Donkey (photo by Antoine Moreau)

You’ve got to admire the creativity of the Jerusalem municipal official who tried to have a “donkey pride” run alongside Jerusalem’s gay pride parade this past week. He clearly loves the animals so much that he would honor them by inviting them to join Jerusalem’s much-beloved gay community in celebration. Oops, cancel that. He was attempting to put together a parallel donkey parade in order to illustrate the “bestial nature” of gays. And I thought it was a donkey-rights thing! (I guess if donkeys get rights, everyone will want them.)

Seriously, though, this homophobic action speaks volumes about at least one aspect of the nature of homophobia: the practice of reducing LGBT people to our bodies and denying us our souls. Calling someone a beast, after all, really says that all they have is brute physicality. No sensitivity. No yearnings. No pain. No God.

Reducing LGBT people to our bodies is morally wrong for many reasons, reasons that involve both justice and the spirit. I’ll stick with three such reasons in this post.

Because that’s really what this is all about, isn’t it? Publicity. Let’s face it, burning books has never been an effective way to quell the public’s thirst for knowledge, nor has it been an effective means to destroy ideas you don’t agree with. But that isn’t stopping the feisty folks at the Dove World Outreach Center from declaring 9/11 Official Koran Burning Day. (They even offer “Islam is of the Devil” T-shirts on their website that you can wear to your local book-burning event!)

The “Christians” who run and support this “church” aren’t really concerned with religious dialogue or spreading the Word of God as much as they are getting publicity. Lest we Muslims feel picked on, we must remember that Dove World Outreach Center has also engaged in this same kind of…uh…outreach with other groups including homosexuals and pro-choice advocates. Apparently, their idea of ministry involves condemnation, destruction and name-calling. (I’m not even going to go in to the [alleged] for-profit ventures and practices regarding unpaid labor by church members.)

Anyone who has had the benefit of knowing Christians who actually practice the tenets of the Bible knows that this group’s actions are about as close to Jesus’ teachings as the rabid Mullahs overseas preaching violent hate are to the peaceful message of Islam. Which is not at all.

Look, as a Muslim I’d love to get all riled up over this flagrant disrespect for our holy book. I’d love to be incensed that the Dove World Outreach Center is calling us and our noble faith tradition evil. But I can’t even manage a little bit of indignation. Because it’s stupid. It’s not even an eloquent argument or informed protest. It’s just some angry people having a spiteful little tantrum.

The Qur’an is a marvelous gift to humanity. But if you choose to burn it rather than read it, it really is your loss. God is a lot bigger than a book and has assured us that He has his own way of dealing with people who choose to disrespect His Message. I have faith that He can handle it.

In the meantime, if you are interested in actually reading a Qur’an, I’m pleased to be able to offer you the following links:

The Message of the Qur’an by Muhammad Asad – Qur’anic text, translation and commentary.

This is my personal favorite translation in print.

The Qur’an Online In Three English Translations (Pickthal, Yusufali, Shakir)

An excellent compilation from the University of Southern California’s Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement.

Listen to Qur’an Online

An online tool that lets you listen to the Qur’an being recited in Arabic. You get to choose between three different reciters and can read along in your language’s translation in subtitles.

Share a Qur’an Everyday

A Facebook page set up in response to the negative “Burn a Koran on 9/11″ page. When you subscribe to this page you’ll get to read inspiring surahs from the Qur’an each day.

Pity the discipline of economics! It has tried so hard to win the respect of all as a “science.” It even gets an annual prize in Sweden mimicking the Nobel Prizes for natural sciences. That may assuage its “physics envy” for a while. For most of us, however, economics is the “Rain Man” of academia. It has an impressive command of models and facts, and yet seems to be strangely out of sync with the realities of economic life. How do we explain this?

Over at The Distributist Review, John Médaille offers a few suggestions on this in the course of his review of a new book by Robert E. Prasch, How Markets Work: Supply, Demand and the ‘Real World.’ I have not yet read Prasch’s book. If, however, Médaille’s review does it justice, then How Markets Work should be in every progressive’s library. The reason is that it seems to offer a paradigm shift in thinking about how supply and demand determine prices and, most importantly of all, wages.

