by Richard Cohen
Jewish Wisdom
Strange Land, New World
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I am the first Jew to live in this cloistered Benedictine monastery. I don’t blend. I wear a kippah everywhere I go, and I observe the Sabbath and all Jewish holidays. I’m studying to become a rabbi, and I live here in this remote community of Catholic monks vowed to chastity and obedience.
Eco-Spirituality
Nature Has a Mind of Its Own
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What’s the greatest mystery facing every person on the planet? Ultimately, it’s some version of the age-old “Where do I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going?” So far, no one has a satisfactory explanation for the existence of nonphysical minds in this otherwise physical universe.
Vol 25.6 NovDec 2010
The Presence of Living Organisms
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It is possible that the plant as a living and vital presence responds to the warmth and radiance of the sunlight and turns toward it responsively. This interpretation, which I favor, understands the plant as a spiritual-material unity rather than reducing the plant to the materialist dimension that is visible to the detached, scientific eye.
Vol 25.6 NovDec 2010
The Responsibility of Theology to Science
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Artists who create icons and sacred music often describe their activity as a form of prayer. I think too that if nature is understood, in some sense, as the work of God, then seeking to discover the ways of nature through science might also be experienced as a form of prayer.
Articles
A Spiritual Approach to Evolution
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Don’t worry, we are not about to join the creationists with their rejection of evolution and insistence that God planted all those dinosaur bones to test your faith. The fact is that most liberals and progressives, in fact, most people who have completed high school, have been heavily indoctrinated into the dominant religion of this historical period, the religion of scientism, and as can be expected, will feel deeply uneasy — if not feeling that they are outright disloyal — if they consider the possibility that another worldview is not only possible but plausible.
Vol 25.4 JulAug 2010
OYL! Corruption, the Spirit, the Earth, and Us
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This is not an oil “spill” we are facing, the way water might spill from a dish or oil from a tanker—a finite amount in the first place, and then we clean up. This is more like piercing a hole into the Caverns of Hell, so that they pour forth without limit.
Environment
Spirituality in a Time of Crisis
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It’s not self-sacrifice but liberation that the Tao and all deep spiritual wisdom offer us.
Facing climate change, we must free ourselves or collapse.
Vol 25.3 MayJun 2010
How Much Change Will the Earth Require of Us?
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We will be so much better off psychologically when we give up our dreams of mastery
and come back to living within nature.
Vol 25.3 MayJun 2010
Introduction to Special Section
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For the scientifically well-informed, there’s a seriously bleak quality in the air around global warming and other environmental threats. To avert the multiple foreseen catastrophes will require heroic measures. But which measures have a chance of working?
Jewish Wisdom
A Kabbalah for the Environmental Age
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A longing for Kabbalah is abroad in the land. Even people with little connection to Judaism, no knowledge of Hebrew, many of them in fact non-Jews, are seeking initiation into the secret chambers of Jewish esoteric knowledge. Differing from the interest in Hasidism that centered mostly around Chabad in the preceding decades, this turn to Kabbalah has rather little to do with Jewish observance or with nostalgia for a romanticized shtetl past (a past that many denizens of “Kabbalah centers” in fact do not share). The Kabbalah seekers are after the Truth, with a capital T.
Z Archive
Happy Birthday, World
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There is an ancient talmudic tradition that affirms that the world was created on Rosh Hodesh Tishrei, a day also known as Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year. Our Mahzor also reminds us that the world was created on this day. So it’s particularly appropriate for Jews to stop and think about how we are celebrating this most ancient Earth Day, how we are honoring the birthday of our home, the planet earth.