Herb Kohl has been one of the most influential writers on progressive education during the last forty years. His has been one of the leading voices encouraging teachers to get beyond the stereotypes they may have about the types of children in their classrooms. Here’s an evocative piece he just sent me about connecting with the natural world, and with some people he found himself close to stereotyping.

My Blue Heron

By Herbert Kohl

Photo: Rich Anderson/flickr

Where I live it is impossible to own the night. It owns you, swallows you, surrounds you outside of the beam of your flashlight, hints at nocturnal life, awakenings, silences punctuated by the last cries of owls and the first of ravens and jays. I love to get up before the sun and walk to my study when it is dark, when there is no moon or when the waxing and waning moon tints the trees silver and yellow. I talk to the few stars left in the sky, wish upon them, and, before getting to my writing, sit in my chair and listen to the silence, look out into nothing, and hope some unexpected event or detectable movement will inspire me for the day.

“Agnostic” we understand as “not knowing”–usually referring to beliefs about God. “Spiritual” is more problematic. If I say I am a “spiritual agnostic” some people think I am claiming to be holier than thou, as if calling oneself a humanist meant one was a better human being than thou. These self descriptions are more about aspirations and outlook than achievements.

What would a “spiritual agnostic” believe about the universe, suffering, or the meaning of life? I am casting caution aside to offer my own case as an example. It says nothing about what others believe.

I belong to a small group at the Oakland Unitarian church that meets twice a month. We talk about our lives, spiritual practices and anything else. I wrote last fall about one of our group who works in a government welfare office, and who learned how to bring her spirituality into the work: it is one of my favorite posts on Tikkun Daily. We have started a practice every quarter of taking the whole evening to hear about and discuss what one of our group believes, our “credo.” It was my turn a week ago, and I had to write out my thoughts so I wouldn’t ramble. Two or three of the group thought I should post my credo here. I am diffident about doing so. What we really believe and live by is so personal. But since one of my conclusions is to be bold, here goes.

Credo. What I believe. 4/15/10. UU Oakland Covenant Group.

This splits easily into two for me: what I’d like to believe and what I really do believe.

Gaylord Nelson, father of "Earth Day"

Spending the last two days at the “Earth Day at 40″ conference has made me proud to be a Wisconsinite. There are many reasons why Wisconsin gave birth to Earth Day forty years ago. But the most important can be summed up in four names: John Muir, Frederick Jackson Turner, Aldo Leopold, and Gaylord Nelson.

What an earth-loving tradition these four men created! John Muir — who grew up in Portage, Wisconsin and attended the University of Wisconsin — went on to found the Sierra Club, help protect Yosemite Valley, and urge us all to passionately engage with wilderness. As opposed to Muir — who immigrated from Scotland — Frederick Jackson Turner was born in Portage, Wisconsin. Like Muir, he studied at the University of Wisconsin, to which he returned as a professor. He’s best known for his “frontier thesis,” which suggested that Americans were formed by their experiences on the frontiers of our continent. His insight that a people and their culture could only be understood in connection with the land they inhabit has proven pivotal to what became the environmental movement years later.

I’m really excited to announce that my website has a new design and now features more content than it ever has before.

God Bless the Whole World is a free online educational resource that provides tools for personal and social transformation. The site feature hundreds of videos, audio files, articles and courses on social justice, spiritual activism, nonviolence, counter oppression, environmentalism and self care among many other subjects. For example you can watch a full length course on the African American Freedom Struggle taught by Stanford University professor Clayborne Carson or a class called Science, Magic and Religion from UCLA among many others. There are over 50 documentary films about Julia Butterfly Hill, Nietzsche, Nelson Mandela, Helen Keller, Buddha and Muhammad to name a few. And don’t miss great titles like Fog of War, Sicko and Guns, Germs and Steel. You can also watch talks by Van Jones, Michael Lerner, Arundhati Roy, Marianne Williamson, Thich Nhat Hanh, Dr. King, James Baldwin and Malcolm X in addition to hundreds more. In total there are well over 500 videos for your viewing pleasure. And I’m adding more every day. You can also read articles and speeches, explore podcasts, watch debates and listen to audio files.

