By Tommy Airey, originally posted to his Substack, which provides an audio version and important links
*A letter to my niblings (ages five to thirteen), on the 3rd anniversary of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
Dear Riley, Mason, Milo and Haylen,
Abraham Joshua Heschel once said that the whole future of America depends on the impact and influence of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Abraham Joshua Heschel was a rabbi and professor who marched with MLK in the Black freedom struggle.
You already know who MLK is. You’ve read about him in children’s books. You’ve seen photos and murals of him all over the place. You hear about him every January, in the lead-up to his holiday weekend.
It is one thing to know who MLK is. It is another thing to be impacted and influenced by him.
My hope is that you and your generation will not only be impacted by MLK’s beautiful words, but also that you will be influenced by his brave actions.
Six years before George Floyd and I were born, MLK said that the greatest purveyor of violence in the world was his own government. A lot of Americans got really angry when he said this. The next day, 168 newspapers condemned him.
MLK made it clear that real terrorism is what America does to other people all over the planet.
By Jim Perkinson, a sermon on Matthew 21:23-32, preached at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Detroit, MI on September 27, 2026
“Not Me” Attention
A prelim footnote: my evangelical, born-again, Pentecostal, tongues-speaking, word of the Lord-seeking “Christianity” all to the good, much of my adult life has been about learning to see, appreciate, honor, and finally be amazed by what is not me. “Not me” in terms of living for 15 years in community sharing all things in common under the same roof with as many as 20 other people in one single family dwelling; “not me” as a white male in east side inner city, Black Detroit; “not me” in terms of gender and orientation; “not me” in having a wife who is Filipino-born and enculturated; and with her, “not me,” in learning from indigenous cultures and peoples how to turn aside from human focus on human concerns to fall in love with the Wild World of more-than-human elders and co-dwellers, whether plant, animal, soil, season, weather. Or water.
We are in the Christian lectionary “Season of Creation” with a central theme of Living Water. And the question for me is: Can I pay attention to water outside of my concern to drink it, wash with it, ask it to cleanse my dishes and tools and take my garbage and pollution away, grow my crops or transport my computer chips from Taiwan or my I-phone from DRC? Can I get fascinated with Water on Her own terms and for Her own sake? Can I stop being human supremacist and only paying attention to such things to the degree they support me or give me some kind of experience I can capture in a selfie? Can I stop being the center of my own universe? After all, I am more than 60% water myself and Her dwelling in me means I am not primarily “me,” but another creature who is literally billions of years old and only for an evolutionary split-second, “agreeing” to be in this strange conjunction of all kinds of other creatures—eaten plants and metabolized animals, cavorting bacteria and provocative viruses, a little bit of residual iron and copper, bone and nails and hair, etc.—whose sum and substance for some 70+ years has rambled across a small piece of this planet as an upright oddity called “Jim Perkinson.” Can I relate to Water without instantly colonizing it?
Nepal Devastation
8:37 am Nepal Time on August 26, 2026, a seismic thud registered at 5.2 magnitude on the Richter scale. A slice of glacier-covered-rock 5,000 feet long, 3,300 feet wide, 425 feet thick, sheered off the north face of Langtang Lirung Mountain, plunged nearly a mile almost straight down into the Lhende Khola valley tributary to the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli river systems, landing with the force of 950 tons of TNT, pulverizing the rock, melting the ice, and then surging with a force 30 times that of Niagara Falls, at times racing more than 100 miles an hour with a wave crest as high as 300 feet, downstream for 60 miles before finally slowing and settling into a “mere” flood.
A “Water Word” sounding at a mega-decibel level heard round the globe.
The human consequence is still being figured in the multiple thousands of deaths, entire villages wiped out, 41 bridges swept away, thousands of homes destroyed. And we can be tempted to say—Ah, Nature! So cruel! So brutal! So uncaring in the trajectory of its “wild agency,” mindless of its effect, in an eyeblink taking out vast numbers of our species who did nothing to warrant such an annihilation!”
Another compelling offering from The Alternative Seminary.
An Online Gathering on Saturday, October 10, 2026 from 10:30am to 12:30pmET – Led by Rev. Donte Milligan.
Hip Hop is a genre of music deeply rooted in and inseparable from Black culture and community. More than almost any other genre, Hip Hop has created space for marginalized voices to speak, resist, testify, and imagine new possibilities.
