from communism as practiced in the former Soviet Bloc.

There’s also a bit of a distinction–a much smaller one–between the New Humanists and the so-called New Atheists.

We may look different, sound different, follow differing doctrines and dogmas, or none at all, but compassion is at the core of the major faiths and ethic systems of our world. The Golden Rule, or some form of it, is found in every major religion and in almost all if not every country on our planet. Karen Armstrong is counting on this unifying ideology to bring together individuals and communities this Friday for the launch of the Charter for Compassion. Here’s a short video about her campaign:

Family members listen to music during a vigil for US Pvt. Francheska Velez, 21, who was killed in the Fort Hood massacre.

Debra Saunders in her nationally syndicated column this morning:

His own words as he opened fire – “Allahu Akbar” – and perhaps his online screeds show who he was. He acted not as a stressed-out shrink, but a violent and twisted extremist.

David Brooks in the New York Times this morning:

… evidence is now mounting to suggest he chose the extremist War on Islam narrative that so often leads to murderous results.

Both conservative columnists write against what they see as a failure of media nerve and even of national courage to call this man a terrorist.

“The fun of the story for us,” say the Coen Brothers, in their gloss on A Serious Man, “was inventing new ways to torture Larry.” He’s the only nice person in the film, and if torturing nice people is your idea of a good time, this might be the film you’re searching for. Or if you have always wondered what self-hating Jews really look like, here’s a matched set of brothers to demonstrate.

It’s a natural phase to go through as a child, that when your life is miserable, you take out your toys and torture them. But by the time you’re in your fifties, surely it’s time to move on. Much has been made about the similarity of A Serious Man‘s setting to the Minnesota world the Coens grew up in. But surely even Minnesota, let alone Hollywood, has therapists that could help? Torturing two-dimensional puppets is no occupation for two grown men, let alone the basis of an entertaining spectator sport.