Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/culture/page/37/)
Posts about culture, the arts, the media, book reviews, movies etc.
When conflict prevention is examined through a faith-based lens, a different set of factors come to the foreground. Technical fixes seem less important, faddish even. The importance of relationship comes into focus. The approach to time changes. The slow, steady approach I’ve witnessed in many places can yield real results. The tortoise can overtake the hare.
When people on the left side of the political spectrum think of country music, the phrase ‘social justice’ rarely comes to mind. Nonetheless, the second incarnation of the One More Shot music festival combines just these two seemingly disparate entities. Held in Birmingham, UK, over the weekend of April 24-26.One More Shot will be headlines by Christian Kane, from the television shows Angel, Leverage, and Steven Spielberg’s award-winning miniseries Into the West.
#Cut50 aims to reduce the incarcerated population of the U.S. by 50 percent over the next 10 years by convening ‘unlikely allies,’ communicating a powerful new narrative, and elevating proven solutions such as restorative justice and youth empowerment programs that provide jobs and skills. Recent successes in both ‘red’ and ‘blue’ states prove that it is possible to reduce incarceration rates successfully while achieving better outcomes, saving money, and protecting public safety.
In 2011, the script for Admissions was given to Academy Award nominee and peace activist, James Cromwell, who graciously agreed to play the lead role. Admissions has won 26 international awards, been translated into Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, and Spanish, and broadcast to 80 million people worldwide. As a result of the positive response, a number of peace organizations coalesced around the film’s message and several efforts were synergized. The result was a new mission to create Ministries and Departments of Peace in governments worldwide.
Today, the legacy of Khalsa Diwan Society is a reminder that Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh communities have had a longstanding history of cooperation and collaboration in California, providing a model for small and marginalized faiths to share a safe, communal space.
Being a militarist and racist state will not help win Israel any friends around the world, and in the not-too-long-run it will weaken Israel’s support in the United States both among Americans in general and in particular among young Jews.
It is good for the Jewish people, as for all people, to be engaged in struggles for justice, and bad for us to be either complacent or antagonistic in the face of systemic oppression. But Hillel’s position does not simply discriminate against Jews; it prevents Jews from entering into active solidarity with certain suffering groups, and thereby asks us to be complicit in the unfolding of injustice.
Force Majeure forces us to face an uncomfortable set of questions. Can desire be reconfigured so that we can have sex and domesticity with equal partners in the home? Can women demand equality and masculinity, which so many self-identified feminists seems to command without recognizing serious tensions? A full feminist agenda must find a way to defuse common libidinal impulses if the vision of sex equality is going to be rendered friendly to marriage and domestic life.
Certainly, those of us who want to put collaboration at the center of how we function are swimming upstream. Everything is stacked up against us… What’s most needed, in my mind, is the empowerment of all to be able to express their needs and perspectives and, simultaneously, be interested in the needs and perspectives of others and in finding a solution that works for all.
The current bifurcated restroom designation contradicts the realities of peoples’ sexed bodies, gender identities, and gender expressions. Many intersex people define neither as “male” nor as “female.” Which restroom must they choose, or which are they allowed to choose?