America Beyond the 2012 Election: Our Fall Print Issue

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Our Fall 2012 Issue
This special section of Tikkun faces controversy head-on, engaging in debates on the place of crucifixion symbolism in Christianity as well as why America needs a Left no matter who wins in November. Can a narrow focus on electoral politics distract us from the impending global crises—like climate change, economic collapse and the power of transnational corporations that transcend national politics? These pages offer wide-ranging analyses of religion through contemporary politics. Tikkun welcomes sharp criticisms and alternative readings of the ideas discussed here.

Subscribe to Tikkun or join the Network of Spiritual Progressives now to read the full versions of these articles online! Click here for the full table of contents. If you are a member or subscriber who still needs guidance on how to register to read the online version of the print magazine, email miriam@tikkun.org or call 1-888-PEACE40 for help. Click a link below to explore the issue!
Why America Needs a Left
by Eli Zaretsky
The United States today should be engaged in a great debate, not so much over who the next president will be, or over the role of government in economic life, but over the very identity and future orientation of the country itself. Read More »

Obama in Question: A Progressive Critique and Defense
by Gary Dorrien
We elected an inspiring, eloquent, dignified, reflective type who understood very well that his candidacy offered, and rested upon, a series of shortcuts. Politics is always about power and is only sometimes about social justice. It has a relation to redemption—the healing of life and the world (tikkun)—only through its connection to social justice. Read More »

The Need for Progressive Realism
by Heidi Hadsell
Yes, Obama was moderate, and still the lofty sounding rhetoric made us feel that change really was possible. Hope was in the air. With time, we didn’t so much argue about the policies of his administration, many of which seemed fair and forward-looking. Rather, we took issue with the unwillingness to fight, the folding of the hand before the cards were played, the untoward interest in compromise with those who sought his political demise, and the combination of heady discourse with reliance on advisers peddling conventional economic wisdom geared toward the rich. Read More »

What Comes Next for Spiritual Progressives?
by Stephen Phelps
America’s political dysfunction is a symptom of a national identity crisis. Americans are drawn to incompatible views of human purpose. I appreciate how Gary Dorrien (writing in both this issue of Tikkun and in The Obama Question) frames the broken mirror of national identity in two panes. In one is yearning for unrestricted liberty to acquire wealth; in the other is yearning for self-government—that is, a desire for rightful power to apply core values in the creation of public policies and practices, including those that pertain to wealth. Read More »

Trickle-Up Democracy
by Douglas Rushkoff
I know we’re not supposed to say such things, but I have lost faith in national politics. Yes, I’ll vote in the coming elections and do my part to get the less sold-out, less anti-communitarian candidate in office. But I no longer look to the top tier of centralized government to solve our problems or help us grope toward conclusions together. Read More »

Be a Progressive Democrat!
by Mimi Kennedy
Election year is different from all other years. Keep your head together. Keep organizing to send people to the ballot box, and watch the voter rolls, absentee procedures, and election-night count. It’s our basic progressive value: Hear all voices! Read More »

Democratizing the Economy for a New Progressive Era
by Gar Alperovitz
Come what may in November’s presidential election, progressive prospects at the national level are far from encouraging. Truth be told, we live in an era of deepening stagnation and political stalemate. Read More »

Reclaiming the Radical Imagination: Reform Beyond Electoral Politics
by Henry A. Giroux
The upcoming election of 2012 presents a challenge to progressives whose voices have been excluded from both the mainstream media and the corridors of political power. Under such circumstances, politics dissolves into pathology as those who are able to dominate politics and policy-making do so largely because of their disproportionate control of the nation’s income and wealth and the benefits they gain from the systemic reproduction of an iniquitous social order. Read More »

Why Progressives Should Follow Feminism’s Lead in 2012
by Alix Kates Shulman
Some progressives, disappointed in Obama’s performance, are expressing apathy about the 2012 election. Feminists, however, facing an escalating “war on women” and recognizing the enormous political stakes, have been organizing with renewed energy. Read More »

Third-Party Politics: A Conversation with Green Party Candidate Jill Stein
by Michael Lerner
Michael Lerner: So you’re running for president. Could you tell me a little bit about who you are and how you came to run on the Green Party platform?

