Culture

A Krisis With a Creative Solution

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Technology has become a cipher for the collective anxieties of a society in the throes of florid death denial. Even though we think we “cheat death” and “steal time,” the piper always demands his due, and the price is the return of the repressed. Technology isn’t the death of Spirit; it is its efflorescence. The choice is ours, to embrace or deny. And we already know the price of denial.

Culture

Interdependence Day Celebration

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Faced with July 4th celebrations that are focused on militarism, ultra-nationalism, and “bombs bursting in air,” many American families who do not share those values turn July 4th into another summer holiday focused on picnics, sports and fireworks while doing their best to avoid the dominant rhetoric and bombast. We in the Network of Spiritual Progressives believe that this is a net loss.

Culture

Before the Dawn

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On this fast day, I remember that many U.S. people worry, like anyone anywhere, about the hardships a new day may bring, in a dangerous and uncertain time that seems to be dawning on every nation and the species as a whole. In the U.S., we carry the added knowledge that most of the world lives much more poorly – in a material sense, at least – than we do, and that were the sun to truly rise upon the U.S., with familiar words of equality and justice truly realized, we would have to share much of our wealth with a suffering world.

Healing Israel/Palestine

Palestine at the Crossroads

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The Palestinians’ struggle for a homeland is affected by the language used to describe their rights and to mount opposition against them. I simplify this language into two kinds: that which demonizes and is violent, and that which creates hope and is nonviolent. That’s the format for my observations in the parliament.

Culture

Looking Back: Rachel Dolezal and the Wages

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Dolezal may be personally mendacious and manipulative, but her construction of herself, however contrived, struck a raw nerve in the American psyche. The “white” woman turned ‘black” is even more transgressive than transgenders. Her professed bisexuality attracts less attention than her racial identification.

Culture

Weeding Roses in Kabul

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The APVs and their students face numerous challenges to their future security and survival. Yet bleak conditions don’t deter their resolve to move forward. I myself felt quite hopeful, especially while sitting in on a class about nonviolence.

Culture

Sacred Activism: A Meditation on Inner Transformation

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As our world becomes increasing ideologically polarized, bridging the gap between beliefs is equally crucial and difficult. Shaikh Kabir Helminski proposes that society takes up a new perspective that “recognizes the limitations of all religious beliefs, but without discarding the core values of spirituality [and] recognizes how much the secular world sacrifices to the idols of consumerism and materialism. But it respects secularism for not imposing a single interpretation of belief upon society and for allowing the freedom to choose one’s own lifestyle.”

Culture

NRA's Strategy of Blaming the Victims

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While LaPierre by implication blames the massacre at Sandy Hook on school officials for not having armed guards, Cotton places direct blame on the murdered pastor for his own death and the death of nine others.This strategy of blaming the victim is often used to reverse and thus deflect the argument by skewing the actual power dynamics and thereby attempting to misappropriate responsibility for the oppression from the dominant group and to those who are, in fact, most negatively impacted by the oppression.