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Sexuality/Gender

Apoplectic about Abortion: One Woman’s Emotional Roller Coaster

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I used to be angry, now I am apoplectic. I also used to be fraulein and now I am a frau. I used to be a mademoiselle and now I am madame, a señorita and now a señora. In other words, I am a mature woman whose human rights are vanishing before her very eyes. For a long time, I have become habituated to freedom, confusing myself, apparently, with a human being—or even a man. I don’t like it when Congress treats me like a girl by hacking away at abortion rights and talking about eliminating funds for family planning.

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Politics/Law

I Was Wrong About Occupy

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Thursday morning a dozen occupiers addressed forty or so clergy. We clergy were all somewhat skeptical of the demand for public space. You could hear the ministerial, rabbinical hrumph, hrumph in the room. (Most of us had never occupied Zucotti Park and a downward trend in temperature wasn’t going to improve on that.) But the occupiers edged toward the theological as they articulated a need for communal, inspirational, face-to-face contact in which they could “appear” to one another.

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Culture

Occupy in Exile: Sacred Space is Everywhere

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People love to stay immune from the connections between the sacred and the profane, holy space and “regular” space, tented space and the well-appointed space of a mansion. They try to tell us that politics and religion never meet. Or that money is “dirty” and therefore can get away with its meanness. Deliverance from these false dichotomies is our greatest need as a country. Money is holy and just and good when used for holy and just and good purposes. It is not “dirty” and therefore the property of those naughty boys of Wall Street.

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(A)theologies

“Debt” is a Spiritual Word

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In the Lord’s Prayer we pray for the forgiveness of our debts, as we forgive our debtors. I know some congregations say “trespasses” and others say “sins.” Where I come from, we always said “debts.” It meant something different from what the landlord did when he knocked on our door, asking for the rent. He wanted money. The Lord’s Prayer asks for a new equilibrium between cost and payment—a different marketplace altogether.

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