There is a deep human yearning for connection and community. Restorative practices offer a pathway for shifting social structures to be more responsive to that need.
2012
What’s Love Got To Do With It?
|
While several hhttps://www.tikkun.org/newsite/wp-admin/themes.php?page=custom-headeristorical antecedents converged to give rise to the restorative justice movement, the Civil Rights Movement was a principal contributor, having a defining impact on its thrust and spirit. I believe we have forgotten our recent historical roots. I believe we have not learned from the history of the peace, women’s, and environmental movements’ initial failures to intentionally engage issues of race.
2012
Controversies Around Restorative Justice
|
Most articles in this issue come from progressive and radical activists, scholars, lawyers, and teachers who are writing wholly from within the restorative justice movement. So with one foot planted inside the restorative justice movement as a student and the other in more journalistic territory, I am hoping to offer a different perspective: a beginner’s birds-eye glance at some of the controversial issues both outside and within the movement, and at factors that may be enabling it to gather traction.
2012
From Individual Rights to the Beloved Community: A New Vision of Justice
|
The United States itself was founded on a principle of human freedom that presupposed an inherent antagonism between self and other, a belief that the essential meaning of liberty was that we need to be protected against other people. Yet as we now look out at and live within the envelope of the world we have thus created, we must come to realize by a kind of evolution or enlightenment—by “waking up”—that the liberal framework, the framework of separation, is not only inadequate but harmful.
2012
After Twenty-Six Years in Prison: Reflections on Healing
|
I want to stop violence, stop violent crime. I won’t live long enough to see that happen if it’s even possible, but I don’t think that my God requires of me that I see the possibility of it but that I do the work.
Articles
Christmas Post-Mortem: Santa’s Attack on the American Family
|
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.
Christianity
Occupy Chanukah and Christmas
|
Chanukah was the first recorded national liberation struggle against Greek imperialism, and Christmas celebrates the birth of a hoped-for messiah to free the Jewish people from Roman imperialism. Both Judaism born of slaves in Egypt and Christianity born of a movement of the poor and powerless were in their times the “Occupy” movement that confronted the powerful and those who served them.
Articles
Transforming the Economy: Linking Hands Across the Social and Environmental Divide
|
Climate change and extinction are both too narrow. We need to move beyond ecological concerns to reach out to the ever-larger proportion of society focused on eradicating injustice and poverty. We need to reach out to those who now live in fear of losing their livelihoods and homes.
Articles
Strategy and Memory for Progressive Believers
|
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 Primal Spirituality of Circumcision vs. the Cultural Steamroller of Scientism
|
Should a society based on the principles of democracy and Western thinking permit people to circumcise children? The answer to that question may well be no. I suggest, however, that this is the wrong question through which to understand the issue of circumcision.
Articles
Incision and Gender
|
The uproar over San Francisco’s proposed ban on circumcision has largely died down after a judge struck the measure from the city’s ballot, but the national conversation is far from over. Indeed, just this week, the American Medical Association voted to adopt a policy officially opposing any future attempts by cities or states to outlaw circumcision.
Articles
Becoming a Jew Is Dangerous — Circumcision Is the Least of It
|
Matthew Taylor initiates his sharp critique of brit milah (the covenant of circumcision) with anger … as a rabbi, I would of course be very engaged by such a confession and would want to know more. But as an introduction to a learned discussion over a ritual practice that is so central to the Jewish narrative, this expression of anger is not exactly conducive to a rational exchange. It is, however, honest and deserves a sober response.
Articles
My Body, My Choice: Ban Non-Consensual Circumcision
|
Like countless men who have been circumcised, I’m angry about what was taken from me. If I could go back in time to the moment before this was done to me, I would use any means necessary to stop it. I wish there’d been a law against it.
About Tikkun
Debating Circumcision
|
The uproar over San Francisco’s proposed ban on circumcision has largely died but the national conversation is far from over. Indeed, the American Medical Association just voted to oppose all future bans. Don’t miss this vigorous debate between opponents and defenders of the practice.
Articles
The Gift of the Gay Rights Debate
|
We grow as religious people through an unlikely combination of courage and humility. It takes courage to question one’s opinions, and humility to recognize that we may not be as right as we thought. It is for this reason that spiritual progressives have rightly embraced the movement for equality for LGBT people not as a condundrum, but as an opportunity for precisely the kind of spiritual maturation we seek.