James Cone

Though I’m a white non-Christian I experienced Glenn Beck’s recent diatribe against “dangerous” Black Liberation Theology as a personal insult. I went to Union Theological Seminary, the home of James Cone, and a founding author of Black Liberation Theology. As a Jewish student entering Protestant Union Theological Seminary I was a minority. Not surprisingly it waswith Union’s black evangelical students that I felt the greatest measure of acceptance. Many of these students came to Union to learn how to integrate their evangelical faith with Cone’s theology.

Prior to my time at Union like many liberals I associated the term “evangelical” with two things: conservative politics and angry white people from the red states. I assumed that the being “born again” meant that you became a registered Republican. It was my encounter with black evangelical students that changed my views. I quickly learned that one could be a self defined “evangelical” and also an advocate for social justice.

Original to Tikkun:

by Jonathan Granoff and Rhianna Tyson Kreger

A few years ago, Lawrence Bender and Jeffrey Skoll set out to make a new documentary about nuclear weapons, a film which would act as a wake up call to the imperative of nuclear abolition, just as their last project, An Inconvenient Truth, galvanized public discourse – and action – surrounding climate change. Teamed up with policy expert Bruce Blair and Writer-Director Lucy Walker (Devil’s Playground, Blindsight) they created the newly released Countdown to Zero, which unequivocally argues that, whether by accident, malicious intent of “terrorists” or as a result of failed diplomacy, nuclear weapons pose an unacceptable risk and must be eliminated.

While scores of arms control and disarmament civil society groups are deeply inspired by the mass consciousness-raising and mobilization opportunity the film presents, many disarmament activists are vocally disappointed with the film. They are concerned that the film overemphasizes the hazard of sub-state actors acquiring these weapons of terror and places insufficient responsibility upon countries like the US and Russia for their continued reliance on– and dangerous posture of– nuclear weapons.

Countdown to Zero makes the case for abolition without employing the moral arguments eloquently posited by luminaries such as Albert Schweitzer, or Cold Warrior George Kennan, who once stated:

The readiness to use nuclear weapons against other human beings – against people we do not know, whom we have never seen, and whose guilt or innocence is not for us to establish – and, in doing so, to place in jeopardy the natural structure upon which all civilization rests, as though the safety and perceived interests of our own generation were more important than everything that has taken place or could take place in civilization: this is nothing less than a presumption, a blasphemy, an indignity- an indignity of monstrous dimensions – offered to God!

Indeed the film omits many valid arguments highly relevant to advancing to the security of a world without nuclear weapons:

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel different, even when I was very young. Being different is as familiar to me as breathing and eating. Last week, as part of the Institute for Sacred Activism I attended, I experienced a major shift in relating to being different. Because the path I am walking is the path of vulnerability, and because I have some hope that what I experienced may be of use to others, I decided to write in some detail about the opening that happened and about what I learned as a result.

Let me start from the end. I have had a storyline for most of my conscious life that says there is no room for me in the world. What I came to see this past week is that I can be different and there can still be room for me. I also had a shocking realization that the idea that there is no room for me leads to feeling separate, and has been hampering my effectiveness in the world.

This week’s spiritual comes from Vietnamese Buddhist monk and leader in engaged Buddhism Thich Nhat Hanh. Both poems come from “Call Me By My True Names: The Collected Poetry of Thich Nhat Hanh.”

WALKING MEDITATION

Take my hand.
We will walk.
We will only walk.
We will enjoy our walk
without thinking of arriving anywhere.
Walk peacefully.
Walk happily.
Our walk is a peace walk.
Our walk is a happiness walk.

Galen Guengerich, Senior Minister of All Souls (Unitarian Universalist) Church in New York City, thinks so. At the recently completed General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association in Minneapolis, he posed, elaborated, and defended this position for Unitarian Universalists (UUs) in an eight-part series of well-attended talks. (Ideas discussed in this post may be found in this sermon that Rev. Guengerich delivered prior to General Assembly and that overlaps with his first talk at G.A.)

