Spiritual Literacy Blog

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

"Losing a species to extinction is like tearing a page out of sacred scripture," said Calvin DeWitt. So it is bad news indeed when 2,000 species are added to the list of the world's most endangered animals and plants, bringing the total to 12,000 threatened species. The losses are due to the effects of invasive alien species in certain habitats and loss of other habitats from human pressures.

It will help if you've seen The Matrix movies, but even if you haven't, you can get the message of this clever animated production by the Global Resource Action Center for the Environment.

Leo, a pig happily living on an illusionary family farm, meets Moopheus, a cow, who offers to tell him all about the Meatrix, "the lie we tell ourselves about where our meat and animal products really come from." Take the red pill and wake up. The piece, which requires a FLASH player, ends with a shopping and action guide.

The newspaper headline today announces the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision that "barring an individual from the protections, benefits, and obligations of civil marriage solely because that person would marry a person of the same sex violates the Massachusetts Constitution." The political pundits are already saying that the issue of gay marriage will divide the electorate in 2004. Instead of listening to them about the meaning of this decision, let's listen to some people who have experienced a gay wedding. Macky Alston and his partner Nick were married in a church in New York City: "Our love was blessed then and there by God in a new way."

Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh advises us to avoid violent media because it waters the negative seeds or tendencies we all have inside us. Research by two Iowa State University psychologists confirms this point. They found report that violent video games increase aggressive behavior in children and young adults. So far, producers have ignored appeals to tone down the violence in games, but other research may help on that front. It finds that viewers have a harder time remembering advertising messages in violent programs.

The U.S. economy is turning around, according to some reports. But as Fred Block points out on AlterNet, that may only be true of the "thing" economy that produces products. The "care" economy, in which people take care of each other and the environment, is not doing as well. These two economies are interdependent and interconnected, but the approaches that work for one can undermine the effectiveness of the other. A unified economy would "reconcile our desire to prosper with our deepest moral and spiritual impulses."

When upwards of 40 million people signed on to the national do-not-call registry, they were sending a message to more than just annoying dinner-time telemarketers. Many of us are getting fed up with voice-mail menus, computer voice recognition systems, email spam, and other systems that waste our time because, presumably, our time is less valuable than the interests of the companies trying to sell us things. How we use our time is an ethical decision that should be ours to make.

Worried about the crime rate? You don't know the half of it, and unless the FBI gets some different instructions, you never will get the full picture. The agency's annual "Crime in the United States" report doesn't cover corporate crime, notes Lee Drutman in the Los Angeles Times. "The absence of data ignores the problem of suite crime while stirring up fear about street crime." This is giving us a very distorted picture about the choices we need to make and the justice issues we need to raise.

Attractive professors consistently outscore their less comely colleagues by a significant margin on student evaluations of teaching, with men teachers getting more points for looking good than their women colleagues. So now we know: beauty trumps brains in academia just as it does in advertising and acting. Perhaps we should add courses to the curriculum on recognizing inner beauty and, to use an Islamic term, "doing the beautiful."

Once again the scientists have confirmed what the mystics have long known. The multi-regional hypothesis — that modern humans evolved from a precursor species in different regions around the world, thus explaining "racial" differences — is losing ground to the hypothesis that it all started in Africa (with none other than "Eve"), thus we are all Africans. Could this knowledge change our indifference to the plight of our brothers and sisters on that continent?

One value of spiritual work is that it helps us get in touch with our true selves and to become all that we are meant to be as God's sons and daughters. Another kind of "work" is currently in vogue. Breast implants are a popular gift for high school graduates, and extreme makeovers, a la the TV series, are being cheered at "reveal" parties. Ellen Goodman asks, "is it freedom to choose the image a culture imposes?"

We would rush over to the blood bank if a friend put out a call for donors. Most hospitals allow you to bank your own blood before surgery, and some will let you donate for a specific patient. But is earmarking blood the ethical choice? What about the buying and selling of blood?

Robert Kuttner, co-editor of The American Prospect, argues that we need broad education about, and practice of, the value of compassion for strangers.

It is important in the spiritual life to maintain an open mind as well as an open heart. American writer Susan Sontag recently won the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade for her role as a defender of "the dignity of free thinking" and as "an intellectual ambassador" between the United States and Europe. In her acceptance speech, she defines a writer as someone who "pays attention to the world" and salutes literature as a workshop that "can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours."

Restorative justice offers a fresh field where forgiveness can bloom and flourish. Here is another true story of reconciliation from South Africa where a policeman and the man who shot him are now friends, even jamming together on trumpet and drums.

Religious institutions are discovering that they need to make program adjustments in recognition of the fact that nearly half of all American households are now headed by unmarried adults. Singles number 86 million, one-quarter of the population, and this means they are reshaping the social, cultural, and economic landscape. Think changes in travel offerings, literature on the single life, single-serving sizes in grocery stores. This is the power of 1.

Utah's Governor Michael Leavitt has been confirmed as the new head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Utah's most prominent resident in spiritual circles in Terry Tempest Williams, a Mormon, naturalist, and environmental writer. In an interview she talks about environmental degradation as one form of terrorism and then advises us to remember "George W. Bush is our shadow: arrogance, impatience, entitlement, greed, capitalism; we are all complicit in that."