Earth-based Religions

How I Became a Pagan

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Paganism. The name itself has a certain wild and crazy sound to it, a sense of scribbling wildly outside the lines of the establishment. Much as I’d like to claim that aspect of the word, that sense of neo-medievalists dancing naked in the spring moonlight before they copulate in the furrows so that the crops will come again this year, that isn’t me, and it isn’t my paganism. I’m an urban middle-aged man, ex-school teacher, born and raised Jewish. What has brought me to a spiritual place where I can assert my religion is pagan, (or primal, to use Huston Smith’s more encompassing term) ?

Gender and Sexuality

Coming (and Being) "Out" as a Spiritual Path

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For those of us who have come out of the closet, National Coming Out Day – which is being internationally celebrated today – is a good reminder of the spiritual journey each of us have undergone since the fateful day we decided to say, “Enough. I am who I am, and from today onwards I will live by it.” The idea that coming out is a defining spiritual moment in a person’s life is not something you’ll find in mainstream LGBT discourse. Understandably so, of course: those who control religious discourse in America and elsewhere have done a tremendously effective job at turning gay people against organized religion. Ask a gay guy if they believe in God and an overwhelming majority of them will say, “I don’t think so,” or “No, I don’t.”

Buddhism

The Dalai Lama's Difficult Teachings

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I was surprised when a friend told me that the well known American Buddhist nun Pema Chodron’s talk this week in a 3,000 seat Bay Area venue is sold out, considering that it’s the same week when the Dalai Lama is teaching in the area for four days, including at a sold-out 11,000 seat venue. (You can get virtual participation in Chodron’s event via live-stream video.)
The Silicon Valley newspaper the Mercury News reports:
…the Bay Area appears eager to listen. Already rich in Buddhist traditions from Japan, Vietnam and other Asian countries, the region has become a mecca for religious thinkers of other faiths who are blending Buddhist traditions with their own, as well as a beachhead for the fledgling “interfaith movement.” I know a lot of people who are blending elements of Buddhism into their lives, without ever saying “I am a Buddhist.” “Interfaith” is a difficult concept, because it requires a different relationship with one’s own religion, quite apart from other religions:
As the Dalai Lama sees it, today’s global reality requires us to accept two premises: First, that no one religion can meet all of humanity’s needs.

Gender and Sexuality

"Temporary Marriage in Islam is Sex for Hire": Fatemeh Fakhraie

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The GOATMILK DEBATES continue… The motion:”Temporary Marriage is a valid option for Muslims in the modern age”
AGAINST THE MOTION: “Sigheh Marriage [Temporary Marriage or Muta’a] is Sex for Hire”

Fatemeh Fakhraie
I support any way that two consenting adults can safely get it on. And so I don’t think sigheh marriage (temporary marriage also referred to asmut’a, or pleasure, marriage) is a bad idea. In a magical, lollipop-and-rainbows land. But in the reality where we all live?

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.

General News

Is the "Anti-Immigrant Tide" Reversible?

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Well, it’s only an apparent tide and to the extent to which it seems to have momentum, it is reversible. Those are conclusions of what is, in my opinion, an excellent analysis of the current political state of play on the immigration rights issue, in a just published article, “The Preventable Rise of Arizona’s SB 1070,” by Justin Akers Chacon. Last June the General Assembly of my Unitarian Universalist denomination adopted Immigration Rights as a 4-Year Study-Action Issue, orienting its associated congregations, as much as possible given UU pluralism, toward a single primary topic of shared conversation. Since then I have been looking for a coherent way to understand the causes, the political forces standing in the way of a just resolution, and a sense of how progressives might engage this issue with some chance of a positive outcome. Chacon’s article is the best analysis I have seen so far.

Healing Israel/Palestine

The Spirit of Sukkot Contradicts Israel's Occupation of Palestine

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The following note from Rabbi Arik Ascherman raises for us a very important question: is it anything more than hypocrisy for Jews to dwell in sukkot this holiday, pretending to make ourselves vulnerable to material insecurity, when in fact we have huge material and military security but instead are imposing insecurity on the Palestinian people? It’s a troubling question. Rabbi Ascherman is the courageous chair of the Israeli branch of Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel, and his experience this week in the Silwan section of East Jerusalem gives us a better understanding of what is at stake in the demand by Palestinians that Israel continue its temporary ban on settlement building or expansions or home demolitions or evicting Palestinians from East Jerusalem, at least while the negotiations are continuing. We in the U.S. might also add a note of our domestic hypocrisy in claiming to care about the poor and the oppressed, but allowing the Democrats to have spent this past year and a half providing almost no relief to those who are being thrown out of their homes for inability to pay off outrageously high mortgage rates — rates that were imposed on them by banks that made loans without adequately alerting the borrowers to the likelihood that their mortgages would be much more expensive soon. We Jews at least should be giving this issue a much higher priority than our Jewish community has done so far.

Culture

An Ancient Take on a Modern Question: Morality in Our Changing World

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I mentioned in my last post that the question I was raising – how  to respond morally to change when even our moral sources are changing – is an ancient question. Consider the story of the ancient Greek philosopher Cratylus, who was influenced by the philosophical vision of Heraclitus. Though the name Heraclitus may be unfamiliar, his dictum that “you can’t step into the same river twice” is probably very familiar. Heraclitus was one of the original philosophers of process and flux – everything is dynamic, whatever is, is in motion. Cratylus was deeply influenced by this idea and followed it to what he deemed to be some of its logical consequences: he argued that not only can one not step into the same river twice, but one can’t step into the same river once.