A More Demanding Spirituality

Character, as Guengerich conceives it, is about asking more of ourselves than an “anything goes” spiritual multiculturalism does. It’s about self-discipline. He thinks that people are looking for a more demanding form of spirituality than is conveyed by the answer “we have no creed” often given by lay UU’s to the question “but what do UU’s believe?”

Guengerich is reasonably concerned about the fate of his own denomination. Although some UU congregations have grown recently, over-all the denomination has numerically stagnated – it has not grown in absolute numbers since Unitarians and Universalists joined forces in 1961, yet in the same period the U.S. population has doubled. But the challenges to “religious liberal” or “spiritually progressive” values are greater now than ever, as indicated by the influence of the religious right even after it suffered from its association with the political meltdown of the Bush II Administration. Guengerich thinks that if UU’s and their social witness are to make a real difference, we need to consider what an ethics of character has to offer.

Racial Profiling, by Gary Oliver (golliver@sbcglobal.net)

A judge agrees! “Judge Blocks Key Parts of Immigration Law in Arizona.” Judge Susan Bolton said:

“There is a substantial likelihood that officers will wrongfully arrest legal resident aliens,” she wrote. “By enforcing this statute, Arizona would impose a ‘distinct, unusual and extraordinary’ burden on legal resident aliens that only the federal government has the authority to impose.”

Also nice to get this email today:

On Eve of Anti-Immigrant Arizona Law Taking Effect, U.S. Faith Leaders Descend on State

Launch Coordinated Weekend of Protest

TODAY at 2 p.m. EDT, religious leaders from across the country, all of whom are in Arizona to protest SB-1070– the anti-immigrant law there, will hold a telephone press conference to denounce the law, which is scheduled to go into effect on Thursday, and unveil their weekend of coordinated action to stand against punitive laws that divide families and communities. These faith leaders will stand alongside hundreds of other people of faith who are leading events in several cities as part of the National Weekend of Prayer and Action for Immigrant Justice, coordinated by Interfaith Worker Justice July 29- August 1.

The people were sick and tired of being sick and tired. They had come to the conclusion that they wanted a government that protected their health and wellbeing. They organized from coast to coast to tell their representatives that they were taking the blindfolds off and were no longer going to stand for their elected representatives serving the interests of the gas and oil industry at their expense.

It was a movie that woke the people in Gasland. The movie told the story of a group of faceless executives who had come into the lives of the good people of Gasland and offered them and their neighbors money to allow oil and gas companies to inject thousands of gallons of water and toxic chemicals into the ground to extract natural gas, a process called hydraulic fracturing. They were given money for the rights to use this method of extraction on their property. They did not know that the chemicals would contaminate their drinking water, that natural gas would come out of their taps so that they could light the water on fire. They did not expect muddy water to flow from their taps as a result. They did not expect to have to buy water from Wal Mart. They did not expect that they would be afraid that their homes would explode underneath them.

My mother-in-law thinks we are crazy, taking half a day off work to cook, serve, and clean up for around 50-100 homeless folks who come to our church on Wednesdays. We only do this once every five weeks, part of a rotation of folks who make sure that there’s a hot meal for homeless folks in Palo Alto every day. Yes, at the end of our six hour shift I am pretty exhausted, more so, it seems, now that a decade has passed since we started. But crazy? No. We still get a lot out of it. So why am I going on and on about this and how does the title of this post fit in? Easy. The guy who got us started doing this homeless meal just wrote a lovely “musing” about homelessness, mental illness, spirituality, and toasters, and I thought I would share it with you all.

But before you click to read more, please say a prayer for our friend Susan, one of our meal team members, who is having surgery today to remove a cyst from her spleen. She wants to be surrounded by prayer as she heads into the operating room.

And now you can read the rest of the story. Read on!

