Watch or listen to our call launching our National Working Groups. These groups will provide a space for NSP members to gather to brainstorm, strategize, learn, and co-create and serve as a model of how to organize a local group.
Articles
Tikkun Wins 2015 Magazine of the Year Award
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Tikkun is the winner of the prestigious 2014 “Magazine of the Year: Overall Excellence in Religion Coverage” award from the Religion Newswriters Association!
Culture
Consciousness Studies and a Transformation of the Western Worldview
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Adventurers have come to the field of consciousness studies bringing a variety of skills, ideologies, and intelligence types, and they have come for many reasons. To enter the field is to step into an explanatory turf-war between science and spirituality.
2012
Healing the World Through Consciousness Exploration
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An exploration of consciousness confirms that no matter how different the trappings of culture, language, costume, or beliefs, we are the same sort of beings, we want the same things, and we are subject to the same disappointments and joys. In short, an exploration of consciousness has great power to illuminate and inform efforts at tikkun olam.
2011
Is Addiction Really a Disease? A Challenge to Twelve-Step Programs
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For most of America, having a disease means having a foreign body assume residence in the biological tissue, multiplying itself and attacking the surrounding healthy tissue. This idea is a direct result of the discovery of microscopy and the bacterial origin of many afflictions. The metaphor here is war, and all good doctors are on the front lines, battling leukemia, eradicating AIDS and other serious illnesses. Sometimes we cause the war ourselves and sometimes we are simply invaded. But where is the infection in addiction? To what can we actually point?
Israel/Palestine
Recognize Palestine! Recognize Israel!
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The Network of Spiritual Progressives, Tikkun’s political action arm, is both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine. We are hopeful that UN recognition of Palestine would persuade Israel to freeze its expansion of settlements in the areas that were part of pre-1967 Palestine. We also hope that UN recognition would lead Israel to negotiate in good faith to create a Palestinian state and reach a just settlement of all remaining issues, ensuring security for Israel and Palestine.
26.4 Fall 2011
We Are Staying In Print
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Great news: we’ve negotiated an arrangement for Tikkun to join the family of academically and intellectually serious journals published by Duke University Press.
Network of Spiritual Progressives
Nine Qualities of the Spiritual Activist
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The most effective activism is from the soul to the outer world, so each of us must also do the work of creating spiritual coherence within our own souls
Network of Spiritual Progressives
Tikkun at 25
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Those of us who founded and shaped Tikkun for the past twenty-five years have been solidly committed to supporting the manifestation of the Spirit of God in this world. In our view that means advancing the possibilities of a world based on love; kindness; generosity; individual and collective freedom; mutual recognition; thanksgiving; pleasure; joy; the evolution of scientific knowledge, spiritual wisdom, understanding of self and others, and deep levels of individual and global consciousness; the triumph of social justice; peace; equality; material well-being; environmental sanity; mutual forgiveness and caring for each other; and awe, wonder, and radical amazement at the grandeur and mystery of the universe. Our goal of tikkun-ing the world (healing, evolving and transforming it), has a long tradition in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and in other spiritual and religious communities as well. We are merely one contemporary embodiment of that tradition. The Promise, Successes, and Problems of the NSP
Knowing that people often find that their highest progressive ideals cannot be expressed freely in their various religious communities, or at least not acted upon in those institutions, we decided seven years ago to create the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) to be the educational and activist arm of Tikkun.
2010
Suicidal vs. Life-Giving Religious Narratives
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I was invited to reflect here on the topic of “spiritual visions for social healing,” under the general heading of “creating a caring society,” but first, I’d like to turn the topic upside-down to look at religious visions for social suicide.
Vol 25.5 SepOct 2010
Yankee Doodle Faced Big Oil
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The human race — not for the first time in our history — has lost the sacred sense of self-restraint. We don’t restrain ourselves. And what’s the result? The earth will give forth thorns and thistles, not abundance, and you will have to work with the sweat pouring down your faces to get just barely enough to eat.
Education
How Closed are “Closed Minds”?
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When I moved to the University of Missouri after having worked in Boston, I found that approaches to racial and gender equality that worked in New England were counterproductive in our work in the lower Midwest. We asked students to share what they valued in their culture, what nurtured and sustained them. We experienced the joy of expanding circles of deliberation and engagement with those we had formerly seen as prejudiced, closed-minded, and uninterested in learning
Articles
A Politics Based on Soul Force
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I think that if you’re looking at the world today and you’re not heartbroken and you’re not grieving, you’re not conscious. The question is, if we know that things can be done, what are we called upon to do?
Analysis of Israel/Palestine
The New Zionist Imperative Is to Tell Israel the Truth
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This is an extremely interesting and terrible time for the issue that I work on, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I’d like to think together about some reactions to the flotilla incident and about where we go from here—what are the policy options, the implications for our politics, and, from my perspective, the implications for the American Jewish community.
Network of Spiritual Progressives
The Race to Save Civilization
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If we look at early civilizations that declined and collapsed, more often than not it was a shortage of food that brought them down. Until recently I had rejected the idea that food could be the weak link in our modern civilization; I now think it probably is.