Tikkun Recommends

ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE Barbara Kingsolver HarperCollins Publishers, 2007 Complete with recipesand advice, Barbara Kingsolver brings her superb skills as a novelist to tell the true tale of her family’s year eating only food that is grown locally and sustainably . Reading this book will so expand your consciousness about food without knocking you out with political correctness that it should be requiredreadingforeveryhighschool student! OURSPACE Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture Christine Harold Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2007 The commercialization of public life, civic culture, and even childrearing has become a major focus for radical critique as freedom seems to narrow to life-style choices. Christine Harold critiques the strategies of resistance developed so far, whether they be those seeking state intervention or anarchist-style pranking and pirating appropriation of the tools of the manipulators of mass culture. PHILOSOPHERSWITHOUTGODS Louise M Antony Oxford University Press, 2007 We’ve often pointed out that the Network of Spiritual Progressives and Tikkun are for not only religious people but for those who are spiritual but not religious as well. Louise M. Antony has put together a powerful groupofessaysbysomeofthesmarter atheists of our time, explaining why they don’t believe. Rather than the foolishness of Dawkins or Hitchens, these are compelling and sophisticated arguments that religious people ought to confront, even though the version of God they refute seems more appropriate to the comic-book version of religion than to sophisticated versions of liberation theology or progressive spirituality. BLESSEDUNREST Paul Hawken Viking, 2007 Paul Hawken is hopeful that the thinking that informs the environmental movement will ultimately suffuse most institutions and will change a sufficient number of people so as to begin the reversal of centuries of frenzied self-destructive behavior . It’s not too late for the world’s largest institutions and corporations to join in saving the planet, but they must do so on “the planet’s terms.” In this book, Hawken recognizes the intrinsic connection between global social justice and ecological survival. THE SCIENCE OF ONENESS: A Worldview for the 21st Century Malcolm Hollick World Rights, 2006 MalcomlmHolicksetsouttoprovide “a worldview for the twenty-first century,” and his insightful science of oneness shows how to play out the notion that consciousness is inherent in all matter. While doing his best to incorporate scientific insights, this book will appeal most to those who believe that “mind and body form an integral whole which create and sustain each other.” Missing is any understanding of how these insights might be brought into the task of healing and transforming our economic , political and social world. THE MESSIAH OF MORRIS AVENUE Tony Hendra Henry Holt, 2006 For all its humorous twists and turns, Tony Hendra’s novel is a deep and engaging recasting of the Second Coming of Jesus of Nazareth in the imagined context of an America totally ruled by the religious right. The great Jewish prophet returns in the form of a soft-spoken, media-shy young Latino man whose restatement of the heart of Jesus’ message is as compelling and revolutionary today as it was when he first spoke truth to power in a Rome-dominated ancient Judea. It’s living theology in the form of entertaining fiction that reminds us of why all prophetic voices get treated so poorly as much in contemporary America and in the religious communities as in the empires and Temples of antiquity. RECOMMENDS If This Be Jews Now that Jews are no different from anyone else, do we have to prove it by being as bad as anyone else? Of course, why shouldn’t Jews be as bad as anyone else? Who says we have to be better? Except of course, we’re Jews…. You used to have to be at least a genius in order to beat the quotas at Ivy League colleges— I’m afraid I wasn’t, and couldn’t, when I tried to get into Columbia. We weren’t even considered Caucasian—we were Semites, and in my town that meant practically Negro. But that was before Israel. My God, how life changed for us. The Restricted signs came down from hotels, and they practically begged us to join the country club. Now we can live...