Author: RadicalDiscipleship

Para Todos

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Just Peacemaking, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

Cop CameraA charge before “An Interfaith Day of Prophetic Action,” a protest in downtown Los Angeles (04.13.2017) over recent actions by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents:

We will be sanctuary for all.
No exceptions.
Not one more.
No more separating families.
Para Todos.
This is just the beginning.
There will be a next one until justice prevails.
An organized community is a secure community.
We will abide by the principles of nonviolent resistance.
We will stay focused.
We will stay in prayer.
We will stay in the radical love of God.

Weeping

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, UncategorizedLeave a comment

jesus-wept“Jesus knew what we numb ones must always learn again: (a) that weeping must be real because endings are real; and (b) that weeping permits newness. His weeping permits the kingdom to come. Such weeping is a radical criticism, a fearful dismantling because it means the end of all machismo; weeping is something kings rarely do without losing their thrones. Yet the loss of thrones is precisely what is called for in radical criticism.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination: Revised Edition

Pacem in terris: Easter, Earth Day, and Pentecost’s promise

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Uncategorized, Watershed DiscipleshipLeave a comment

prayer-politiks-logo-1x.pngBy Ken Sehested

Pacem, pacem, pacem in terris

Easter’s focus is always sharper when allied with Earth Day. We sing, properly, of being wayfaring strangers. “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor” (Deuteronomy 26:5) is among the oldest testimonies of fate and faith. An alternate translation—“A Syrian ready to perish was my ancestor”—brings added poignancy to the text

We are indeed strangers; but not foreigners. In common usage these two words seem similar. Biblically speaking, though, the theological difference could not be greater. Continue reading “Pacem in terris: Easter, Earth Day, and Pentecost’s promise” →

Wild Lectionary: The Predator Within

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, Uncategorized, Watershed Discipleship2 Comments

2249220298_de45840ab4_o(1)Easter 7

Discipline yourselves, keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour.  –1 Peter 5:8

by Ric Hudgens

We must not domesticate our understanding of the wild. I am not referring to domesticating wild places into civilized spaces. I am noting our tendency to romanticize the wild in a way that removes its sharp edges.  In the rewilding of our theologies we must deconstruct docetic expressions that remove the divine and human from nature. Also, we must keep the divine and human embedded in real nature – not a romanticized Disneyland nature where animals sing and dance or time lapse photography makes change appear sudden.

The natural world which is filled with the divine and the contains the human is also “nature red in tooth and claw,” as Hobbes wrote. There are predators. There are prey. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: The Predator Within” →

When She Died, We Buried All Those Words With Her

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance1 Comment

AlexieA poem from Sherman Alexie (thanks to elder Clancy Dunigan for passing this along):

My mother was a dictionary.

She was one of the last fluent speakers of our tribal language.

She knew dozens of words that nobody else knew.

When she died, we buried all of those words with her.

My mother was a dictionary.

She knew words that had been spoken for thousands of years. Continue reading “When She Died, We Buried All Those Words With Her” →

The Crisis We Face

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

Chris HedgesBy Chris Hedges, from his most recent TruthDig column “Trump is the Symptom, not the Disease,” as always, keeping it real:

Forget the firing of James Comey. Forget the paralysis in Congress. Forget the idiocy of a press that covers our descent into tyranny as if it were a sports contest between corporate Republicans and corporate Democrats or a reality show starring our maniacal president and the idiots that surround him. Forget the noise. The crisis we face is not embodied in the public images of the politicians that run our dysfunctional government. The crisis we face is the result of a four-decade-long, slow-motion corporate coup that has rendered the citizen impotent, left us without any authentic democratic institutions and allowed corporate and military power to become omnipotent. This crisis has spawned a corrupt electoral system of legalized bribery and empowered those public figures that master the arts of entertainment and artifice. And if we do not overthrow the neoliberal, corporate forces that have destroyed our democracy we will continue to vomit up more monstrosities as dangerous as Donald Trump. Trump is the symptom, not the disease. Continue reading “The Crisis We Face” →

More Deadly

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CollumbusAn excerpt from chapter one of Howard Zinn’s The People’s History of the United States (1980):

It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map.

My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the map-maker’s distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian’s distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual. Continue reading “More Deadly” →