Author: RadicalDiscipleship

The Antithesis of Activism

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

bellAn excerpt from Killing Rage: Ending Racism (1995) by bell hooks:

Confronting my rage, witnessing the way it moved me to grow and change, I understood intimately that it had the potential not only to destroy but also to construct.  Then and now I understand rage to be a necessary aspect of resistance struggle.  Rage can act as a catalyst inspiring courageous action.  By demanding that black people repress and annihilate our rage to assimilate, to reap the benefits of material privilege in white supremacist capitalist patriarchal culture, white folks urge us to remain complicit with their efforts to colonize, oppress and exploit.  Those of us black people who have the opportunity to further our economic status willingly surrender our rage.  Many of us have no rage.  As individual black people increase their class power, live in comfort, with money mediating the viciousness of racist assault, we can come to see both the society and white people differently.  We experience the world as infinitely less hostile to blackness than it actually is.  This shift happens particularly as we buy into liberal individualism and see our individual fate as black people in no way linked to collective fate.  it is that link that sustains full awareness of the daily impact of racism on black people, particularly its hostile and brutal assaults… Continue reading “The Antithesis of Activism” →

Wild Lectionary: It’s not about the bread

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, Uncategorized, Watershed DiscipleshipLeave a comment

raspberryProper 12 (Year B)
July 29, 2018
John 6:1-21

By The Reverend Marilyn Zehr

Jesus said, “Make the people sit down.”  Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all.  Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted.  When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.”

Funny story, true story:  As I write this I am at a large Church Conference as a “guest,” where on Sunday, I heard an inspiring sermon on the feeding of the multitude story as told by Mark.  After worship and communion where we shared a morsel of the Bread of Life dipped in grape juice, we eventually found our way to the cafeteria for lunch.  As a “guest” for a couple of days I had not purchased a meal plan and so was hoping to purchase a random ticket for lunch.  Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: It’s not about the bread” →

Jesus is our Messiah because He Broke Laws

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, Uncategorized1 Comment

crucifixion_of_christ_mdq5jp.jpgShared with us from Friendly Fire Collective.

At the beginning of the 2016 version of The Magnificent Seven, the mine owner Bartholomew Bogue gives a pseudo-sermon to the townspeople of Rose City who do not want to give him their land. He tells them that, in America, democracy is equated with capitalism and capitalism with God. Therefore, by resisting him, they were standing in the way of democracy, progress, and even God. After this blasphemous sermon, he and his men burn the church the townspeople met in. Continue reading “Jesus is our Messiah because He Broke Laws” →

Gifts on the Shelf: An invitation to a children project

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance, Race, Identity, and History, UncategorizedLeave a comment

20180717_133052By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann

While I waited for my kids to fall asleep, I looked through their bookshelf nurtured by the stories and creativity that rests beside them. There, untouched, were the biographies, the history, the celebrations of protest. These ones always seemed to be neglected when the choices were made with options of talking mice, farting dogs, or gigantic excavators.

I want these stories read and loved. I want them to become part of the fabric of their ancestral history….a movement ancestry. To learn these stories by heart. I want movement history learned as a way to help these boys navigate the scary world they are growing up in. I needed to figure out how to honor the stories and bring the out with gifted anticipation. I needed to create ritual and tradition around them. Continue reading “Gifts on the Shelf: An invitation to a children project” →

Sheep Without a Shepherd

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

BindingWe continue our celebration of the 30th anniversary of Binding The Strong Man, Ched Myers’ political reading of Mark’s Gospel.  Today’s passage is Mark 6:30-34.

…Mark is decidedly presenting Jesus as an “organizer,” but with the intention of feeding the needy, not plotting a military campaign on Jerusalem.  This however, hardly makes the narrative ideology less subversive!  Indeed, there is an implied political criticism here, which we see if we do not limit the intertextuality to the Joshua tradition.  The “sheep without a shepherd” motif is seized upon by the prophets to criticize the leadership of Israel.  Ezekiel 34 spins a parable around it that specifically condemns class stratification: “I will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep” (Ez 34:20).  The ruling class protects its privilege rather than the collective prosperity of the people, becoming predator instead of the shepherd: Continue reading “Sheep Without a Shepherd” →

Wild Lectionary: A Contrast of Economies

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, Uncategorized, Watershed DiscipleshipLeave a comment

wild lectionary.pngNinth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 11(16)

By Rachael Bullock

Psalm 23:1-3
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters;
he restores my soul.

If you haven’t noticed, the conversation around fossil fuels can often be a fairly tense one. This is especially true as political discourse in North America becomes increasingly polarized. As I’ve listened most recently to arguments about Kinder Morgan’s pipeline, oil sands in Alberta, the future of environmental policies, I notice that the general arguments in favour of nonrenewable energy rests on the assumption that there is not enough – in general, not just economically. This makes sense given that when discussing “environmentalism” or any other subject, it is never simply a conversation “about the facts”. Rather, it becomes a dialogue in which participants are often not even aware that underlying life experiences, societal messages, and driving ideologies are brought into play. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: A Contrast of Economies” →

The Decolonization of the Cherished Figure of Man

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

BorderFrom Bayo Akomolafe of The Emergence Network, social media post June 18, 2018.

Reading about the heart-breaking stories of immigrant children at American borders who are snatched from their parents (literally from their mothers’ breasts), tagged, categorized, renamed, hushed, and assigned spots in surveilled warehouses, reinforces several points for me:

1. We often become what we strenuously resist: In its effort to keep the exteriorized ‘outside’ at bay, the American nation-state is exhibiting the same gestures of biopolitical subjectivization that characterized gruesome dictatorial regimes it once claimed to be morally superior to. Already, grainy images of old Nazi concentration camps and the haunting language of finality (Stephen Miller’s “simple decision” sounds eerily similar to Nazi Germany’s “final solution”) are sweeping through the Internet, drawing startling connections between the US and the Third Reich. The lesson here? Exceptionalism is pricey. The reward for hard-line protectionist policies might be safety, but their real cost is the loss of the freedom to be otherwise. The same move that freezes the outside is the very same gesture that damns the inside to its own prison. Continue reading “The Decolonization of the Cherished Figure of Man” →