As women gain power, politically and economically, our cultural power will become ever more interesting. The good news is that we have so much more control over our cultural power than we ever will have over the political or economic. We are the ones in charge of our hearts, which is the home of culture and likewise the site of joy, that mystery that has gone missing under centuries of inequality.

Surely you have heard that women are more than half the US work force. Women now get more college degrees than men. Even John McCain acknowledged that the forces for choice in reproductive rights are winning. New Hampshire has a governor and two senators, each of whom is female. We didn’t need Hanna Rosin to tell us about “the end of men.” Nor does there have to be any “end of men,” if women find new beginnings and new tendencies for our generous hearts.

Master Sgt. Renee Baldwin fires a .50-caliber machine gun during a training session. Credit: Creative Commons/Joint Base Lewis McChord.

Alongside horrifying pictures from the New York Times showing very young boys being trained to fire assault rifles (“Selling a New Generation on Guns“) comes the news, welcome in some quarters, that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has ordered the military to admit women to full combat roles. I believe that this is not the way to equality.

Some years ago the philosopher Mary Midgley, unconsciously echoing a position Gandhi had articulated decades before, wrote that life “is the whole of which we are parts, and its other parts concern us for that reason. But the language of rights is rather ill-suited for expressing this.”

My review of “Yossi and Jagger” was published in the New Jersey Jewish News issue dated April 24, 2004. My piece on its sequel, “Yossi,” has been published in the current issue of this same newspaper. The main character in both, Yossi, played by the same actor, has changed his status in life from being a junior infantry officer who loses his lover, Lior Jagger, in combat in Lebanon, to a career as a cardiologist in a Tel Aviv hospital. But he has not yet moved beyond his grief. He remains deeply depressed.

And while Israeli society has changed to the point that being gay is no longer as stigmatized as it was ten years before, Yossi Gutman, M. D., has still not emerged from the proverbial closet. The NY Times reviewer, Stephen Holden, expressed incredulity that Yossi’s young new love would be so open about his sexuality and so accepted by his boisterously straight army buddies. But since the filmmaker is Eytan Fox, a gay Israeli who generally explores this reality in his films, who are we to doubt it?

“Muslims and non-Muslims should realize that we all are just travelers in this temporary world,” photojournalist Sadaf Syed tells me. She adds that we all should act on this realization “by opening up and getting to learn about each others faith, cultures, tradition.”

Photographer Sadaf Syed pays respect to the victims of 9/11 at Ground Zero in New York City.

Since she was two months old, Syed has traveled throughout the United States with her family, exposed to different cultures, religions, and people, including Muslims of different ethnicities. After picking up on many different customs and traditions, Syed became inspired to tell stories about this diverse group of Muslims.

Syed began her photography career with wedding photography and portraiture. Years later, her career shifted to amplifying the voices of people whose stories are seldom heard, giving them the chance to share their journeys, emotions, hopes, fears, abilities, and disabilities. As a visual storyteller, Syed is always looking for ways to inspire and educate people through her photography.

“You’re not a storyteller in words and writing, but you’re a storyteller visually, so you’re always looking to stimulate people visually,” she says.

In 2010, Syed, a Pakistani-Muslim, self-published iCOVER: A Day in the Life of a Muslim-American COVERed Girl, a book about Muslim women breaking stereotypes across the globe. The book features page after page of everyday Muslim women of different ethnicities and backgrounds, presenting photographs of them alongside captivating captions, quotes, and stories.

The personal is the political, has always struck me as incomplete. It was Teilhard de Chardin who first said “we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” The ‘personal is the political’ assumes an incomplete worldview, a cosmology of separation where the individual is forced to turn to the political as the end we seek – as though we were fundamentally political beings.

Grasping onto a worldview of connection, of interbeing, we hear nature whisper that we are fundamentally spiritual beings, quanta of spirit, mind and body, integrated. We weave our lives as spiders do their webs, out from ourselves and binding us to one another. Our fulfillment is in making these connections, in participating in a whole. That is what I see as spiritual politics: being accountable to the inescapable whole of which my life is just one of many, a unity masquerading as a diversity. When the personal is more than the political, when it is the sacred, I become whole.

Juliane Okot Bitek knows the power of narrative. An award winning writer living in Vancouver, Canada, Okot Bitek is also an Acholi woman who calls Gulu in Northern Uganda home. Considering the civil war (1986- 2006) that plagued northern Ugandans, it’s no wonder much of Okot Bitek’s passionate writing focuses on social and political issues. In the last decade, through her poetry, essays, fiction, nonfiction and opinion pieces, Okot Bitek has fought both to make sense of, and to expose the tragedies of her homeland.

