Spiritual Literacy Blog

Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat read the "book of the world" for spiritual meanings.

In one Kansas school, kindergartners bully each other once every six minutes. Some 3.7 million American schoolchildren in grades six to ten regularly verbally taunt or physically torment others. This growing problem has long-term effects on bullies, their victims, and bystanders, and it is compounded by cultural forces — a society that condones, even supports, rudeness as a means to get ahead.

An article in The Christian Science Monitor fills out the picture of what's happening and what needs to be done. Clearly, what's needed is more of the spiritual practice of reverence.

Bill Moyers, who recently retired from a distinguished career in television, closed the Conference on Media Reform in St. Louis on May 15 with this speech. It is his response to the news that White House partisans on the board of directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting had secretly been holding the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in general and his show NOW in particular to a partisan litmus test.

Anyone familiar with NOW, which continues with host David Brancaccio, knows that it is the freshest, most intelligent, and hard-hitting investigative journalism on television. And unlike other news programs, it always presents a lively mix of ideas and ideals from both sides of the political spectrum. Moyers, who won 30 Emmy Awards for hosting various PBS programs, states: "Our reporting was giving the radical right fits because it wasn't the party line. The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of the Republican Party gets. That's because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth."

Read this important speech because it is a powerful example of the calling of a religious man who feels compelled to speak truth to power. Then watch for a series of town hall meetings to be set up to allow Americans to speak directly to PBS station managers and policy makers.

Madeleine L'Engle's classic children's book A Wrinkle in Time was on ABC television Monday night. The author had very little to say about the show in this interview but plenty to say about the value of stories, the Bible, her writing and reading routines, and daring to believe in God.

Jonathan Omer-man, director of Metivta, a spiritual center for study and meditation in Los Angeles, thinks every year, not just the years when we have national elections, is a time for religious people to be involved politically. While many disdain politics as merely and inevitably "left bashing right, or right bashing left," he says "politics in its nobler forms is a manifestation of the divinely commanded pursuit of justice."

He suggests we each adopt at least one cause in which we do something actively as part of our spiritual practice.

We keep hearing about them in the news reports about the Iraqi prisoner abuse: The Geneva Conventions and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But what do these documents actually say about how we should treat our fellow human beings?

The Society of Professional Journalists has created a reference guide to the Geneva Conventions with the full text and an alphabetical index of subjects. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted on December 10, 1948 by the General Assembly of the United Nations (without dissent), is reprinted at the website of the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International.

According to Dean Paton, the newest polluters are the palm pilots in your pocket, the computers atop your desk, or the message systems clogging your telephone lines with streams of digital effluent. "And it's not just the volume of information that's worrisome; it's the lack of context in which it's delivered." To the rescue come information environmentalists who are finding ways to deal with information overload, including limiting email and not watching TV. Not surprisingly, one of their recommendations is the ancient spiritual practice of keeping the Sabbath.

April 15 is the day when Americans have to file their tax returns. Here's a little reality check for those who are wondering what will happen to the money they have paid and may still have to pay to settle up for 2003. Nearly half of every dollar paid in taxes goes to support military spending and interest on the national debt, says a release from the Progressive Newswire.

For a full report and to see how much of your tax payments go to education, nutrition, job training, healthcare, and other areas, visit NationalPriorities.org. This site also shows some "trade-offs" if tax dollars were spent differently.

Here's a new way to act upon your reverence for the creation — specifically for the air that we breathe. Take a simple five-gallon bucket equipped with a sturdy plastic bag and a hand-held vacuum pump and use it to get an air sample wherever you think there might be contaminants dangerous to health.

From the real hard data generated in this way, many communities have been able to get polluters to clean up their act. Bucket Brigades are now operating from Norco, Louisiana, to Cuddalore, India, to South Durban, South Africa. "A lot more people will get involved in environmental campaigns just because it's a hands-on tool."

"Terror, like ecstasy, tends to magnify perceptions," writes Luke Mitchell in "A Run on Terror" in Harper's Magazine. Two years after September 11, anti-terrorism has become the animating principle of nearly every aspect of American public policy, and it is sure to dominate the election year rhetoric.

It will not be argued on logic or ideology but on the basis of emotion. "Our current obsession with terrorism is premised on the fiction of an unlimited downside, which speaks darkly to the American psyche just as did the unlimited upside imagined during the Internet bubble." In other words, with terror we are dealing not only with an outside threat but with our own shadows.

All those hoping for reform and renewal within the American Catholic Church following the recent revelations about priests and sexual abuse should review a sobering report on recent polls by veteran Catholic cartographer Andrew Greeley. Calling the newest priests "young fogeys," Greeley identifies differences between the liberal priests who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s and the newly ordained priests involved in the Restoration movement. An example: One-third of the younger priests think the laity need to be "better educated to respect the authority of the priest's word."

At the end of the movie Dead Man Walking, Sister Helen Prejean tells a man about to be executed to look at her when he is given the lethal injection: "I want the last thing you see in this world to be the face of love."

We thought of that scene when we read that Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu had traveled to a Texas prison to meet a man on death row. Convicted murderer Dominique Green had written to the South African Episcopal archbishop after reading his book No Future Without Forgiveness. Tutu's response after spending two hours with the man: "He's a remarkable advertisement for God."

Ever wonder if there is more to the Internet than you know? It's such a vast entity, maybe there is something to do that you are missing. The Pew Internet Project has been looking into what Americans do online. They found that 63% of American adults -- that's 128 million people -- go online, 69 million of them on a typical day.

Follow the link for charts showing the percentage of Internet Users who have done a particular Internet activity and the kinds of things they do on a typical day.

President Bush's State of the Union address last month is a perfect example of the attitudes and policies of a "conservative strict-father family" worldview that "sees the world as a dangerous and difficult place, where evil lurks, and competition will always produce winners and losers." So what's a President to do? His job is to protect the family, teach the "kids" right from wrong, and reward the good (i.e. successful) people by giving them tax cuts and by taking money away from social programs for the "unsuccessful" people.

The contrast to this worldview is the "progressive nurturing parent family" characterized by "two central values: empathy and responsibility." Read more about how to distinguish these worldviews by code words and political actions in "The Hidden State of the Union" by George Lakoff, author of Moral Politics.

The mainstream media, including the Associated Press and Reuters, have been releasing pictures showing world leaders with halos. Having worked with photo editors over the years, we know that a lot of care goes into choosing which photos to use from contact sheets. So are the editors trying to tell us something? Check out this photo gallery.

Social mobility in the United States has declined considerably over the past few decades, according to a report in Business Week. Other research shows a drastic increase in income and wealth inequality. This spells "The Death of Horatio Alger," writes Paul Krugman in The Nation. No longer do sons always seem to do better than their fathers. And government policies are aggravating rather than addressing that "class warfare."