St. Peter's Basilica; photo by Myrabella

As part of its announcement about new laws disciplining child-abuser priests, the Vatican revealed yesterday that it would treat child abuse by priests and the ordination of women to the priesthood as equally grievous offenses against the Catholic Church. Also included in the list of offenses at this level, by the way, are heresy, apostasy and schism.

Moreover, survivor advocate groups have indicated that the new laws on disciplining pedophile priests are not substantial enough to address the problem at its root, that they are a “tweaking” rather than the deep change truly needed.

Spiritual and religious progressives may well find both of these outcomes disturbing, heartbreaking, and infuriating. For feminists and others who support women in the priesthood, the cause for pain and anger is clear; similarly so for survivors of priestly pedophilia. But I think we can go even farther and say that both the Vatican’s refusal to overhaul the disciplinary rules and its comparison of pedophilia to women priests share a common moral failing: neither outcome is based on a pro-lives ethic.

Islam has a great tradition of appreciating and revering the earth. More than 700 verses in the Qur’an extort Muslims to reflect on the miracle of creation and make it clear that Allah views the earth as its own entity with the right to be protected and cared for. It even goes so far to say “Greater indeed than the creation of man is the creation of the heavens and the earth.” (40:57)

As Muslims, we understand that our submission to God is intrinsically tied to the way we treat His gift of life on this planet.  A peaceful, gentle reverence for plants, animals and landscapes are part of the fabric of our religion and translate beautifully through Islam’s strong foundation of social justice and activism.

Therefore, the environmental movement is one area where Muslims can make a huge contribution to society at large, and to productive interfaith dialogue.

For example, this month I contributed to a joint interfaith statement about Chemical Regulation Reform:

Interfaith Groups Speak Out on National Chemical Regulatory Reform

Amanda Quraishi, a member of Austin’s Muslim Community, said, “I think it is an ethical and moral imperative for average consumers to be informed on what we are buying and putting into our bodies. As a parent I feel an even greater responsibility to choose healthy foods and products for my children. I tend to support and buy from companies that identify, classify, and test their products for personal and environmental safety. Ideally, this kind of transparency would be the norm.”

Most concerned citizens would happily make a statement like this to voice their worries over the undisclosed exposure to unnatural chemical compounds that we are subjected to on a daily basis. But it is a great privileged to be able to make this statement as a Muslim because it lets me present the tenets of my faith in a positive, constructive and practical way. I am certain that my neighbors feel the same way, and the mutual respect and admiration that is created as we work together to protect the earth within our own faith traditions is miraculous in itself.

I had the chance to talk to Amanda Robinson, Coordinator of Texas Interfaith Power and Light, an environmental program of Texas Impact. When I asked her about her experience engaging various faith groups in environmental activism she told me, “What I see is that different communities are in different places on environmental issues – some have been very engaged and active for a long time, while others are just beginning to connect teachings from their religious tradition to concerns about the environment. Increasingly, people of all faiths are realizing that their tradition, whatever it is, has important things to say about care for the earth and care for other people, and that these concerns are interrelated.”

She continued, “There are many areas where teachings from different religious traditions converge in a shared concern, and environmental issues are one of these areas. The world’s great religious traditions all speak of care for the earth and its creatures. In the Abrahamic traditions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – there is a call to guardianship and care of creation. In the Eastern traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism, there is a profound sense of the interconnectedness of all life on earth. Although our traditions use different terms, the message on this subject is the same – it is a unified call for humans to care for the environment. On environmental issues, then, there is a lot of room for people of different faith traditions to work together in common cause.”

Learn more about Texas Interfaith Power and Light on the main website, or check out their Facebook page for current events and news about the organization. You can also email info@txipl.org.

NWP members picket the White House in 1917. The banner reads, "Mr. President, How Long Must Women Wait For Liberty."