Okot Bitek comes to writing through an impressive lineage. Her late father is the famed Ugandan poet, essayist, novelist and academic, Okot p’Bitek, who was, shortly before his death in 1982, appointed as the first professor of Creative Writing at Makerere University in Kampala. Things weren’t always so rosy, however. As a result of her father’s work, Okot Bitek and her family spent the early years of her childhood in exile in Kenya. As a result of this history, Okot Bitek is no stranger to political strife and social unrest. Still, in spite of this, she describes the pleasure of growing up in a house full of books and lively debates between her parents and their literary and artistic friends. Some of Africa’s luminaries were regular houseguests: Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and David Rubadiri were men she called uncle, and on a given day they might be filling the Okot Bitek household with their intellect, their opinions and their friendship.

Growing up in such an environment would make anyone sensitive to the importance of storytelling. As Okot Bitek says, “Stories are everything. Without a story, none of us exists.” But it’s not just the significance of narrative that is so dear to Okot Bitek, she is sensitive to the invisibility and the silence that shrouds those whose stories don’t get heard. This is evident in the work she has recently completed, which is provisionally titled Stories From the Dry Season. Collaborating with Dr. Erin Baines of the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia and Grace Acan, a women’s advocate and LRA survivor, Okot Bitek took on this work as a way to tell the stories of women from northern Uganda who were abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army (L.R.A) and who eventually returned to civilian life after long and terrible years of abuse and assault.

I had a conversation last week with someone who gave up making films to start a business he hopes will earn enough money to finance major social-change organizing projects. He condemned progressives for their illusions, saying they that think if they’ve watched a hard-hitting film, they’ve done something, but really, “they’ve done nada. The most under-appreciated art and the one most needed and that makes the most difference is the art of organizing.” He explained that he meant Alinsky-style community organizing, with protests – rallies, marches, pickets – focusing on a succession of concrete steps in the hope they will aggregate into meaningful change.

I find this insistence on one form of activism fatiguing. It reminds me of the old alchemical idea: that if you perform the same action over and over again, it will eventually yield a transformative result. At this point, I think most old-style forms of organizing alone have about as much chance of succeeding in addressing our crises as ancient alchemical experiments had of finding the philosopher’s stone and transmuting base metal into gold. Real transformation has to engage the whole person: body, emotions, intellect, and spirit. But you can’t make anyone see what he or she is not ready to perceive, no matter how plainly it is inscribed in reality.

Holiday Present

My mom told me she’s a lesbian
and it rained for a week,

not because she told me she’s a lesbian
but because sometimes it just rains like that

in December, when families get together
around nine shining candles or one electrified tree

or whatever they light at the ecstatic dance solstice celebration
at Muir Woods, because it’s holiday time in the Bay

and my mom gives me a present
wrapped in a question:

Do you want to meet her?

Richard Mourdock, a Republican candidate for Senate in Indiana, recently made the following statement during a debate for the Senate: “Even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.” Here is my reply:

Richard Mourdock

A Letter to Richard Mourdock

Seriously, Mr. Mourdock, when a woman gets pregnant from rape, “God intended that to happen”? What exactly did God intend to happen, the rape, the pregnancy? Let’s remember that without the rape there would be no pregnancy.

So, let’s talk about RAPE. And I mean, let’s REALLY talk about RAPE.

Rape is typically defined as when one person forcibly engages in sexual intercourse (sexual intercourse includes both vaginal and anal penetration either with a body part or an object) with another person against that person’s will.

What might that look like? Well, it can look like someone taking a stick or other object and putting it inside a woman’s vagina or a person’s anus. It can mean placing one’s finger or tongue inside the woman’s vagina or a person’s anus. It can also mean placing one’s penis inside a woman’s vagina or a woman or man’s anus.

Let’s keep in mind that in any and all of these instances, if it is rape, it means that the person having the object or body part inserted into him or her did NOT want that to happen. In fact, they explicitly said NO.

I’m kind of curious, Mr. Mourdock, is that what God intended? For people to have their bodies violated by another person? Because if that is what God intended, I want NO part of your God. And, I want to understand how you could allege to possibly know what God intended?

Credit: Marc Israel Sellem/The Jerusalem Post.

On Sunday August 19, 2012 in Jerusalem, four more women were arrested at the Kotel, the Western Wall, considered the holiest site in Judaism, for reportedly engaging in behavior that could lead to “endangering the public peace and for wearing a prayer shawl.”

They were praying.

Yes, it is still against the law for women to pray out loud, wear a tallit (prayer shawl), and read from the Torah at the Kotel. However, such practices are considered normative for many Jewish women worldwide. The law stems from a 2003 Israeli Supreme Court decision, when the Court upheld in principle the right of Women of the Wall to pray at the Wall, yet succumbed to the bullying of religious extremist parties. Unfortunately, the incorporation of these parties seems to be required for the formation of any coalition government.

The 2003 Court decision moved communal prayer for women and mixed-gender Jewish communities (Reform, Conservative, Renewal and Reconstructionist) to another area of the Wall called Robinson’s Arch, creating a separate and unequal situation, further strengthening the power of religious extremists at the main plaza. For the full history of Women of the Wall’s court battles, click here.