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My Collective Cultural Imagination Road Trip

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My husband is driving this noisy 16-foot truck filled with his studio materials and tools to our new home in New Mexico. A month ago, we caravanned southeast along this same route: part one of the move, our worldly goods. If I’ve been MIA (and I surely have), that’s why – packing up, moving, unpacking, all the arrangements attendant thereto, and fulfilling my work obligations have consumed months. For the first time in ages, sitting in the passenger seat, I have the mental space to ponder instead of only to plan and execute. I’m writing from that stretch of I-5 heading south dotted with a legion of wind turbines.

Culture

A Proposal to Shrink the Supply of Firearms Available for Criminal Use

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Robert Heinlein, a Libertarian Science fiction writer, popularized the phrase “TANSTAAFL.” He was expressing colloquially, by the words “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” a principle popularized in economics by Milton Friedman. The principle, somewhat oversimplified, is that whenever there is an exclusive choice whichever alternative is taken has an opportunity cost associated, the opportunity to choose another alternative. Reality is often a little less simple. There is no free lunch but there are many relatively governmentally highly subsidized lunches and many much lower or totally unsubsidized ones. That is the case with seeking to reduce harm from the presence in America of between its’ possibly 270 – 300 million firearms. A gun redemption program can only be successful under the motto “Go Big, or Go Home.”
The dialog over harm reduction from firearms is stagnant.

Culture

The Best Way to Deal with ISIS

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The two perspectives articulated here by Uri Avnery and Rabbi Arthur Waskow deserve to be well known and discussed. We at Tikkun have a slightly different approach: we believe that the hate-filled and barbarous approach of ISIS will continue to manifest in a world that is fundamentally unjust, creates huge amounts of suffering in daily life for at least 2 of the 7 billion people on the planet, and privileges military power over kindness in its expenditures of money and in the organization of nation states.

art

Repentance & Reparations by Kate Poole

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With the High Holidays here. Kate Poole has published a new comic commenting on some of our concerns today regarding wealth, race and consumerism. Explore more of Kate’s work here. [nggallery id=169]

Culture

All Should Be Repenting for the Suffering of the Refugees

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Most Americans seem completely blind to the way that we have played a major role in creating the problem of millions of refugees struggling to survive and to how we have a major responsibility to fix it. Few Americans realize that there was no major refugee problem until the 1990s. Here’s what happened since then to change the world.

Culture

Tikkun Wins Best Magazine of the Year Award

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So how in the world did a Catholic conference award Tikkun magazine with the Best Magazine of the Year Award for the second time in a row from the RNA Religious Newswriters Association? (Technical term of the award: Magazine Overall Excellence: 1st Place Winner: Tikkun Magazine). Well the short answer is that it wasn’t the religious Catholics who gave the award, but the mainstream religion newswriters, and they had once again recognized Tikkun as the most outstanding magazine that covers issues in religion. Read about it here!

Culture

Remembering Oliver Sacks (1933-2015) and His Gift

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But his writings didn’t venture into the overtly political. His life’s work – his gift – was to find a way of entering into his patients’ inner worlds not as a detached clinician but as a fellow human being, and to find a form of words to describe the experiences being suffered or endured or just lived with.

Education

Ten Things I Learned from Hugo Chávez

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Chávez was a democratically elected president, elected by a wide margin after running as an outsider in Venezuela’s fixed two-party system. His first acts as president were to wipe out illiteracy, establish healthcare clinics in the poorest barrios, and create a brand new constitution based on citizen input and participatory democracy. I wish our democratically elected presidents and governors would build our hopes up by empowering us with better education, healthcare for all, and new rules to improve rather than degrade our democracy.

Culture

God and Man in Toronto

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I would like not just the United Church of Canada but indeed all people concerned and interested in theological expression and exploration to consider the possibility that an “atheist minister” need not be a contradiction at all.