I created the site because I’ve been extremely fortunate to have studied with, been mentored by and worked alongside some pioneers in the fields of social justice, spirituality, religion and counter oppression. I’ve invested a lot of time and money into my education and realize that many do not have the privileges that I have had to gain access to these opportunities. Thus, the goal of my site is to bring together the various people, ideas, resources and insights that have influenced me into an easy to use format that is free for the public. And the beautiful thing is that all of the material on my site is already available on the internet in some form or another. Universities are increasingly placing their full length courses on YouTube and in ItunesU. Organizations like TED have provided fascinating lectures by today’s leading thinkers. Full length documentary films are available online in addition to hundreds of talks, lectures and speeches by spiritual teachers, activists and visionaries.

Each week I will be posting to Tikkun a video with a short commentary that I’ve added to my website so be on the lookout. Additionally the site is always “under construction” so please feel free to send suggestions, ideas, links, design insights, resources…etc that you would like to see on the site. You can email them to godblessthewholeworld@gmail.com.

Dr. Dorothy Brewster-Lee is based in Arusha, Tanzania, and oversees Catholic Relief Services (CRS)-supported programs for orphans and vulnerable children in six countries with high prevalence rates for HIV. Photo by Kai T. Hill/CRS

A terminal case of patriarchy or a vibrant source of love and revolutionary potential? In case you missed it, Nicholas Kristoff got the Catholic Church just right in his last column, “A Church Mary Can Love.” It’s both. (I’m hardly an expert but I was happy to ask one or two Catholics who are, whom I met today at an interfaith conference on global poverty at St Mary’s Catholic cathedral in San Francisco: they shared my pleasure at the column). On the one hand, says Kristoff:

The Catholic Church still seems stuck today in that patriarchal rut. The same faith that was so pioneering that it had Junia as a female apostle way back in the first century can’t even have a woman as the lowliest parish priest. Female deacons, permitted for centuries, are banned today…

Lety, a Guatemalan who was able to avoid transmitting her HIV to her sons, thanks to antiretroviral therapy and prenatal care from CRS. Photo: Sara A Fajardo/CRS

On the other hand:

Yet there’s another Catholic Church as well, one I admire intensely. This is the grass-roots Catholic Church that does far more good in the world than it ever gets credit for. This is the church that supports extraordinary aid organizations like Catholic Relief Services and Caritas, saving lives every day, and that operates superb schools that provide needy children an escalator out of poverty.

This is the church of the nuns and priests in Congo, toiling in obscurity to feed and educate children. This is the church of the Brazilian priest fighting AIDS who told me that if he were pope, he would build a condom factory in the Vatican to save lives.

This is the church of the Maryknoll Sisters in Central America and the Cabrini Sisters in Africa. There’s a stereotype of nuns as stodgy Victorian traditionalists. I learned otherwise while hanging on for my life in a passenger seat as an American nun with a lead foot drove her jeep over ruts and through a creek in Swaziland to visit AIDS orphans. After a number of encounters like that, I’ve come to believe that the very coolest people in the world today may be nuns.

Photo by Katya Dreyer-Oren

How should future religious leaders be trained so that they can at once be rooted in their traditions and equipped to work with people of others? This question has been asked with increased urgency, as American theological seminaries have tried to adapt to what has become the most religiously diverse country in history. Answers have proven somewhat elusive.

This week, from April 14 – 16, a group of remarkable visionaries and emerging inter-religious leaders convened at Andover Newton Theological School and Hebrew College to discuss potential answers during the pioneering CIRCLE National Conference 2010. Participants included Brad Hirshfield, co-Founder of CLAL: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, Ingrid Mattson, Director of the Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations at Hartford Seminary and Executive Director of the Islamic Society of North America, and Stephen Graham, Director of Faculty Development and Initiatives in Theological Education at the Association of Theological Schools.

It seemed fitting to hold the conference jointly at two of the few seminaries to cohabitate the same campus and maintain a close administrative and curricular relationship. Students at Hebrew College and Andover Newton can cross-register for courses, while several classes are team-taught by professors from both institutions. The campus also houses the Center for Interreligious and Communal Leadership Education (CIRCLE), whose “mission is to nurture a new generation of moral and spiritual leaders equipped for service in a religiously diverse world” through a fellowship program, leadership training, and inter-campus initiatives and programs. Its administrators, Dr. Jennifer Peace and Rabbi Or Rose, saw the conference as a natural extension of their work.