A DIY (do it yourself) art movement is spreading in opposition to the capitalist trends of the “high art” realm. It’s a movement that kindles idealistic hopes for the possibilities of art, even amid the reality of the contemporary art world’s elitism and market-driven nature.

Many DIY artists and collectives are functioning on local, community levels to create projects that benefit the communities in which they are working. Richard Shilling is a fine example of one of these DIY artists.

As I sat in Daniel Ellsberg’s home listening to Medea Benjamin talk about the debacle that was Iraq after the U.S. invasion,  having myself recently returned from visiting the destruction in Afghanistan, I wondered who would be the 21st Century Ellsberg. Who would leak the truth about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Now we know the answer. WikiLeaks. 90,000 pages of mostly classified documents have been leaked to the press and posted on the web about the war in Afghanistan and Amy Goodman’s program Democracy Now has a round table to discuss it.

Many years ago, when I was struggling to understand the smoke-and-mirrors world of corporate journalism, a Washington, D.C., veteran passed on to me a bit of wisdom:

When I was a reporter, an old PR pro once told me something. He said ‘You come to the press conferences and you listen, and the first mistake you make is that you think we’re lying. You discover we’re not lying. Then you make a greater mistake. You think we’re telling the truth.’ (1)

In Part I of examining the Catholic Crisis, I tried to point out the problem with this greater mistake. We examined the falsity within the partial truths of the meta-stories in pop culture, these simplistic, black-and-white constructs that make the world safe and understandable. We picked apart the assumptions blended with facts in one of last week’s news story that made it seem the Vatican thinks the ordaining of women is as bad as priests who sexually abuse children.

Now, we turn to a more difficult side of the partial truth: the way in which it is true. The truth within the partial truth poses a challenge to human understanding, because it is so difficult to face that our mind wants nothing more than to jump to quick and easy explanations, to construct meta-stories of some kind. But if we do this, we avoid the paradox that can, with struggle, force us to mature.

This remarkable video captures the scene at an unusual demonstration: one where the police make no attempt to separate the two sides. Those defending a convicted policeman’s reputation and those attacking the system as racist are vehemently opposed to each other. Without police lines between them, people engage at close quarters, shout insults and even talk and answer each other’s points, nose to nose. It looks like the police should stand back at more demos, and let this happen. People want to speak at and to each other and some even listen.

What makes it even more remarkable is that the videographer has an agenda: he asks everyone what they think about empathy.

If you have followed the latest news, you might think that the Catholic Church has just made changes to “equate” the the sexual abuse of children with ordaining women as priests.

That’s what the New York Times told us over a week ago:

VATICAN CITY – The Vatican issued revisions to its internal laws on Thursday making it easier to discipline sex-abuser priests, but caused confusion by also stating that ordaining women as priests was as grave an offense as pedophilia.

The decision to link the issues appears to reflect the determination of embattled Vatican leaders to resist any suggestion that pedophilia within the priesthood can be addressed by ending the celibacy requirement or by allowing women to become priests.

Naturally, if you take this report at face value, as I did and many others have, including some on Tikkun Daily, you would think that the Church must be run by people who are either overtly evil or mentally ill. So I started looking into this episode. The more I looked, the more complicated it became.

Protest against sexual abuse of children by priests (flickr.cc/Steve Rhodes)

After investigating it this week, as a veteran journalist and a Catholic, I think I found the real culprit in this story. The real culprit is a spiritual virus of our times: the partial truth.

The partial truth has two lives. In its first life, it is a partial lie. It creates a false frame for the debate, makes moralistic dichotomies and leads to simplistic, destructive decisions. In its second life, it also contains some truth. The truthful side of a partial truth needs to be confronted honestly in its true depth so that understanding can develop and real solutions sought. But the lying quality of the partial truth has so confused and distorted the debate that an honest search for a solution has become all the more difficult and even derailed.

Gay-friendly church (photo by Drama Queen)

Once every few weeks, rather than writing a standard blog post, I will use my space to catch readers up on some of the national and global news about faith and LGBT issues.

