Culture

Tikkunista

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Dear TDB readers,
I wondered if this description of my online magazine, Tikkunista, was inappropriately self-serving for a post on Tikkun Daily so I asked Dave if he thought it was worth posting. He asked that I share his answer, which follows. I think this post would help a lot of people understand the appeal to the writer of online writing and blogging. We are looking for more people like you who want to do this on Tikkun Daily. We especially want people, whether they are generalists or not, who are able to take a “beat” that fits with our spiritual progressive mission.

Culture

How We Criticize, Hear and Are Empathic With Each Other: a Clash of Cultures Evident on Tikkun Daily

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The controversy over Be Scofield’s post on perceived racism in the mainstream, chiefly white, yoga world seems to me to reflect a clash of at least three American cultures. All three are made up of decent people trying their best to survive, thrive and help this suffering world. Be straddles these cultures. In his post he talks in the voice of one of them to his friends in another of them, and is getting very angry responses from some of those friends, partly perhaps because of the influence of a third culture that is rising today and that a lot of us are trying to learn from. These three I am calling white liberal culture, the critical writings of the oppressed, and nonviolent speech and action.

Christianity

Bonhoeffer’s Theological Drive to Protect Jews from Nazis

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This article was written with John Shellito, who served as its primary author. Johnis a student at Union Theological Seminary, interested in how faith communities can resist oppression in economic, ecological, and social spheres. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 2008 and is currently pursuing ordination in the Episcopal Church. “He was never what one might today term a culture warrior, nor could he easily be labeled conservative or liberal,” claims Eric Metaxas in one of many pungent lines from his groundbreaking new biography of Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Yet Bonhoeffer has often been pigeonholed as a courageous radical, working secretly for the assassination of Adolf Hitler during World War II.

art

Collaborative Art Fractures Prison Walls

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The image of a hand pressed against thick glass, fingers outstretched, made its way onto Evan Bissell’s canvas because it still haunts one of his collaborators, a young woman named Chey who saw it as a child visiting a jail. “My dad used to do that when I’d visit him,” she wrote in a note to viewers of the “What Cannot Be Taken Away: Families and Prisons Project” at San Francisco’s SOMArts space. “The glass was so thick that you couldn’t feel any warmth.” The collaborative art exhibition, which seeks to open our imaginations to new ideas about why harm happens and how harm can be repaired, is itself a hand pressed to the glass of the prison system, a warm-hearted attempt to create new flows of communication and empathy between people shut inside and people shut out. The project grew out of months of written dialogue between four fathers at San Francisco County Jail #5 and four teenagers whose own fathers are or were previously incarcerated.

Empathy

Personal Growth and Social Change (7th and Final Post) and Invitation to a Phone Discussion

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Part 1 of this topic was posted on Aug 8, and links are provided below to all the other parts of this mini-series. This is the last segment. If you would like to participate in a real-time conversation with me about these topics (this Sunday, 9:30 – 11:00am Pacific Time), see below for more details, or go here to register. I started this mini-series with noting that none of us ultimately knows what would (will? could?) bring about significant change, beyond our experiments with alternatives, beyond a vision absent material resources, beyond the smallness of our efforts.

Culture

Personal Growth and Social Change (Part 6): A Gift Economy

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This mini-series started on Aug 8, and this is the seventh post so far. The previous post was on Sep 24. Each of the posts can be read separately. Example: Gift Economy
Because I have such a deep longing for a gift economy, so deep that truly every day hurts in seeing how far we are from such a system, I continually look for examples of gift economies already operating so I can sustain and expand the solidity of my faith in this possibility. I am less interested in hunter gatherer societies that still have gift economies than in examples within the existing modern capitalist economy.

Culture

What We Lose Without Deep Neighbor Love and Delight in the Holy

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“Justice is co-created through the joining of deep neighbor-love with delight in the holy.” I love that sentence from Mike Hogue’s recent post. If that’s what it takes to create justice, no wonder we have so little of it. I mean, isn’t it a given that you lose deep neighbor-love when you move into the middle class? Isn’t losing deep neighbor-love the way that you make it yourself?

Culture

Personal Growth and Social Change (Part 5)

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This mini-series started on Aug 8, and this is the seventh post so far. The previous post was on Sep 10. Each of the posts can be read separately. Working towards and creating change (as distinct from change happening, which is a constant in life) involves conscious choice and action. On the personal level, this means becoming more the person we would like to be, and creating new options for ourselves.

Culture

Guest Post: “The artist formerly known as Molly Norris,” By Christopher Stedman

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Last week the atheist blogosphere lit up with reports that Molly Norris, the Seattle cartoonist who inadvertently inspired “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” (EDMD), had been forced to change her identity and go into hiding due to death threats she received from extremists. How did these same bloggers who promoted EDMD respond to this news? They expressed sadness and frustration. And who wouldn’t? Poor Norris – imagine having to give up everything you knew because your life was in danger.

Empathy

Examining Islamophobia

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We probably all start out prejudiced; having been brought up by people who look and act like us and believe the things that we learn to believe, we start by assuming that our way is the right way to do things, and if people do things differently they must be wrong. The need to grow beyond that childhood perspective is what led Mark Twain to optimistically claim that, “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.” But though we now live in a global village, in which the floods in Pakistan or fires of Russia are no further than a click away, an irrational fear of Islam or Muslims, Islamophobia, has been rising as fast as the floods, and spreading as fast as the fires. The most obvious examples are the inchoate rage some have felt at plans to build a Muslim community centre two blocks from ground zero, and the proposal to burn Qur’ans sponsored by a fringe Florida pastor. But it goes a lot further: last week Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic, wrote: “Muslim life is cheap, particularly to Muslims…