Last week, I had the privilege of reading from my novel, Hold Love Strong, at Pete’s Candystore, a great venue in Brooklyn, a few blocks from 334 Manhattan Avenue, where once I lived in the middle of a friend’s apartment and often climbed the fire escape to the roof where I began to piece my life back together; or rather, began the process of reflection and self-possession necessary for living a full and meaningful life. After I read, Nadia and I had the chance to speak with Mira Jacobs, one of the curators of the event and a mother to a one-and-a-half-year-old son, Zakir, a name that means remembering and/or grateful. Talking about new motherhood, pregnancy, and childbirth, Nadia repeated a phrase a friend had recently said to her, and although she meant it in reference to having a baby, it is, I think, at the very core to the solutions of our present social and political problems, and thus what we — those of us who wish for a peaceful, humane world if not for ourselves then for our children — must do and anchor ourselves to in order for there to be the chance for the world we can imagine, the world we deserve.

“Be ready,” she said, “for overwhelming joy.”

Recently I talked with a friend about why he harbors so much resentment towards his partner and their 13 year old child, that he sometimes reacts with intense anger to relatively minor snappy expressions. My friend, let’s call him Fred, wanted to free himself from the grip of unconsciously chosen anger, so he could choose how to respond.

Invisible Contracts
As we talked, Fred recognized that it’s highly unlikely that he can transcend his reactivity in the moment. It’s almost always too late. The moment of true power is earlier, when he makes his own choices about what he will or will not do.

Fred suffers from a common affliction I like to call being “overly nice.” Simply put, Fred tends to stretch towards his partner and his child, or say “yes” to what they ask of him. That “yes” often comes with an expectation, usually unconscious, that they will appreciate him later. Then, when they don’t show appreciation, he can easily experience it as a breach of an invisible contract they don’t even know they signed! No wonder he gets so angry.

I need to say more than I said yesterday about what is deeply wrong with this statement of Krugman’s:

If ours were a preindustrial, primarily agricultural society, extreme climate change would be obviously catastrophic. But we have an advanced economy, the kind that has historically shown great ability to adapt to changed circumstances.

But first, I don’t want to be a doom-monger or to have Tikkun Daily too associated with predictions of doom. For reasons I don’t understand, but that are deep in Christian culture especially, European cultures have a strong affinity to predictions of doom. These seem to me to be connected to a dark view of human nature, as embodied in the Christian doctrine of original sin (which is not held by Jews or Muslims). In my youth I was so oppressed by the dooms-du-jour that I cultivated a personal deathwish. It took me a long time to get over it.

I think many of us are vulnerable personally to reading about how bad climate disruption may be. So let me praise Krugman before getting to my criticism. The beauty of Krugman’s major article last Sunday on climate change is how hopeful it is about our ability to pay for the changes we need to make to avert climate catastrophies. My wife asked me yesterday whether I would encourage our son to have children if he wants to some day. She knows I rejected the idea myself as a young man because of the horrors of this world, current and future, and we are both very aware of how bad climate change could be. I had no hesitation saying I would encourage him to have children, because I believe our civilization has to change deeply but does not have to collapse, and Krugman’s type of thinking is a significant strand in that hope. Just as the dooms that I allowed to oppress me in my twenties–endless population explosion, resource depletion, nuclear war and winter–did not materialize in their worst forms, so climate change need not in my son’s and hopefully my grandchildren’s lifetimes, or ever.

I think nothing right now is more important than the cultivation of hope, and of belief in our abilities to refocus our lives on what matters: empathy for each other, love of all living things. But the hope needs to be based on reality, not on wishful thinking.

Three paragraphs of caveats! Now to why Krugman’s statement above is the purest wishful thinking.

There seems to be general praise from environmental blogs for Krugman’s major article on the economics of dealing with climate change in last Sunday’s New York Times. Krugman accepts the climate scientists’ consensus about the dangers of global warming and argues that it will actually be relatively cheap to prevent the worst of it happening. It’s been a hard week for me to do any research on this, with getting our next issue to press. So I haven’t had time to hunt around much and find anyone else having the same reaction I did to the article.

Which was: Do Krugman and I live in the same planet as regards the effects of a nine degree rise in temperature by 2100? Krugman reports the scientific consensus that this is what we are looking at if we don’t get our act together to reduce carbon emissions fast. But then he writes:

While there may be some benefits from a warmer climate, it seems almost certain that upheaval on this scale would make the United States, and the world as a whole, poorer than it would be otherwise. How much poorer? If ours were a preindustrial, primarily agricultural society, extreme climate change would be obviously catastrophic. But we have an advanced economy, the kind that has historically shown great ability to adapt to changed circumstances. If this sounds similar to my argument that the costs of emissions limits would be tolerable, it ought to: the same flexibility that should enable us to deal with a much higher carbon prices should also help us cope with a somewhat higher average temperature.