In this program, we will explore Hip Hop as a prophetic and mystical tradition. Rappers often function as prophets and mystics of marginalized Black and Brown communities, giving voice to experiences that are too often ignored, silenced, or misunderstood. Through their lyrics, they name injustice, expose systems of oppression, wrestle with suffering, celebrate resilience, and imagine liberation.
Even when its language is bold, brash, or profane, Hip Hop can speak a gritty truth on behalf of God’s beloved. Together, we will ask what happens when we take those voices seriously as sources of theological reflection and prophetic wisdom.
Come listen with open ears, wrestle with the theology, and find God in the places you least expect it.
Wendell Berry died yesterday at the age of 92. He was a writer and farmer and activist for the earth. Jeremy Porter passed this poem along this morning. Porter is a spiritual director, farmer and bus driver in Lexington, KY who been influenced immensely by Berry’s life. The poem is called “Testament” and it was published in 1984.
Dear relatives and friends, when my last breath Grows large and free in air, don’t call it death — A word to enrich the undertaker and inspire His surly art of imitating life; conspire Against him. Say that my body cannot now Be improved upon; it has no fault to show To the sly cosmetician. Say that my flesh Has a perfect compliance with the grass Truer than any it could have striven for. You will recognize the earth in me, as before I wished to know it in myself: my earth That has been my care and faithful charge from birth, And toward which all my sorrows were surely bound, And all my hopes. Say that I have found A good solution, and am on my way To the roots. And say I have left my native clay At last, to be a traveler; that too will be so. Traveler to where? Say you don’t know.
But do not let your ignorance Of my spirit’s whereabouts dismay You, or overwhelm your thoughts. Be careful not to say Anything too final. Whatever Is unsure is possible, and life is bigger Than flesh. Beyond reach of thought Let imagination figure
Your hope. That will be generous To me and to yourselves. Why settle For some know-it-all’s despair When the dead may dance to the fiddle
Hereafter, for all anybody knows? And remember that the Heavenly soil Need not be too rich to please One who was happy in Port Royal.
I may be already heading back, A new and better man, toward That town. The thought’s unreasonable, But so is life, thank the Lord!
So treat me, even dead, As a man who has a place To go, and something to do. Don’t muck up my face With wax and powder and rouge As one would prettify An unalterable fact To give bitterness the lie.
Admit the native earth My body is and will be, Admit its freedom and Its changeability.
Dress me in the clothes I wore in the day’s round. Lay me in a wooden box. Put the box in the ground.
Beneath this stone a Berry is planted In his home land, as he wanted. He has come to the gathering of his kin, Among whom some were worthy men,
Farmers mostly, who lived by hand, But one was a cobbler from Ireland,
Another played the eternal fool By riding on a circus mule
To be remembered in grateful laughter Longer than the rest. After
Doing that they had to do They are at ease here. Let all of you
Who yet for pain find force and voice Look on their peace, and rejoice.
Today is the one-year anniversary of the martyrdom of Anas Al-Sharif, a 28-year-old Palestinian journalist who grew up in a refugee camp and committed his life to tell “the truth as it is, without distortion or falsification.” Because of this bold commitment, he was murdered by an IDF missile (probably made in America).
In his final message to the world, he called Palestine the heartbeat of every free person in the world. He wrote his message two months before his murder because he knew they were coming for him.
More than 260 journalists have been murdered in Gaza over the past three years.
This week, Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM)- is organizing a week of action, in honor of Anas Al-Sharif, to ensure that the voices of Gaza are heard and to let complicit media know that we will hold them accountable.
As Anas Al-Sharif said, don’t let chains silence you.
I would pay close attention to this transparent warning to all progressive and left forces that the Trump regime published as a press release yesterday. I assume further arrests and violent repression in the run up to the midterms and more intensely during the national elections.
The US imperial state knows that the best way to neutralize justice movements is to entangle them in legal defense for political prisoners. A word to the wise should be sufficient.
The quote below is by Stephen Miller:
“One of the hallmarks of left-wing violence and terrorism is its completely pre-textual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties in an effort to shield its own violence… When the leftist — who does not believe in freedom, who does not believe in civil rights, who does not believe in any ordinary notion of justice — protests that we are violating his rights, understand the he is lying to try to persuade people who are not closely following the political scene that some injustice has perpetrated against him. We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization.”
Not surprisingly, she is doing the classic liberal historian move, which is trying to rescue America’s founding by treating slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and women’s exclusion as tragic “contradictions” rather than constitutive features of the American project.
Look at this phrase she uses in her piece: “the sticky little problem of Black and Indigenous enslavement”
Sticky little problem? Seriously?