This morning I had the pleasure of talking with Fran Luck on WBAI-FM , a Pacifica affiliate in NYC. Fran hosts the “Joy of Resistance,” a show that covers “the ongoing and world-wide struggle for the full liberation of women–as it continues to unfold dynamically in every country and culture on the planet.” She had read my original post about Sarah Palin and wanted to interview me about the parallels I saw between Palin’s “feminism” and the Nazi militants, about whom I wrote part of my dissertation. It was a great conversation.

I’m a conversation junkie. Nothing gets my mind going like talking with a knowledgeable person. That’s part of the reason I love Tikkun Daily. I interact with smart, informed folks who are just as interested as I am in the topics I write about.

Fran’s interest in my post was piqued by the fact that a group of women calling themselves “feminist” existed during the Third Reich. She brought Abby Scher into our discussion, because Abby has been researching women on the American Right for quite a while and edits “The Public Eye,” a quarterly publication that tracks right-wing movements.

Almost two months have passed since the June 10th attack on the Gaza Aid Flotilla. As a means of continuing to remember and honor those who died on that day, we have posted a video of the memorial the Network of Spiritual Progressives held during the 2010 conference in Washington D.C.. See the video here:

This June hundreds of members, organizers, and nationwide spiritual leaders joined forces in Washington, D.C., for a weekend conference of discussion, planning, and strategy. One of the many exciting conversations happened in the form of a rally in front of the White House urging Obama to be the Obama we voted for! See the video here:

On the Sunday, July 11^th edition of ABC’s “This Week”, the moderator, Jake Tapper, asked a panel of pundits their opinion of Sarah Palin’s online advertisement for her political action committee where she speaks about “mama grizzlies.” The female grizzly bear is noted for her fierce protection of her cubs. Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post called the ad “vapid “and “platitudinous”. George Will countered by saying that on the “vapid meter” it did not compare with a sentence in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

I respectfully beg to differ. Will’s judgment regarding the sentence served only to betray his own stunning supercilious ignorance. The sentence: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” derives from both Hopi wisdom and from a poem by the late Blackwoman activist, professor and poet June Jordan -”Poem for South African Women.” The poem has been set to music by the a cappella singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock. Writer Alice Walker used the last line in the poem: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” as the title for a book.

When I became a mother, I’d heard plenty about the terrible twos and the anguish of adolescence. The phrase empty nest syndrome was also well-known to me. But nothing and no one prepared me for having fully grown, independent children in their twenties who don’t consider it compulsory to call their parents once a week.

With my mother, the once a week call was an ironclad, if unspoken, rule. If I failed to call, she would call me, her voice cool, subtly reproachful, unsuccessfully denying a need which I now understand all too well. Sometimes I ask my children (with mock-incredulity) how they dare to flaunt this law of the universe? Occasionally I am more direct: call me once a week. So far it hasn’t happened.

I once had lunch with an advice columnist for a local paper. “Ask me something,” she said. “I get tired of making up my own questions.” OK,” I agreed. “How do I get my adult children to call me?” This veteran mother and grandmother looked at me as if I were an idiot: “You don’t,” she told me. “Leave them alone. They’re busy.”

Sometimes a review of a book is a good substitute, for those with limited time, for actually reading the book. This may be the case with what appears to be a thoughtful review by Bernard Porter of a new book by Sasha Polakow-Suransky, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa. Although the book does not seem to concern itself with the extent to which Israeli society itself is similar to apartheid South Africa, the reviewer discusses that question in passing, noting disanalogies. Not discussed, so far as I can tell, is whether the term “global apartheid” can be applied to the global socioeconomic system and if so, to what extent Israeli society, like our own, is complicit in it.

The review starts by considering the issue of whether Israel did or did not offer nuclear weapons technology to South Africa in 1975 and then continues:

We have known for some time that Israel consistently dissembled, in the 1970s and 1980s, about its wider alliance with South Africa: this is the far more interesting puzzle that Polakow-Suransky’s well-researched, readable and (I think) balanced book sets out to unravel.

It’s puzzling, of course, because of the deep political gulf that surely ought to have separated a nation born of Nazi persecution from a regime of (largely) ex-Nazi sympathisers.

The rest is here. Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now interview with Polakow-Suransky in May is here.

Women of The Wall spokeswoman Anat Hoffman, right, before the Kotel (Western Wall), in March this year.

The latest outrage came today when Anat Hoffman, a leader of the Women of the Wall, Jewish women who want to pray at “the Wall” (the remaining part of the ancient Temple, now a wall that sits directly at the western edge of the Temple Mount in a plaza which is also frequently used for Israeli state occasions including induction into the Army), was arrested. The charge was suspicion that she might be planning to disobey a recent order of the Israeli courts prohibiting women from reading the Torah at the Wall–a suspicion based on the fact that she was carrying the Torah near the Wall.

Though Orthodox law prohibits men and women from praying together, there is nothing in traditional Jewish law that would forbid women from praying in a women’s section at the Wall. But the Orthodox leadership in Israel has once again extended Jewish law in an oppressive and patriarchal direction. Tikkun recently co-sponsored a talk by Anat Hoffman in San Francisco, and we consider her one of our heroes in Israel–not only for her work in defending the rights of women, but for her previous work when, as a representative of the Meretz party she was elected to the Jerusalem city council and there championed the rights of Palestinians and the poor (including the Orthodox poor, of whom there are many in Jerusalem). The Union of Reform Judaism can be proud that they hired Anat Hoffman as the director of the Jerusalem office of the Religious Action Center. You can read more about her arrest at a ynetnews article I’ve linked to on our Current Thinking site where I put my recommended articles (and please see below the poem relevant to this incident written by Dr. Abby Caplin, Tikkun Daily blogger, member of Tikkun’s Network of Spiritual Progressives and an organizer for Women of the Wall support groups in the U.S. which Tikkun strongly endorses).

Let me by clear that not all Orthodox Jews agree with the Orthodox leadership on this or other points mentioned below. There are people like Rabbi Avi Weiss who is trying to extend women’s rights in orthodoxy by ordaining Jewish women, leaders like Rabbi Yehuda Amital z”l, who passed away this weekend but who was the founder of a peace party in Israel called Meimad, independent thinkers like orthodox Rabbi Tsvi Blanchard whose writings sometimes appear in Tikkun, and an Orthodox Feminist Alliance that has been courageous on this issue and which has received the support of some rabbis in the U.S. and Israel.

Eleven-year-old Olivia Bouler was horrified by news of the foul oil smearing across the gulf. Her first thought: birds, her favorite animal. Her second thought: how to help them.

I am beginning to wonder if perhaps Obama was right to tackle health care reform as a first initiative. It is difficult to find health care issues to write about these days…our mainstream and alternative media are rightly wrapped up in the crises of the day, the Gulf oil spill disaster, the Afghanistan War and high unemployment rates. Of these, at least two are directly tied to our inability as a nation to confront Big Oil. Frustrated with tepid Congressional efforts to stem the oil tide, I decided to take a small step to wean myself off of oil. I began cooking locally available food: weeds!

I have recently returned from the 49th General Assembly (GA) of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations (UUA, for short), which met in Minneapolis June 23-27. I was one of two delegates representing my congregation in Bowling Green, KY. Since Tikkun Daily includes subscribers and bloggers who consider themselves UU’s and the UUA grapples with many of the same challenges as do otherwise affiliated or unaffiliated spiritual progressives, it’s a reasonable guess that what occurred at the UUA General Assembly will interest Tikkun Daily readers.

Above: Excerpt from Native American activist, environmentalist, economist, and writer Winona LaDuke’s June 26 lecture to the 2010 General Assembly of the UUA. See the complete lecture here.

The Unitarian Universalist Association resulted from unification in 1961 of two of the country’s oldest radical/liberal religious denominations, both of which have roots in the Radical Reformation. General Assembly is the annual decision-making gathering of delegates representing the congregations that belong to the Association. This denomination is committed in principle to democratic process in society and in its member congregations. Like other socially engaged religious movements, it has continuously faced the task of renewing itself in changing social, political, and spiritual conditions. This was especially evident at this General Assembly. One index of the urgency of this task is the fact, reported by UUA President Rev. Peter Morales, that half of our ministers are likely to retire in the next decade.

I am reading The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World, by John Michael Greer, a book I recommend (it has somewhat bizarrely cheered me up) and hope to find time to describe here. Meanwhile, here’s an excellent review. Searching for the author I was astonished to find pics of him as a druid in full regalia — I came across a hint of that in the book but it is otherwise secular ecology, sociology and future vision with nary a Green Man. Trolling his blog I came across this quote which seemed too good not to repost, seeing that I am swamped with words here at Tikkun, and hiking in the hills last weekend was mourning how little I really understood about the lansdcape I was walking through:

Our time, as the media never tires of telling us, is the information age, a time when each of us can count on being besieged and bombarded by more information in an average day than most premodern people encountered in their entire lives. Now it’s important to remember that this is true only when the term “information” is assumed to mean the sort of information that comes prepackaged and preprocessed in symbolic form; the average hunter-gatherer moving through a tropical rain forest picks up more information about the world of nature through his or her senses in the course of an average day than the average resident in an industrial city receives through that channel in the course of their lives.

Lots of more that here on The Archdruid Report.

Involuntary manslaughter. It is with great sadness and bitterness that those two words are echoing through California right now.

Protesters gather in downtown Oakland following involuntary manslaughter verdict in trial of the officer who killed Oscar Grant.

Protesters have massed in downtown Oakland in response to this disturbingly lenient verdict in the trial of Johannes Mehserle, the former transit police officer who shot and killed unarmed train rider Oscar Grant.

Involuntary manslaughter — it’s a verdict usually reserved for accidental killings such as car accidents. That conviction alone usually carries with it a maximum prison sentence of four years, but in this case the maximum sentence has been upped to fourteen years due to Mehserle’s use of a firearm in the killing.

I am deeply critical of our nation’s bloated and violent prison system (the United States locks up a higher percentage of its population than any other country in the world, and this does not make us any “safer”) so it was strange to find myself hoping — along with so many others in the East Bay — for a stiffer verdict and therefore longer prison sentence for Mehserle. This is and is not about Mehserle. In truth, what I want is not revenge or punishment but rather an end to police brutality and racism in our society. But for various reasons, this particular trial has taken on an enormous symbolic significance.

For days we’ve been wondering: Will the verdict reinforce our sense that the justice system sees crimes by cops against people of color as somehow natural or forgivable? Or will it reassure us that our justice system is capable of seeing a white cop’s killing of a Black man as equally if not more criminal and disturbing than a Black man’s killing of a white cop?

Rachel, Mary, and the Reverend Mother

Mary Clancy, the ne’er-do-well protagonist of the 1966 comedy The Trouble With Angels is the Catholic education system’s worst nightmare: she is clever, irreverent, wise beyond her sixteen years, and full of “scathingly brilliant ideas.” She is sent (along with her best friend and most loyal follower, Rachel) to St. Francis Convent to be “straightened out.” It is there that she meets her foil and foe — the venerable Reverend Mother (played by the equally venerable Rosalind Russell), a stern nun with a fondness for order and cooperative, obedient young women. Shenanigans, of course, ensue.

For most of the film, the plot is episodic and predictable. We follow Mary and Rachel through their four years of high school, which are peppered with pranks and subsequent punishments. The Reverend Mother can be seen lurking around corners and smiling ruefully at the folly and preciousness of youth before putting on her stern mask to punish the girls. She intends to expel them at one point, but her heart is softened by these two girls’ (especially Mary’s) particular need for a strong mother figure and a firm-but-gentle guiding hand. It is all very ’60s.

Our car; photo by Tom Walters

My car is a testament to what happens when my family’s convictions meet my community’s rejections.

Since moving to Colorado Springs, we’ve had our share of bumper sticker vandalism. Years ago, for example, the car had one bumper sticker that read, “Earth, Air, Fire, Water Bind Us to Her” (in honor of my Wiccan partner) and another that read, “Who Would Jesus Bomb?” (in honor of the God-intoxicated prophet and wisdom teacher). The Wiccan bumper sticker was destroyed quickly from what we can tell, torn off in angry raw strips. The Jesus bumper sticker was left alone, except that the word “Jesus” was removed with surgical precision.

But on to the current state of the car. We were driving along and wound up behind a huge SUV (being driven aggressively) with a bumper sticker that said, “Don’t Let This Car Fool You. My Real Treasure Is In Heaven.” After wondering whether the sight would have made Jesus gag, I came up with the idea of adding some religious bumper stickers to our car.

By Josh Healey

Oscar Grant and his daughter

Here in Oakland, we are anxiously awaiting the verdict in the trial of former BART police officer Johannes Mehserle’s murder of the unarmed Oscar Grant. The murder, which was captured on video by bystanders and seen on Youtube by millions of people, sparked massive protests and militant actions around Oakland last year – and has the potential to generate further unrest depending on the jury’s decision.

The verdict could come down as early as today, and there’s a lot of questions in the air about what’s going to happen. I can’t say for sure what my own reaction will be. Still, I decided I need to make a list of personal principles that I’d hold myself to, no matter what the decision is. So let me say that when the verdict comes…

I will be in the streets, either in celebration or outrage. Possibly both.

Photo from Appalachian Trail. Courtesy of FlickrCC/steev-o

This week’s spiritual wisdom is a beautiful poem that Ned Green wrote on the Appalachian Trail in his journal in 1997. On February 18, 2001, at age 26, he passed away while doing what he loved most — climbing. After his support on an ice ledge gave way, he fell into a deep chasm on Mt. Washington, New Hampshire.

Precarious

A grounded bird
Perched feet from sheer faces,
Freefalls and deadly drops
Flying on jutted thrusts of rock
I suddenly feel boreal
And pseudo-alpine.

The wind rustles steadily
In lower reaches of this chasm,
this monstrous ravine.
Clouds puff and duplicate
In the sun’s constant spread.

Found after Twain's death, this story was written in oppodsition to the Philippine War of 1899-1902, and first published in 1923.

We are delighted to start presenting occasional one-off posts by guest authors with this fine essay by Cynthia Wachtell, author of War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914.

By Cynthia Wachtell

I sometimes wonder what Mark Twain would make of America’s many modern wars. This year marks the centenary of Twain’s death, which means he died before World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the first Gulf War, and our current contretemps in Iraq and Afghanistan. Oh what a century he missed!

Of course, Twain wrote the American classics Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, but he also spilled a lot of ink about war. In early 1899, in the wake of the shocking battle at Omdurman, in which eleven thousand poorly armed Dervishes in the Sudan were completely annihilated by British forces equipped with new Maxim machine guns, Twain reacted with obvious alarm.

He darkly mused, “Suppose circumstances made it necessary for us to fight another Waterloo . . . I will guess that 400,000 men were on hand at Waterloo . . . In five hours they disabled 50,000 men. It took them that tedious, long time because the firearms delivered only two or three shots a minute. But we would do the work now as it was done at Omdurman, with shower guns, raining 600 balls a minute.”

Twain worried that combat was becoming ever more modernly deadly. He grimly observed, “Cain did his murder with a club; the Hebrews did their murders with javelins and swords; the Greeks and Romans added protective armor and the fine arts of military organization and generalship; the Christian has added guns and gunpowder.” Twain knew the future of war would bring new innovations, even if he could not exactly envision aerial warfare, atomic bombs, napalm, and guided missiles.