Tikkun Recommends

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The Migrant Ship
Nicholas Murray
Melos Press, 2016

#refugees welcome: Poems in a Time of Crisis
ed. Oliver Jones
Eyewear Publishing,
2015

These two pamphlets from indie poetry presses in the UK showcase how poets across the pond have been responding to the Syrian Civil War, the confrontation with the West staged by ISIS, the refugee crisis that has arisen as a result, plus the immigration nightmare and its consequent social inequalities—all of which are felt more immediately and intensely there than in the U.S. #refugees welcome, which is a short anthology, includes English poets long associated with social action, such as Tom Phillips, alongside many younger voices originating from the Middle East, such as Alice Yousef and Zeina Hashem Beck. The poems vary widely, from verse reportage of working in the refugee camps (Thomas McColl), to spare, rhythmically taut images of violence (Kate Noakes), to the unsettling ironic distances between a world intact and another blown apart (Rosemary Appleton). The poems all evoke the radical American poet, Thomas McGrath's idea of the tactical poem, intended to move and mobilize people to a cause, in this case social justice for the dispossessed. Murray's The Migrant Ship works differently, teasing out the psychological implications of diaspora that are at once beautifully spare, allegorically open, and made with tough craft.

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#Empire Baptized
Wes Howard-Brook
Orbis Books, 2016

Wes Howard-Brook's Come Out My People! presented a compelling interpretation of the Bible as a struggle between two competing religious visions—a "religion of empire" and a "religion of creation" that seemed to parallel the account of Rabbi Michael Lerner's earlier Biblical interpretation in Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation between "settler Judaism" and "renewal Judaism." Now, Howard-Brook extends that analysis to show how the transition from the Jewish Jesus of the Gospels to the coercive Christianity in a book he titles, Empire Baptized: How the Church Embraced What Jesus Rejected (Second-Fifth Centuries).

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The Great Spiritual Migration
Brian D. McLaren
Convergent Books,
2016

This same contradiction governs the Jewish religion today, though Jews voted 70% for Clinton, and it is a central spiritual and political reality for the U.S. Christianity which produced a victory for Trump which would not have happened had Christian evangelicals followed the teachings of Jesus rather than the Christianity of fear and domination (white evangelicals voting 90% for Trump) that formerly conservative Evangelical Brian McLaren seeks to replace in his latest (hopefully prophetic work) which he subtitles, "How the World's Largest Religion is Seeking a Better Way to be Christian." He presents a "Charter for a Just and Generous Christianity" which among other goals aims to make "love our highest aim—love for God and neighbor, for outsider and enemy, for ourselves and the good earth," and seeks "the common good, locally and globally, through churches of many diverse forms, contexts, and traditions, and we imagine fresh ways for churches to form Christlike people who join God in the healing of the world."

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Bosch and Bruegel
Joseph Leo Koerner
Princeton U. Press,
2016

The beginnings of genre paintings of everyday life in northern Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries was, Harvard U. art historian Joseph Koerner tells us in this beautifully presented and deeply engaging book, "bound inextricably to what seems like its polar opposite: an art of the bizarre, the monstrous, the uncanny," particularly in the work of Hieronymous Bosch and Pieter Bruegel. At times using Biblical themes, but rendering them as though they were happening in a way that they viewer can feel personally both moved and scared, these painters have managed to be as alive to 21st century viewers as they were to the emerging humanism of their own time. Bosch's portrayal of the Garden of Earthly Delights may have been intended as a preface to the horrendous suffering that the devils of Hell were preparing for the sinners, but it nevertheless portrayed the possibilities of a community obsessed with sexuality that had never been more beautifully portrayed in world paintings. Bruegel captured the scenes of daily life for many peasants, and managed to elevate their...