But surely it’s the other way round. We have such a sophisticated economy that the loss of Lehman Bros can almost send us spiraling into a Great Depression. What do we do when we lose Bangladesh, Mumbai, South Florida and Louisiana, vast territories that now produce crops become dust bowls, vast territories that are now too cold to farm have to be put to the plow and hundreds of millions of people moved to them, across political borders so that the nation state system becomes unable to cope? We lose only five percent of gross world product? Or do we lose half of humanity?

Rob Katz just sent me a link to this amazing video, with music from his CD called Renewal. Wow.

Two weeks ago, my father’s dementia worsened and his legs seemed to be swelling up so I called his local VA clinic and they got me in to see a nurse practitioner the next day. She didn’t like the looks of things so she ordered a bunch of tests and asked me if I could head up to the VA Hospital in SF to get a sonogram. 45 minutes later he had the sonogram, all the other blood and urine tests, and we were waiting in the pharmacy for a prescription. Someone called out my name and I walked over thinking it was time to pick up Dad’s drugs. “The nurse practitioner called and said she thought it would be good for your father to get a chest X-ray too, could you go upstairs right now and get one?” Yes.

One of the rationales for the war in Afghanistan is that under the Taliban it was a state that oppressed women and denied them their freedoms. Unquestionably, the Taliban government did deny many of the freedoms that women have won in the west and that are now taken for granted: the freedom to vote, to be educated, to dress as they choose. But freedom is a tricky concept: in some countries, such as Australia one isn’t free not to vote – it is compulsory and there are fines if one doesn’t. In all countries children (or their parents) aren’t free to choose to not be educated – up to a certain age they have to be in school. And increasingly, women are free to not wear a niqab (a veil that obscures their faces) – but they aren’t free to choose to wear one. Freedom is peculiar when it only allows you to make whatever choice the state wants.

I just ran across this peculiar tale of IRS-love in the New Mexico Independent. It seems that a group of Albuquerque seniors decided to wage a rally in support of the IRS after learning it was targetted for a Tax Day tea-party protest.

Tea partiers are saying they actually like the IRS and were holding an unrelated rally in a different spot. I guess the school-loving, sidewalk-hugging grannies and gramps must be suffering from Alzheimers…

From today’s New York Times:

For the first time in decades, researchers are reporting a significant drop worldwide in the number of women dying each year from pregnancy and childbirth, to about 342,900 in 2008 from 526,300 in 1980.

But some advocates for women’s health wanted The Lancet, British medical journal that reported the research, to suppress the news until a couple of major meetings at the UN and in Washington DC on maternal health had been held. They thought the good news would detract from the urgency of their cause. Fortunately the editor of the journal disagreed, saying he thought the news helped their cause rather than hindered it. At least one activist agreed:

An advocate for women’s health, Dr. Flavia Bustreo, director of the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, said the improvements described in the new report represented “hope at last.” She said her organization, affiliated with the World Health Organization, was not one of those that tried to delay release of the findings.

She said the report was well done and called The Lancet a “scrupulously” edited journal. She said the findings made sense and were consistent with other reports from large countries like India, which can drive global figures.

“For 20 years, the safe motherhood movement has been conveying an impression of no progress,” Dr. Bustreo said. “To hear confirmation of improvements is good news. To us, the good news will maintain the interest of investors. If you don’t show results, that’s the worst position you can be in. The evidence and scientific truths have to be put in the open and discussed.”

Who was right on this? I can’t say. I am just very oriented myself towards wanting to know the good news. I’m the kind of person who is more motivated by bad news + hope than by bad news alone.

The Nuclear Security Summit that brought leaders of 47 countries to Washington, D.C. to discuss ways to secure nuclear materials is a just peace means to a just peace end.

Just peace theory holds that peacemaking is a day by day, step by step process.  It begins with the understanding that respectful and equitable relationships between individuals and between nations will provide a structure that invites cooperation rather than conflict.  And, when disagreement does happen, when interests collide, there is a method to find a satisfactory solution for all involved.  The goal is to work together to find a way to build a better world.