Jill Stein: It’s a wonderful place to begin. I’m a mother and a doctor—a general internist. When people ask what kind of medicine I’m practicing, I now say political medicine because it’s the mother of all illnesses. We’ve got to fix this one in order to fix all the other things that ail us! Read More »

Compassion for the Victims of Our Global Capitalist System
by Michael Lerner
Too many liberals and progressives blame voter support for reactionary and ultra-conservative politics on the supposed mean-spiritedness, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, or stupidity of those who vote the other way. By slipping into this easy mindset, we fail to perceive the real yearning so many of us have for a life filled with love, caring, and generosity. Read More »

The Death of Christianity
by Lawrence Swaim
There is at the heart of Christianity a disturbing doctrine that has the uncanny ability to overwhelm cognition, and—when internalized by the believer—the ability to traumatize. I refer to the belief, held by most Christians, that Jesus Christ, the prophetic figure of Christianity, was crucified to redeem the world, and that this plan originated with God. Read More »

The Hope of the Cross
by C. Kavin Rowe
Getting rid of the cross is tantamount to getting rid of Jesus—which is to say, of Christianity itself. Many self-proclaimed progressives may want Christianity to go away, but realists know that this will not happen anytime soon. So, for the time being, let at least this much be understood: If Christianity is here at all, it will have to do with Jesus of Nazareth. And if it has to do with Jesus of Nazareth, it will have to do with the symbol of the cross. Read More »

The Cross as a Central Christian Symbol of Injustice
by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza
I do not think that we should drop the symbol of the cross, either from the story of Jesus or as a central Christian symbol. We need the symbol of the cross as a public sign of imperial injustice and murder, a symbol that challenges state and ecclesiastical powers, and empowers victims. Hence, it is necessary to retell the story of Jesus in terms of justice and not just in terms of internalized love. Read More »

A Red Letter Christian Speaks to the Palestinian Church
by Tony Campolo
Politics alone will not solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—a deep, collective, psychological healing must also occur to sustain a lasting peace. I believe Palestinian Christians are uniquely situated to facilitate this healing process. Read More »

Religion and Equality in Human Evolution
by Robert Bellah
Where did we come from? What should we do here? Where are we going? As long as human beings ask these questions, we will need metanarratives—accounts of cosmological and biological evolution that place the human species in the context of what we know about the universe as a whole. Read More »

Sabbath Practice as Political Resistance: Building the Religious Counterculture
by Ana Levy-Lyons
One thing Abraham Joshua Heschel and Karl Marx had in common, aside from having both been spectacularly bearded Eastern European Jews, is the shared insight that time is the ultimate form of human wealth on this earth. Without time, all other forms of wealth are meaningless. Read More »

In Death’s Dominion
by Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi
I am writing this by the bedside of my ninety-eight-year old mother, watching the life forces slowly ebb. On the table beside the hospital bed on which Mom lies, rests Eitan Fishbane’s Shadows in Winter: a Memoir of Love and Loss. Eitan is my nephew and Mom’s grandson. In 2007, his wife, Leah, was two months pregnant when she died suddenly at the age of thirty-two of an undetected brain tumor, leaving her husband and a four-year-old daughter. Read More »

Black Liberation Theology and the Lynching of Jesus
by Gary Dorrien
It took James H. Cone four weeks to write his first book, Black Theology and Black Power, a work surging with revolutionary expectation. It took him six years to write his latest work, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, a book of haunting sorrow and beauty. Read More »

We Can End the Suffering of the People of Palestine and Israel

To do so will require changing Western societies in a profound way. Embracing Israel/Palestine shows how—it's a book not just about the Middle East but about how to rethink our entire approach to social and political change.

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