Why work? For the Benedictine spirit,
work is not simply work.
Articles
In Praise of Baseball
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After decades of observation and outright devotion, I believe that even in these difficult days for the sport, baseball continues to instruct on our most fundamental human virtues and values. More to the point, I believe baseball far more that any other team sport embodies and celebrates many of the principles at the core of what it means to be a progressive, and especially a spiritually minded progressive.
Articles
Raising the Curtain on “Gandhi Centre Stage”
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I have never bothered to respond to Gandhi detractors because, like the Mahatma himself, I tend to think their pathetic writings are best left to die a natural death—the eventual fate of all untruth. Nevertheless, when Michael Lerner urged me to reply to “Gandhi Centre Stage,” the article by Perry Anderson that appeared in a recent issue of the London Review of Books, I assented.
Articles
Languages of Liturgy and Occupation
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Living in Ramallah has meant that I must see my Judaism differently. It means I sometimes have to turn myself inside out. I see our religious symbols differently. I experience Hebrew differently. I hear Hebrew as the five million Palestinians who live here do: not as a spiritual language but a language of military occupation.
Articles
Exodus: An Allegorical Portrait of the Human Mind in its Relationship to God
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I would like to share a new and quite radical midrash regarding the story of Exodus, one that I have found extremely powerful.
Activism
Called to Montgomery
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What would it take to recruit students for a movement to build community, as Martin Luther King dreamed? A Christian minister reflects on the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and how we might move from disengagement to social action.
Articles
Bridging the Abrahamic Traditions
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In a world where violence seems to prevail, it can be hard to believe in a God of love. Starr’s beautifully crafted book offers and enter into a space where divine love is illuminated as a central teaching and core ethic within the heart of these three monotheistic traditions.
2012
Christianity Without the Cross?
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Publishing an article that intensely criticizes an aspect of Christianity was a stretch for us here at Tikkun. Although we consider this magazine to be interfaith as well as Jewish—and have many Christian readers and writers—the idea of taking on something as sacred to the Christian world as the cross gave us pause. The last thing we want to do is convey disrespect to the Christian community and its complex internal debates. On the other hand, having already gotten ourselves into a huge amount of trouble by criticizing something sacred to many American Jews—namely Israel and its army—we thought it reasonable to take seriously our interfaith status by allowing a writer to take on a very controversial issue in the Christian world. We welcome sharp criticisms and alternative readings of the history discussed here.
2012
Compassion for the Victims of Our Global Capitalist System
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Too many liberals and progressives blame voter support for reactionary and ultra-conservative politics on the supposed mean-spiritedness, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, or stupidity of those who vote the other way. By slipping into this easy mindset, we fail to perceive the real yearning so many of us have for a life filled with love, caring, and generosity.
Christianity
The Cross as a Central Christian Symbol of Injustice
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In “The Death of Christianity,” Lawrence Swaim argues that the doctrine of substitutionary atonement “makes God out to be a vengeful, homicidal deity who can be satisfied only with the death of his son.” He eloquently elaborates how the doctrine of blood atonement is a product of Roman imperial power, injustice, and terrorism, and presents the cross as a sign of conquest that has shaped Christian identity and ecclesiastical might throughout the centuries. Urging us to embrace a counterstory of Jesus’s life, Swaim goes on to suggest that we replace the symbol of the cross with the image of “a woman holding a child.”
2012
The Hope of the Cross
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Ignorance of major world religions comes in many forms today, but Lawrence Swaim’s particular version is still stunning. It is almost as if Swaim skimmed pop or even comic books on Christian theology and early church history and fashioned a reckless rant from their raw materials. Of the many historically and argumentatively strange things in his essay, his call for Christians to get rid of the symbol of the cross is the most bizarre. Getting rid of the cross is tantamount to getting rid of Jesus—which is to say, of Christianity itself.
2012
The Death of Christianity
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There is at the heart of Christianity a disturbing doctrine that has the uncanny ability to overwhelm cognition, and—when internalized by the believer—the ability to traumatize. I refer to the belief, held by most Christians, that Jesus Christ, the prophetic figure of Christianity, was crucified to redeem the world, and that this plan originated with God.
2012
Religion and Equality in Human Evolution
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Where did we come from? What should we do here? Where are we going? As long as human beings ask these questions, we will need metanarratives—accounts of cosmological and biological evolution that place the human species in the context of what we know about the universe as a whole.
2012
A Red Letter Christian Speaks to the Palestinian Church
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Politics alone will not solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—a deep, collective, psychological healing must also occur to sustain a lasting peace. I believe Palestinian Christians are uniquely situated to facilitate this healing process.
Articles
The Gift Economy: A Model for Collaborative Community
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Imagine walking into your local cafe or corner grocery, filling your basket with what you need, leaving behind what you can financially, and walking away with no formal exchange. Now imagine that this economic relationship works as well if not better than a formal market economy. Impossible? Not according to “gift economy” theorists and the courageous communities that make this sort of system work.