Please note: additional readings and resources are available by topic under each Issue.
New and Recommended Books
Books by Tikkun Institute staff
Fr. Raymond Helmick, S.J.
Why Camp David Failed
Raymond G. Helmick is an American Jesuit priest, and Professor of
Conflict Resolution in the Department of Theology at Boston College.
For over thirty years he has worked as a mediator in various conflicts,
including Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, East Timor, the
countries of the former Yugoslavia and the Middle East.
Based on personal correspondence and position papers with all three
leaders, and a long personal association with Yasser Arafat and a whole
series of Israeli Prime Ministers dating back to 1985, this book offers
a unique account of the real reasons behind the failure of Camp David...
Helmick details the recommendations he gave, as a mediator, during
the period. Written with empathy for all parties involved, the book
does not stop short of drawing serious conclusions. Above all it is a
hopeful book: Helmick shows that, despite the renewed violence, people
have an enormous capacity to overcome animosity and despair. He
analyses the prospects for reconciliation in these difficult times.
Other books:
Charlie Derber: Regime Change Begins at Home
Berrett-Koehler Publishers © 2004
Charles Derber is Professor of Sociology at Boston College and
former director of its graduate program on Social Economy and Social
Justice. He is a prolific scholar in the field of political
economy, international relations and society, and is the author of
eight books. His op-eds and essays appear in Newsday, the Boston
Globe, and other newspapers and he has been interviewed by Newsweek,
Business Week, Time and other news magazines.
One of the most important books by a regular Tikkun writer to locate
our current political-economic situation as a phase in America's
historical development. This analysis helps us get our historical
bearings and therefore to both see the roots of our current situation
and dig our way out. Derber understands our current era as a
"third corporate regime," the pro-business successor to the New Deal
regime that was essentially defeated by Reagan's presidency. Its "five
pillars" are the dominance of transnational corporations; the
corporate-welfare state; permanent "social insecurity" featuring an
unstable job market and shredded government safety nets; a foreign
policy of "empire"; and an ideology of "the corporate mystique," a
combination of free-market triumphalism and consumerism. Regime
Change is a full-bodied analysis of our current political situation and
is highly recommended to those in the Tikkun community.
Thomas Berry writes that Matthew Fox "might well be the most
creative, the most comprehensive, surely the most challenging
religious-spiritual teacher in America." His California-based
Institute of Creation Spirituality (now Wisdom University) has been
known for years as a center of creative, feminist-leaning, mystical,
visionary Christianity.
From the Publisher: In Fox's new book, A New Reformation!, he
proclaims that we are in fact confronted with two churches: one
expressed by the image of the Punitive Father, personified by a rigidly
hierarchical church structure, repression of the feminine, spreading of
homophobia and the elimination of internal dissent; and the other
expressed by the feminine figure of Wisdom, personified by a
Mother/Father God of justice and compassion. It is time for Christians
to choose whom it will follow: an angry exclusionary god or the loving
open path of wisdom.
Roger Gottlieb
A Spirituality of Resistance
Crossroad Publishing Company 1999
Roger S. Gottlieb is professor of philosophy at Worcester
Polytechnic Institute, a social activist and the author or editor of
more than ten books on politics, spirituality, the environment and the
Holocaust. He is a columnist for Tikkun magazine, writes for
popular and academic journals and has tried to teach -- and learn --
the meaning of spiritual life in a dark age. This book is an
extraordinary work, something that has needed to be written in order to
bring together the personal and spiritual with the
psychological. He appreciates yet critiques those types of
spiritual practice that only encourage individual growth and spiritual
self-esteem, as this turn inward can tend to detach us from issues of
social and political responsibility and sometimes from pain and
evil. This book helps us with one of Tikkun's central tasks: to
explore what a politically progressive spirituality -- one that we can
use to change both ourselves and our society -- might look like.
International
Forum on Globalization: Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A
Better World is Possible, 2nd ed, October 2004 © Berrett-Kohler
Publishers, Inc.
The anti-corporate-globalization movement is often dismissed
(unfairly, many believe) for being better at critique than at having a
positive vision. Alternatives is one of the best answers to this
charge. In the last few years, the International Forum on
Globalization has become one of the nation's pre-eminent institutions
challenging the homogenizing, one-size-fits-all model of corporate
globalization. But along with this critique, we now have this book
which incorporates hundreds of living, real-world examples of
alternative economic models at the local, national, and global levels.
After years of close collaboration with social movements -- especially
worker, farmer, and environmental organizations -- IFG has included
many of their calls for change as the basis for developing the
alternative proposals in the book.
Frances Moore Lappé and Anna Lappé
Hope's Edge
Over thirty years ago, Frances Moore Lappé, then a 26 year-old college student in Berkeley, wrote Diet for a Small Planet
a book that changed the lives of many in our generation
forever. Many of us, including this reviewer, took it as our
bible, as it changed the way we thought about food and
hunger. Lappé challenged the notion that world hunger is caused by
scarcity and went on to show that the world crisis comes not from a
scarcity of food but rather from political disempowerment and a lack of
control over one's own material and social conditions. She helped us
see that our diet and agricultural systems are generating the very food
scarcity that we then decry, and showed how each of us has the power to
choose a diet that is (how wonderful!) best for both our bodies and our
planet.
