Politics & Society

Behind the Egyptian Revolution

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Apart from academic specialists, business and government personnel with experience in the Middle East, and U.S. residents who have emigrated to the U.S. from the area, Americans are poorly informed about the Middle East, although Tikkun readers are probably much better informed about the Israel/Palestine issue than the average person thanks to Michael Lerner’s efforts to educate us over the years. But ignorance about the Arab world is great, and so it is not surprising that a deep understanding of the causes of the recent revolt has not emerged from contributions to Tikkun Daily on the topic in recent days. To begin to address that gap, I call to your attention an article by Ali Kadri, “A Period of Revolutionary Fervor”, that appeared February 24, in The Bullet, the E-Bulletin of Socialist Project in Canada. Kadri is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics; he formerly served as an economic analyst for the UN regional office in Beirut. I limit myself to partial summaries, representative quotations, and a few comments of my own based mostly on recent studies of global political economy.

General News

Do Spiritual Progressives Need to Think About Character?

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Galen Guengerich, Senior Minister of All Souls (Unitarian Universalist) Church in New York City, thinks so. At the recently completed General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association in Minneapolis, he posed, elaborated, and defended this position for Unitarian Universalists (UUs) in an eight-part series of well-attended talks. (Ideas discussed in this post may be found in this sermon that Rev. Guengerich delivered prior to General Assembly and that overlaps with his first talk at G.A.)
A More Demanding Spirituality
Character, as Guengerich conceives it, is about asking more of ourselves than an “anything goes” spiritual multiculturalism does. It’s about self-discipline. He thinks that people are looking for a more demanding form of spirituality than is conveyed by the answer “we have no creed” often given by lay UU’s to the question “but what do UU’s believe?”

Rethinking Religion

Renewing Unitarian Universalism: Report from the UUA General Assembly

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I have recently returned from the 49th General Assembly (GA) of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations (UUA, for short), which met in Minneapolis June 23-27. I was one of two delegates representing my congregation in Bowling Green, KY. Since Tikkun Daily includes subscribers and bloggers who consider themselves UU’s and the UUA grapples with many of the same challenges as do otherwise affiliated or unaffiliated spiritual progressives, it’s a reasonable guess that what occurred at the UUA General Assembly will interest Tikkun Daily readers. Above: Excerpt from Native American activist, environmentalist, economist, and writer Winona LaDuke’s June 26 lecture to the 2010 General Assembly of the UUA. See the complete lecture here.