Will a single religion arise? Will syncretism proliferate? Will the world develop shared interspiritual wisdom? Let’s find a way to energize interfaith dialogue without losing the beauty of religious diversity.
Articles
A Hope for Empathy
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On 9/11 we had the brief fortifying message from folk around the planet, “We are all Americans now.” Not blessed with a president who knew how wisely to respond to that world outpouring of empathy, we catapulted into a “war” against terror from which we have scarcely recovered.
Articles
No Drawing: Art, Politics, and Gaza
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A CHILD’S VIEW FROM GAZA
Edited by Howard Levine
Pacific View Press, 2011
Back in 1969, Carol Hanisch wrote her famous essay “The Personal Is Political” in response to the criticism that feminist consciousness-raising efforts were just “therapy.” In 2011, an exhibit of art by Palestinian children was faced with the inverse criticism: accusations that the art, which came out of a therapy program, had an inherent political agenda. In the resulting controversy, many have lost sight of the deeply personal process that led to the art’s creation. A new book on the planned exhibit at Oakland’s Museum of Children’s Art, A Child’s View From Gaza, chronicles the art project’s trajectory from personal to political, from healing to struggle. The Gazan students whose works make up A Child’s View From Gaza were not part of a political protest or advocacy group. Nor did they even have an intended audience for their work.
Articles
Christmas Post-Mortem: Santa’s Attack on the American Family
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As I join many in my community in the annual post-feast January slim-down, it occurred to me that this is a fitting moment to reflect on how expansive market culture is damaging the health of our families.
Articles
Strategy and Memory for Progressive Believers
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Gary Dorrien’s latest book, Economy, Difference, Empire, is an indictment of imperialist fantasies, enormous suffering visited on others, and the “shredding” of America’s reputation in “the war on terror.”
Articles
The Rhetoric of Family in U.S. Politics
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No Direction Home is a powerful and compelling piece of cultural and political history that fundamentally reframes the history of the modern American family. Whether you lived through the 1970s or not, you will not be able to think about that decade and those that followed the same way again after reading this remarkable book.
Activism
The Camp Is the World: Connecting the Occupy Movements and the Spanish May 15th Movement
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Should our energy be focused on finding new spaces to occupy and create encampments? Should we be focused more in our local neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces? Is there a way to both occupy public space with horizontal assemblies yet also focus locally and concretely?
Articles
The Birth of Jazz and the Jews of South Rampart Street
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In popular imagination, jazz emerged from the bordellos of Storyville, the legendary red-light district where piano-players like Jelly Roll Morton entertained the prostitutes and their sporting men. But South Rampart itself was a prior birthplace to jazz along with neighboring Back a’ Town…. Like thrice-born Dionysius, jazz had two mothers, for a while simultaneously: according to the late jazz historian Tad Jones, South Rampart was “the spot for jazz.”
Articles
Feral
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Climbing the tree had not been a thoughtless or impetuous action. The girl had taken a Jew’s harp, a handful of dried cranberries, a scrap of blue leather, feathers, a vial of silver and turquoise beads, a needle, some thread, other secret objects, some sacred, all carefully balanced in the lap of an oversized T-shirt that the girl turned alternately into a desk, a knapsack, a handkerchief for blowing her nose, while another T-shirt became a bandanna, a snood, and a white banner that declared most adamantly: “I will not surrender.”
Articles
Lamenter-in-Chief
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Let us hope that Pinsky’s new Selected Poems will help to dispel the more jaded views of his accomplishments. For Pinsky is an important figure. He is also, as Tony Hoagland has rightly observed, “a much stranger poet than is generally acknowledged.”
Activism
A Palestinian Peacemaker’s Story
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Jundi’s coming-of-age story is chronicled in the illuminating book, The Hour of Sunlight, co-authored by him and his friend, former colleague and author/documentary filmmaker/playwright Jen Marlowe. The title derives from Mahmoud Darwish’s stunning poem, “On This Earth.” Like Darwish’s poetry, Jundi’s life is a tale of dislocation, of yearning, of delight in the details and a reverence for the written word.
2011
Sword and Plowshare in Jewish Thought
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Eisen’s book is written as a series of dialogues between two voices: one that believes Judaism accepts and affirms the use of violence, and one that believes Judaism much more strongly seeks and urges peace. This pattern is useful but could be a lot more useful, were it not for two baffling failings in this review of the multimillennial literature.
2011
The Work of Healing
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Mary Jane Nealon’s gorgeous memoir works along that revelatory thread, examining the physical and metaphysical life of a person who became both a nurse and a writer.