Read about the seven Evangelical Lutheran Church of America pastors, previously barred from serving but now welcome, here.

Read about the decision of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to send its presbyteries a proposal to allow LGBT clergy here.

The greatest division in America today lies between people who have genuine political values, like Shirley Sherrod, and people who live by images and market values, like Fox News and like the Obama administration. Of course, it is true, that people like Sherrod are rare. But as Bob Moses used to say when in 1960 he first ventured into the frozen heart of segregationist Mississippi, if we could find ten people willing to die, we could end segregation in America. Charles Sherrod, Shirley Sherrod – that made two; Bob made three, and the other seven were eventually found.

Anyone who listens to Shirley Sherrod’s extraordinary speech will recognize in it the authentic cadence of the civil rights movement. Born in rural Georgia, Sherrod spent her childhood ogling Northern Negroes who visited the South in rented Cadillacs. She swore to herself that she would leave the farm, leave rural life, leave Georgia and go North but all that changed when, in 1965, when Sherrod was seventeen, her father was murdered. She swore to stay in the South and devote her life to civil rights, which she did. Sherrod’s decision echoed the deepest moment of the civil rights movement, not Thurgood Marshall’s magnificent and ultimately successful pleas before the Supreme Court, not Martin Luther King’s transcendent and soul-uplifting leadership of the Atlanta and Birmingham marches, but those young, mostly but not entirely black kids, who left school, left jobs, left home and went to live in segregated, rural black neighborhoods, over which pistol-toting sheriffs and plantation bullies ruled with impunity.

There is a name for what people like Sherrod did: community organizing.

I guess I’m not alone in sometimes being mystified by myself and my reactions. I want to be a peace-maker – yet I sometimes lose my cool, and can provoke others to rage, without meaning to. I am part of an inter-faith committee in Geneva, Switzerland, the city where I live. We’ve built up some good friendships, relationships across divides – but the tensions in the world beyond our borders often touch us. Which is no big surprise. At one meeting, with a full agenda, I was trying to hurry things along, to encourage the chair to cut short a debate that I saw as going round in circles. Two Muslim friends stormed out of the meeting, one of them saying that they’d had enough of colonial attitudes…

I can easily forget that I’m British, and that others may see in me part of the colonial past that for me is ancient history, not personal experience. I also learned afresh that some old hurts lie like nerves very close to the skin, and I forget that at my peril.

At another meeting, a Buddhist nun made a for me rather patronising remark about the monotheistic faiths being responsible for so much of the violence in the world, unlike her own more pacified tradition. I hit back with ‘What about Buddhist religious extremism in Sri Lanka?’ I knew nothing, I was told, the Buddhists were simply defending themselves and responding to Hindu terrorism. And I was off into another spiral of anger and violence of my own. And again, I had to swallow my pride and apologise.

But I’d rather go through the anger and apologies, and live in the real, than just avoid all conflict and resolutely stick to the polite and superficial.

Rabbi Brian Walt is the Executive Director of Rabbis for Human Rights North America and was the founding Rabbi of JRF Congregation Mishkan Shalom in Philadelphia, PA. He sent us this post for Tikkun Daily, from his own blog today. Goldstone’s report and the anger directed at him has been a major issue for us: e.g., see Michael Lerner’s interview with Goldstone.

On Rabbinic Integrity: “Principles, truth and justice before ethnic or group loyalty”

By Rabbi Brian Walt

Now that the official Israeli response has confirmed several of the most shocking events described in the Goldstone report, Allister Sparks, a prominent South African journalist, has publicly challenged members of the South African Jewish community and Rabbi Warren Goldstein, the Chief Rabbi of South Africa, in particular, to apologize for their public attack on Judge Goldstone. (The American Jewish leadership and community was as vicious in its attack on Judge Goldstone.)

Israel’s report confirms several of the egregious moral violations described in the Report including a lethal attack on a mosque during a prayer service, on a house where a family with 100 members was hiding on the orders of Israel Defense Force, and the killing of a Palestinian holding a white flag by an Israeli marksmen. Sparks writes: