This has been a difficult few months for proponents of marriage equality. Most recently, Hawaii’s Governor Linda Lingle vetoed a bill that would allow gay marriage. She said the issue ought to be decided by voters. Last November, voters in Maine overturned the legality of same-sex marriage. The New York legislature said “no.” The issue may have influenced the outcome of the governor’s race in New Jersey. However, the Washington D.C. City Council voted to allow same sex marriage. When I consider my own history as an African-American woman, I am so glad that during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s there were judges and legislators willing to stand for equal protection under the law even before the general public was ready for racial equality. I am so glad for a faith that believes that my LGBT brothers and sisters will one day receive justice.

Several gems designed to strengthen communities’ ability to define local systems of care are buried deep within the bowels of HCR. These provisions encourage community coalitions composed of health care providers, patients and other stakeholders to design innovative strategies for meeting their own unique health care needs. Instead of trying to impose a boilerplate solution to what has become a chaotic patchwork of local capacities and vulnerabilities, the community health coalition approach encourages creative, bottom-up solutions to our nation’s pressing problems. And it builds communities’ political power to advocate for future reform.

I’d like to present you with a treasure map.

Cross-posted from Common Sense Religion

As one of the most prominent public voices resisting the culture of Christian and religious dominance Christopher Hitchens earns himself a comparison to the freedom fighter who nearly fifty years ago urged the civil rights movement to “stop singing and start swinging.” Responding to a culture of white supremacy, the vicious legacy of colonialism and the hypocrisy of American democracy Malcolm X became one of the strongest voices for black resistance and identity. For much of his life, before his break with the Nation of Islam and his shift toward racial inclusiveness he framed the race problem in an absolutist manner claiming that all white people are devils. He believed that white people could never do any good. Malcolm X publicly made his case by deconstructing the white mindset, analyzing the white power structure and describing the vicious history that has accompanied the Euro-American legacy. It was this fierce resistance against assimilation into white culture that set him apart from the strategy of integration pursued by Dr. King and many others. Despite their shift towards each other’s positions near the end of their lives it is still accurate to describe them as James Cone did: Malcolm X saw America as a nightmare while Dr. King saw it as a dream.

Christopher Hitchens is perhaps the most well known voice amongst the new atheists; Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennet. With books like The God Delusion, The End of Faith, and God is Not Great and with bold personalities they have a reputation for being fierce critics of all things religious. For them religion is most certainly a nightmare. But even amongst a group of vigilant, passionate and hardcore atheists, Hitchens stands out. Perhaps this is because of his prolific career as a journalist, author and popular media commentator on a variety of subjects. But he is also known for being a contrarian; taking unpopular positions and defending them against anyone who will put up a fight. And he claims he has never refused to debate anyone. His God is Not Great book tour presented the opportunity for numerous media appearances, lectures and debates with religious defenders. He even ventured into the Christian Book Expo and debated four well-known evangelical and conservative Christian apologists at the same time. Like X, Hitchens systematically deconstructs the logic of that which he is resisting by pointing out the inconsistencies and hypocrisies within many religious institutions and their texts. He also does a brilliant job of describing the inevitable and disturbing conclusions that must be reached if many of the religious doctrines are taken to be as literally true.

Marrying a foreigner and living in their country — as both my brother and I have done (we’re English but I live in Switzerland and my brother in the States) — can be a challenge: not just to fit in but to work out when to contribute by not exactly fitting in. My own experience leaves me doubly impressed by my old friend Rob Corcoran, a Scot and a white man, who married an American and went to live in Richmond, the former capital of the Southern states. When they arrived there, they moved into a mixed race neighbourhood, and quickly a couple of African-American neighbours became good friends. As an outsider perhaps my friend was better placed to see old problems with fresh eyes.

Out of their experience grew a programme called Hope in the Cities. Rob has now written a book about the experience: Trustbuilding: An Honest Conversation on Race, Reconciliation, and Responsibility published by the University of Virginia Press. It is in part a history of a trust-building and reconciliation work that started in Richmond, but has now reached out to individuals and communities in many other parts of the world. But the book is also a helpful text book, a ‘how to build trust’ handbook. Simple questions (such as ‘Who is not taking part in the conversation?’) challenge the would-be do-gooder. Do I only interact with those who already think like me? Corcoran quotes African-Americans who are meeting whites in an ‘honest conversation’ for the first time; and Republicans who have never really talked in deeper interaction over several hours with a Democrat.

One fascinating practical realization that Corcoran and his friends helped with is The American Civil War Center in Richmond, ‘the nation’s first museum to interpret the Civil War from Union, Confederate, and African American perspectives.’ I look forward to visiting it the next time I’m in the USA. I want to dream about an Israeli-Palestinian museum that tells the history of that troubled part of the world from different perspectives.

No one is questioning that police office Johannes Mehserle shot and killed Oscar Grant, but was it intentional? Massive street protests are expected if he is acquitted.

In a few days, possibly as early as tomorrow, a controversial trial will come to an end, and the verdict on Johannes Mehserle, the police officer who killed Oscar Grant in Oakland, California, last January, will be released. This is a tense moment in Oakland. What will happen if he is acquitted? What will happen if is found guilty? Whatever the verdict is, some people will be unhappy. Some people will interpret whichever result as unjust. What can be done at that time?

One thing that some of us are imagining is having a nonviolent presence with the goal of increasing the chance that people will be heard and treated with care and respect no matter what their position is, or how they express it.

The Bay Area Nonviolent Communication Empathy Team is working in partnership with others to participate in efforts to organize such a nonviolent response in the streets of Oakland. They are planning, in particular, to come to downtown Oakland and support whatever happens, and whoever is there, with the simple and radical gift of empathic presence, which, as French mystic-philosopher Simone Weil said, “is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have the capacity do not possess it.”

A few months ago, I signed up with the good folks at Tikkun to write a post on July 4th. I was hopeful at that time that I could write something encouraging, something hopeful, maybe something about interdependence.

But yesterday, when I sat down to write, I found myself unable to. I had stopped off on my way home from visiting my sister and was drinking coffee in Union Square in San Francisco, my laptop open in front of me. The sunlight was gentle and clear. An art fair was taking place all around me and musicians were playing on stage. Nothing was wrong, or so it seemed.

Behind me, Macy’s department store was draped in red, white and blue. In front of me, the man on stage stopped singing and started talking about Jesus, about how he used to be a heroin addict but was saved from his life of addiction.

“Now, you all may feel like your lives are pretty good,” this clean-cut, all American boy on stage said “You aren’t homeless or addicted. You probably don’t really feel like you need Jesus, but the time will come when you are on your deathbed and you start wondering whether you are going to heaven or hell.”

Usually, I tune this kind of sentimental preaching out – it’s too painful to hear Jesus so watered down – but this time I found myself looking around me at the people with their shopping bags. I glanced at my own expensive cup of coffee and thought about how much I wanted to eat a giant cupcake or write something really profound that would be picked up by the New York Times or just in general be someone much grander and happier and more important than this soft squishy person here in the midst of the shiny city in the bankrupt state of California in the grinding imperial corporation of the United States of America.

Habitat for Humanity 2007 (Joe Mabel)

Interdependence is one of our greatest (albeit least well-respected) truths. It is at the center of our society’s ability to keep going, at the core of human and planetary well-being, and at the heart of many of the most profound spiritual truths. In fact, any spirituality that will have a meaningful impact in the world must explicitly address the interdependence of people, nations, and the ecosystem as a whole. We do well this Independence Day to reframe independence as interdependence, to tilt the narrative toward a healthier way of seeing ourselves and our planet, and to give thanks for the many good things in our lives and our country.

Interdependence, however, also has a less positive side: social inequalities of all sorts similarly rely on interdependence to continue their soul-killing and world-killing work. The military-industrial complex of the last sixty years, and the Supreme Court’s recent collusion with corporations on political spending in candidate elections, represent only two examples of large-scale organizations working interdependently to reward the rich and punish the poor. Two other kinds of interdependence in the service of inequality are interlocking types of inequality and interlocking levels of inequality. (Patricia Hill Collins is only one of many social theorists to have written elegantly about both issues.) This kind of interdependence, too, must be considered from a spiritual perspective in order to maximize our ability to challenge inequality of all sorts.

Tikkun readers naturally want to know what happened on Israel at the US Social Forum. The chief thing that I was aware of (apart from a minor issue of a canceled workshop about which I just posted) was the equation of Zionism with its rightwing manifestations and with current Israeli policies. As if there was no such thing as leftwing, anti-racist Zionism.

I didn’t mention Israel in my first piece about the Forum, because I wasn’t tracking the issue well myself and indeed am highly diffident about writing about Israel at all. That may sound odd for a Tikkun staffer, but as a nonJew, brought in to help with the interfaith outreach of the magazine, I have learned how little I know about Israel/Palestine compared to the experts. Still, I did go to one highly troubling workshop on Israel and do have a few things to say.

At the US Social Forum there was a curious brouhaha, which has been fairly widely reported on the web, over a workshop organized by the vehemently pro-Israel group Stand With Us. As a workshop on LGBTQI rights in the Middle East it looked as if it would fit right in with the Social Forum’s worldview, until it became seen as a way to extol the virtues of Israel compared to its neighboring states and thereby justify Israel’s occupation. It was canceled, with this explanation by the USSF. Stand With Us objected. If you want to know more about Stand With Us, Tikkun ran an article last September by David Theo Goldberg and Saree Makdisi, The Trial of Israel’s Campus Critics, that was strongly critical of it.

This workshop seemed to me to fit in the same ballpark with those rightwingers who have fought against feminist and GLBT rights all the way, right up to the point when the defense of them as proving the quintessential goodness of Western civ becomes a handy weapon to wield against Islamic immigration to the West or against rightwing Islam. This strategy is more common in Europe (where it was pioneered by the late Pim Fortuyn), but in the US can be seen in the way the American Enterprise Institute became the protector of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali Dutch feminist and Islamophobe, about whom I wrote in Tikkun a while back.

I find the cynicism of this U turn from opposing feminist and GLBTQ rights to extolling them nauseating or hilarious, depending on my mood. But seeing that it’s the Fourth of July let us remember that

There’s no denying that science and technology have drastically changed our way of life in the last 250 years. Moreover, to many it seems that the wheels of science and technology are spinning out of control and there’s no way to slam on the brakes. When it comes to issues as disparate as global warming and government surveillance, our ethics and values are not always reflected in our use of science and technology.

So how do we keep science and technology in check? How do we use them as tools rather than allow them to have power over us and our way of life? I think most at Tikkun would agree that our values and ethics, whether religiously, spiritually, or otherwise derived, need and ought to play the major role in determining how science and technology are used. But how do we create such a dynamic?

While I will always, in some sense, be a Texas girl at heart, I also love being out East. The spring brings blooming fruit trees and clusters of daffodils along the roads, and the fall has the gorgeous arrays of changing leaves. It’s breathtaking.

Summer also has lots of stuff in bloom, many things which wouldn’t grow in my arid hometown of Lubbock unless you spent the kids’ inheritance on irrigation. I especially enjoy the June-blooming daylilies under our bedroom window. But I was thinking today about the summer arrival that I most anticipate — the sudden bouquets of chicory in almost every corner of the city.
Chicory is really beautiful. It has sky-blue flowers that open every day. Its hardy, woody stems grow in nice clusters for good visual effect. And it seems to appear, without fail, just about everywhere. It grows alongside telephone poles, in vacant lots, and in cracks of sidewalk. It’s quite the survivor. During a recent city meeting on planting flowers to beautify Lexington for the World Equestrian Games, someone stressed the need to plant flowers which would thrive without constant attention, exposed to exhaust fumes and choking dust. I wanted to nominate chicory.

Interestingly, it doesn’t do well as a cut flower. Try to bring it home for the vase on your counter, and it just wilts. It needs to be connected to its context, to the stems, to the soil. It wants to stay where it was planted.

There may be some lessons here for the Church. We’ve become quite adept at planting and nurturing beautiful seeds, which smell nice and undoubtedly bring beauty and grace into the world. But so often they require so much time and attention that they exhaust our energy before we’ve even looked beyond our own doors. We need to take our cue, not from dainty blossoms that wilt under the baking sun or wither in the slighest drought, but from this hardy and intrepid pioneer. The Church needs no more hothouse flowers; what it needs is bunches of chicory.