For the 30th anniversary sequel to her revolutionary classic,
Frances Moore Lappé and her daughter Anna have teamed up to offer the
perspective of two generations in creating Hope's Edge. It's a
narrative of an intimate mother-and-daughter journey to the many places
in the world where people are taking their lives back and empowering
themselves and their communities in the economic, environmental, social
and political realms. Tikkuners know the importance of
psychological analysis in understanding how and why people are drawn to
beliefs that ultimately oppress them. In this book the Lappes ask
why, as societies, we create the very inequalities and environmental
devastation that as individuals we abhor.
Michael Nagler and Arun Gandhi
The Search for a Nonviolent Future:
A Promise of Peace for Ourselves, Our Families, and Our World
Inner Ocean Publishing, © 2004, revised and updated
Dr. Michael Nagler has devoted his life to exploring nonviolence as
an alternative to war. Professor Emeritus of Languages at the
University of California, Berkeley, and founder and former chairperson
of the University's Peace and Conflict Studies program, Nagler has
become one of the world's most widely respected peace scholars and
activists.
From the publisher: Beginning with the achievements of Mahatma
Gandhi, and following the legacy of nonviolence through the struggles
against Nazism in Europe, racism in America, oppression in China and
Latin America, and ethnic conflicts in Africa and Bosnia, Michael
Nagler unveils a hidden history. Nonviolence, he proposes, has proven
its power against arms and social injustice wherever it has been
correctly understood and applied. Nagler's approach is not only
historical but also spiritual, drawing on the experience of Gandhi and
other activists and teachers. Individual chapters include A Way Out of
Hell, The Sweet Sound of Order, and A Clear Picture of Peace. The last
chapter includes a five-point blueprint for change and "study circle"
guide. The foreword by Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, is
new to this edition.
Dr. Nagler also serves on the advisory board of Tikkun magazine.
Ira Rifkin
Spiritual Perspectives on Globalization:
Making Sense of Economic and Cultural Upheaval
Spiritual Perspectives, © 2004
Ira Rifkin is an award-winning religion journalist with recognitions
from the Associated Church Press, the American Jewish Press
Association, the Religion Newswriters Association, and the Society of
Professional Journalists. Previously news producer of Beliefnet.com, a
multi-faith Web magazine, he is an adjunct professor at American
University in Washington, D.C.
When we talk about 'globalization' we are usually referring to
corporate-led globalization of capital. This phenomenon is often
either defended or critiqued from a strictly economic perspective: can
its claims to be able to bring material well-being to the poor of the
Third World (as well as those of us in the First World) bear
fruit? Yet we must not avoid the cultural and spiritual issues
involved when a single economic model spreads over the
globe. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is often invoked here by
defenders of corporate globalization: only people with full bellies
have the luxury of caring about spiritual and cultural issues. Yet
clearly many forceful religious agendas have arisen as a direct
response to globalization, and we ignore the understanding of these at
our peril. In a clear, non-dogmatic and jargon-free manner, Rifkin
explores how many of the world's religions are responding to the global
spread of capital.
Svi Shapiro
Losing Heart: the Moral and Spiritual Mis-education of America's Children
To be published 2005 by Lawrence Erlbaum.
(not yet in print)
Thandeka
Learning to Be White: Money, Race, and God in America
Continuum International Publishing Group © 2000
Thandeka is an associate professor of theology and culture
at Meadville/Lombard Theological School in Chicago and is a
frequent contributor to Tikkun. A Unitarian-Universalist minister
and theologian, Thandeka was given her name in 1984 by Archbishop
Desmond Tutu. The name is Xhosa and means one who is loved by God.
Her book is a call to build community across barriers of
otherness. It is a book about how children are taught
racism. She concludes that racism is in part rooted in children's
fear of exile and abandonment should they hold positive feelings toward
persons of another race. They soon learn to bury such feelings for fear
they will lose the love of those closest to them. They therefore
learn to hide their original feelings of openness and friendliness
toward people of other groups and give up their own integrity in order
to survive as part of their own group.
Jim Wallis
God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It
©2005 HarperSanFrancisco
Publisher's comments: "Since when did believing in God and having
moral values make you pro-war, pro-rich, and pro-Republican? And since
when did promoting and pursuing a progressive social agenda with a
concern for economic security, health care, and educational opportunity
mean you had to put faith in God aside?
"While the Right in America has hijacked the language of faith to
prop up its political agenda an agenda not all people of faith
support the Left hasn't done much better, largely ignoring faith and
continually separating moral discourse and personal ethics from public
policy. While the Right argues that God's way is their way, the Left
pursues an unrealistic separation of religious values from morally
grounded political leadership. The consequence is a false choice
between ideological religion and soulless politics."
This book explores the progressive and healthy alternative to these
two choices. It's a very important expression of the Tikkun
perspective.
Further Readings
For further resources, see the listings in the book section of
the excellent website of the Foundation for Ethics and Meaning at http://www.meaning.org/frame_inform.html.
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