I don’t read the Onion very frequently but this recent headline story captured my attention and sparked my imagination as a powerful way to reflect upon U.S. Imperialism and Nationalism. However, the article with its suggestion to discontinue the use of the flag may stir up some questions even for progressives as many seek a balance between what they love and dislike about America. But at the end of the day the story is a creative use of satire to get people thinking about the U.S. flag, patriotism and nationalism – especially in the age of Obama, drones and Apache helicopters used to gun down journalists. And just to add a little fuel to the fire I will end with a quote from Leo Tolstoy from his essay “Patriotism and Government” which was the first thing I read at age 19 that introduced me to something other than the nationalistic fervor that surrounded me at the time. He wrote, “I have already several times expressed the thought that in our day the feeling of patriotism is an unnatural, irrational, and harmful feeling, and a cause of a great part of the ills from which mankind is suffering, and that, consequently, this feeling–should not be cultivated, as is now being done, but should, on the contrary, be suppressed and eradicated by all means available to rational men.”

The Onion – April 13th, “U.S. Flag Recalled After Causing 143 Million Deaths”

WASHINGTON—Citing a series of fatal malfunctions dating back to 1777, flag manufacturer Annin & Company announced Monday that it would be recalling all makes and models of its popular American flag from both foreign and domestic markets.

Representatives from the nation’s leading flag producer claimed that as many as 143 million deaths in the past two centuries can be attributed directly to the faulty U.S. models, which have been utilized extensively since the 18th century in sectors as diverse as government, the military, and public education.

“It has come to our attention that, due to the inherent risks and hazards it poses, the American flag is simply unfit for general use,” said Annin & Company president Ronald Burman, who confirmed that the number of flag-related deaths had noticeably spiked since 2003. “I would like to strongly urge all U.S. citizens: If you have an American flag hanging in your home or place of business, please discontinue using it immediately.”

Meredith Gould is holding a fascinating conversation with Jesuit priest, publisher and blogger Paul Brian Campbell over on their two blogs.

I have quoted Meredith here before, about her description of herself as “Jewish in identity, Christian in faith, and Catholic in religious practice” and her comments on Catholic bishops’ blunders in relations with Jews.

Paul started off by asking Meredith “Why do you choose to stay in the Catholic church when it appears to be in crisis?” It’s a good question for someone who was not born and raised in a religion but chose it as an adult. Meredith converted from Judaism. I myself converted from being part of an intense religious movement to happily being part of no group at all. It took me decades to rejoin anything. So I am interested in what keeps people belonging — to anything; and it brings back to me the conflicted feelings I had when I became a citizen of this country. Why do I stay American, when my government is torturing and pursuing unjust wars? It may feel like we have less choice about our nationality than our religion, but there are ways of changing it.

Slightly confusingly to me, Meredith and Paul post on each other’s blogs, not their own. Some quotes to give the flavor about why each of them stays Catholic:

Paul:
The cynical and, sadly, partly true answer to your question is learned apathy and inertia. I feel so bludgeoned by what has been happening in the Church since the sexual abuse scandal started coming to light, that I sometimes feel like a turtle that has withdrawn into its shell and is waiting a long time before attempting to stick its neck out again. There have been moments when I’ve been tempted to flee to some cleaner and tidier form of Christianity like the Episcopal Church or the Quakers…

Permaculture is a movement whose time has arrived. We’re all concerned about “global weirding” (climate change), and according to Starhawk, permaculture offers a set of simple solutions to this problem. In my last post (and the accompanying video), Starhawk talked specifically about how permaculture would sequester carbon in the soil.

Carbon Farmers of America is a group that’s taking this issue seriously. Star explained that they’re funding research to discover the best practices for large-scale building of soil and paying farmers for every ton of carbon dioxide they capture in new topsoil by marketing carbon sinks to the public to fund the work. Topsoil has the capacity as a carbon sink to capture the excess carbon in our atmosphere. And our soils desperately need that carbon. So this group is creating a win-win situation, really taking the permaculture saying “Pollution is the solution,” and applying it directly to “global warming” and topsoil depletion.

Mike Godbe, a young American on a free Birthright tour of Israel, continues his diary and photos of the tour, reporting his experiences and the ways the tour staff present the history and politics of the country. Earlier posts from East Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Masada, Mt. Herzl, Jerusalem, a kibbutz, and Caesaria can be accessed by clicking the corresponding links.

March 21, 2010 – Hebron

I have been putting off writing this post about my visit to Hebron because I do not feel sure of myself in conveying the power of the experience, or communicating what I witnessed daily life in Hebron to be. For the Palestinians that hosted me, fed me, and showed me around, it is important that I bring their stories outside Hebron. For me, as someone who spent less than a week in the West Bank, I feel it would be wrong to simply be a tourist in a place where travel is so restricted. So I want to do my part, and do right by the people I met. This is my attempt to tell part of their story as I experienced it for a day.