Martha Roden, of Fort Collins, Colorado, who has done great work for us as a volunteer making parts of our Network of Spiritual Progressives website reader-friendly, sent me this today in response to Michael Lerner’s An Interdependence Day Celebration for July 4:

I wanted to let you know that our neighborhood Mennonite Church is hosting an “Alternative Fourth of July Celebration” and I thought I’d share the announcement with you [see below].

I believe that more and more faith-based and secular-based organizations are coming to the same conclusion: war doesn’t work, it never has, and doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results is insanity. Who wants to be insane?

Three years ago, Sen. Barack Obama was sharp, forceful and eloquent in his questions to Gen. David Petraeus about the failure of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. In a congressional hearing on Iraq, Obama did not mince words with the general:

This continues to be a disastrous foreign policy mistake. And we are now confronted with the question: How do we clean up the mess and make the best out of a situation in which there are no good options, there are bad options and worse options?

Sen. Barack Obama questions Gen. Petraeus during Iraq hearings, 2007. (Go to 3:00 of this 9:45 minute video for above quote.)

This same candidate Obama was also confidently talking about withdrawing all U.S. troops from Iraq within 16 months during his 2007 interviews. He defended a pull-out to two New York Times reporters, saying it would not “backfire” and discourage the Iraqis to find a political solution involving all sides of the conflict, as the critics claimed.

Beautiful article in our local paper about Dean Ornish (at right with his family), “the nation’s pre-eminent proponent of adopting a healthy life to reverse chronic diseases.”

Since founding the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in 1984, he has run trial after trial looking at whether lifestyle choices involving diet, exercise, meditation – and even love – can be as powerful in treating disease as drugs, radiation, chemotherapy and surgery.

“In my 33 years, in everything we did, people thought we were crazy,” said Ornish, a self-described hugger who exudes a doctor’s natural air of concern. “People said the tests must be wrong or that this could only happen in California. But we have proven that lifestyle is treatment, not just prevention.”

On her “visual blog” Barbara Bash offers us this taste of summer “on a Nantucket Beach.” We have profiled Barbara’s beautiful work here before, and on our art gallery. This is the first image in a series of six from the beach. After the jump I am putting in the second and sixth, but you can see the rest on her blog True Nature, here.

Tikkun Daily is one year old today!

Photo: Rob J Brooks/Flickr

FlickrCC/Eric Haller

This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from poet Mark Siet:

And yet still through these hands do we mold
Our lives of caring from young until old.

Nothing else matters but the Creator in every breath
What else could compare to this sublime holiness
Knowing that with each step there is only One
In the rising of the moon and the setting of the sun.

There in that place where nothing may be perceived
A curious fashion comes into being whereupon received
The threads of Torah’s living letters the vine upon the Tree
Weave these pesukim flowing through Tzimtzum to the sea

Joining the waters above with those that are below
With every meaning shared light there does show
For after all this is the very purpose of divine connection
To reveal in each moment by our infinite reflection.

FlickrCC/chickeyfeather

Faced with July 4th celebrations that are focused on militarism, ultra-nationalism, and “bombs bursting in air,” many American families who do not share those values turn July 4th into another summer holiday focused on picnics, sports, and fireworks, while doing their best to avoid the dominant rhetoric and bombast.

This year that kind of celebration is particularly difficult when many of us are in mourning because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We in the Network of Spiritual Progressives believe that avoiding July 4 or turning it into nothing more than a picnic with friends is a mistake for progressives. There is much worth celebrating in American history that deserves attention on July 4th, despite the current depravity of those who lead this country, though the celebration-worthy aspects of our society are rarely the focus of the public events.

We also acknowledge that in the twenty-first century there is a pressing need to develop a new kind of consciousness — a recognition of the interdependence of everyone on the planet. A new revolution is necessary — one in which our actions reflect a realization that our well-being depends on the well-being of everyone else on the planet and of the planet itself.

We’ve designed the following material as a possible guide for individual families or for public celebrations that share the values we hold. We hope that families will reflect on the themes raised in this holiday guide at their celebrations, and that churches, synagogues, unions, community organizations, and neighborhood associations will incorporate this material into their public celebrations of July 4th.