Slavery was not a “sticky little problem.” It was THEEEE economic, political, legal, and psychic foundation of the country these men were building. You can’t sit there and call the Declaration of Independence “astonishingly radical” while treating the exclusion of most human beings as some damn parenthetical inconvenience.
Basically, her big argument in this piece is that America was founded on equality, betrayed by reactionaries, redeemed by civil rights struggle, and now its all being threatened again. She’s saying, yes, the Founders had blind spots, but the idea was radical. Yes, America excluded people, but eventually Americans expanded the promise. Yes, we are in danger now, but we can return to our better angels.
Listen, America was not merely founded on “the radical idea that all men are created equal.” America was founded on a RACIALIZED EXCEPTION CLAUSE hiding inside that sentence. The men who wrote “all men” did not accidentally forget Black people, Native people, women, the enslaved, the colonized, the poor, or the propertyless. They built a political order where equality could be proclaimed precisely because inequality had already been naturalized. Let’s start there ffs!
By Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly, aka “Dr. CBS,” re-posted from her Substack newsletter. This month, in the lead-up to the celebration of 250 years of “independence,” Dr. CBS has been posting excerpts from a revolutionary thinker from the Black radical tradition every single day.She calls it the “This is America” project.
We must be clear about the difference between radicalism and reaction, revolution and counterrevolution. Let’s talk about it.
I’m Dr. CBS and we have just three days left of of my “This is America” project!
Today we’re thinking with the people’s historian Dr. Gerald Horne’s and his magisterial work, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of United States of America, published in 2014.
Let’s start with our bar”:
Defenders of the so-called Confederate States of America were far from bonkers when they argued passionately that their revolt was consistent with the animating and driving spirit of 1776. Slavery fueled a rising capitalism. However, ironically, breaking the bonds of slavery was necessary if capitalism was to realize its full potential, not least since enslaved Africans were fiercely determined to destroy the wealth they were creating, along with the lords of the lash. Contradictorily, slavery was both a boost for nascent capitalism and ultimately a fetter on its productive force. More than this, chattel slavery grounded in racist chauvinism—of a uniquely republican and toxic type—was one of the more profound human rights violations of the previous millennium. To the extent that 1776 gave such slavery a renewed lease on life, it was truly a lineal ancestor of 1861 and, thus, a counter-revolution of slavery.”
By Jim Perkinson (above), a sermon preached at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Detroit last weekend. Click here to check out (and suscribe to!) Dr. Perkinson’s new Substack newsletter.
I’ll begin retrospectively. A month ago, we had a lectionary passage from Genesis about humans being given “dominion” over the animals and plants of the planet. Four days before that I had just gotten back from leading a bible study at Kirkridge Retreat Center in eastern Pennsylvania, 544 miles one way by car from Detroit. And I could not help instantly relating the two things—the scripture passage and my “passage” to and from Kirkridge. As I had driven east on I-80 to get there, I counted the number of deer, lying in grotesque postures, killed by autos careening across the landscape. I stopped at 26. That is our dominion over deer.
And with every one of them that I passed at 78 miles per hour—staying just under the speed at which I know police would pull me over in a 70-mile-per-hour zone—I loathed my behavior. If I really lived what I believe, I would not dare pass by such a supine body without stopping and at least burying the departed one with appropriate ritual, if not more respectfully skinning the body, gathering the bones, preserving the back strap and ligaments, removing the horns—making sure every feature of that magnificent creature was being honored and lived up to in gratitude for its unwilling gift. Instead, I held myself responsible to cry out to each and every one I passed—as well as all the smaller-sized little ones also lying by the side of the road—“I’m so sorry, I lament my kind doing this, please go over to the Other Side, be healed, find peace!” And in every instance, I would find tears flushing my eyes and often dribbling down my cheek.
And then after the Kirkridge time, I came back to a Motor City in full levity, celebrating the Grand Prix auto fest. We use the French pronunciation to give it seeming status, but I would rather pronounce the “x” in “Prix” as an English “x.” Pricks”! Yes, celebrating the Grand Pricks, the Big Dicks, the high-tech MFs plundering the planet for ever greater speed, going . . . around in circles (the planet is round after all)! Even when we are already energy-strapped and facing fuel crises! What could be more indicative of our insanity!
I don’t believe in dominion. But I live it. I drove to church today. I lament much of what I do every day—but I don’t stop doing it. I am part of the plundering and killing of the planet.
