Politics & Society

Harry Potter's Invisibility Cloak Helping to "Ensure Liberty?"

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What if my little peace and social justice learning company, Reach And Teach, put a “product” on our web site and called it “Throw John Boehner Out of Congress.” Folks could purchase a downloadable PDF listing everything we don’t like about the Republican Minority Leader for, let’s say anywhere from $10 to $50,000. We could raise tens of millions or even billions of dollars and then, Reach And Teach could spend every penny running really nasty ads against Boehner in the two weeks before election day. If the public or government wanted to know who had paid for the ad, we’d tell them to pound sand, protecting our customer’s privacy. Sound like a good idea?

Culture

Color Theory: The Most High Art of Peter Lewis

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During a recent inventory count in the bar where I work, I was surprised to see my boss taking sips from various juice bottles in order to determine their contents. He later revealed to me that he is colorblind. This revelation that someone I interact closely with every day literally does not see the world the same way I do made me question some things, the least of which concerned who should count bar juices from now on. I realized that in my role as someone who writes about art I have taken for granted that my experience of color is the same, or nearly the same as everyone else’s. I wonder now in what other ways people experience art differently than I do.

Judaism

My Son's Bar Mitzvah

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Last Saturday, my son Benjamin became a Bar Mitzvah. His Torah portion is Yitro. I would like to share his D’Var Torah which was packed with insight about participatory government as well as the taking and giving of good advice. My parsha is Yitro. It comes right after B’shallach, in which the Israelits left Egypt by the Reed (Red) Sea.

Culture

CBS Will Air "Focus on Family" Ad

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I guess I would have missed it altogether. I never watch the Super Bowl. I never watch TV. I don’t subject myself to its violence and idiocy. I get my information by reading, whether on the internet (more and more) or through print media.

Earth-based Religions

Groundhog's Day — Pregnant with Life

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I have a friend who says that February is the longest month of the year. Even though this seems nonsensical, I know what she means. It’s still deep winter, but the holidays are over, the Yule lights have been put away — and there’s nothing much to distract from the bare, white winter landscape except for the frigid deep freeze. The cold keeps us inside more than usual, so many of us get cabin fever, that restless, bored, listless, frustrating desire for something you can’t find unless you flee Wisconsin for the southlands. February is the fallow time of year, with bleak landscapes that can either be beautiful in their stark simplicity or deadly boring because of their lack of color and activity.

Politics & Society

"Where Clinton Turned Right, Obama Plowed Ahead"

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Interesting that that’s the New York Times headline about yesterday’s State of the Union speech. The author contrasts Obama’s “staying the course” with Clinton’s move to the right in 1996. The assumption here at Tikkun has been that Obama would continue to follow Clinton to the right. But when you read the whole piece it turns out that they are saying that staying the course for Obama means being unemotional, cool, an “anti-ideologue.” “As temperatures cool,” he [Obama] said, making an assumption that they would cool, “I want everyone to take another look at the plan we’ve proposed.”

Politics & Society

I'm gonna sit right down, and write Father Louie a letter…..

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Dear Father Louie,
Thank you for your work and witness for justice and especially for your willingness to go several extra steps in your protest against the School of the Americas (AKA WHINSEC) at Fort Benning, Georgia. Crossing the line to enter Fort Benning, getting arrested, being tried, and now serving time in jail for your act of civil disobedience, would be great acts of courage for any American, let alone a 77 year old! Given that you have plenty of time on your hands, six months to be precise, I am hoping that many people will follow my lead and write to you, and thank you for your service to our country and the world. It has taken me years to truly understand why protesting against the School of the Americas is so important. When I first left the military in 1987, I didn’t believe the stories I heard from my new civilian lefty friends about torture and assassination in Central America, somehow being encouraged or even directed by Americans against people in places like El Salvador.

Christianity

The New Evangelical Partnership: Cancel Haiti's Debt

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This is great and hugely promising. There’s a whole generation of young evangelicals out there who are different in certain ways from their parents. Gary Dorrien was talking about this on Monday night on the Tikkun Phone Forum (and I hope we can get the recording up soon). Young evangelicals are more accepting of gay relationships for example. They are also more focused on world poverty.

Culture

One City's Trash: Artists in Residency at the San Francisco Dump

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“If there is one place that never sleeps, it’s the dump. Being the final output of society, it constantly has to keep up with our waste.” — Erik Otto
Just south of America’s littlest big city, across the highway from where the 49ers play, a raucous city of refuse rages 24 hours a day, fed by a never-ending river of San Francisco’s garbage. This is Recology, also known as the San Francisco dump. Recology is on the front line of an effort by the city of San Francisco to achieve a state of garbage transcendentalism known as “Waste Zero” (nothing wasted, nothing buried, nothing burned).