My friend Cindy Weber, pastor of Jeff Street Baptist at Liberty in Louisville, Ky., retired last month. Tomorrow, 1 October 2023, her congregation is celebrating her ministry.
She was initially called to serve as associate pastor (1984-1991) and then as pastor (1991-present). The congregation was expelled by the (Southern Baptist) Long Run Baptist Association when Cindy was called as pastor (because she was female).
The congregation’s history traces its roots back to a ministry to the city’s “derelicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, and homeless in 1881.” In the early ‘40s, Clarence Jordan, who would later co-found Koinonia Farm in Georgia, played a role in supporting the mission.
By Jim Perkinson, a sermon for St. Peter’s Episcopal Church (October 1, 2023), a
So, land. A big topic. My wife was recently asked to open a Michigan Climate Summit Conference hosted at Oakland University where she teaches with a formal land acknowledgement and after giving greetings in her native tongue of Kapampangan from the Philippines, the traditional homeland of the Ayta, she offered the following:
I’ve been asked to do the Land Acknowledgment to set the tone for our gathering today and it is fitting that I do so because I, too, am a settler here on Turtle Island. As one Mohawk scholar once said to me once, “It doesn’t matter if your people were brought here through historic colonization, as far as Native peoples are concerned, you are still settlers.” Something I’ve had to sit with for a long time and ponder.
And as protocol goes, it is settlers like myself—not Native peoples—who must acknowledge whose land we’re on—that we are here on Native peoples’ stolen land. And we name this truth not just as pro forma, but as part of the discipline of facing into—and beginning to unlearn—our settler privilege—recognizing that our presence here on this land as non-indigenous peoples means we are beneficiaries not only of native genocide and dispossession, but of other kinds of historic oppressions such as African slavery, U.S. imperialism abroad, and the ecocidal clearing of forests and decimation of wildlife habitat in order to build our cities that’s part of what is driving climate change.
Humanity is naturally separated by language, geography, culture, race, existential narratives, and many other cultural accents that make us uniquely different. We are divided ideologically, politically, racially, by class, belief, faith, and theology. Each group and sub-group has its own ways of expressions and customs, but unfortunately, in one way or another, each group and sub-group claims that its ways and thoughts are uniquely more significant than everything and everyone else in creation. This is human nature where the familiar becomes the norm, and our norms becomes the vehicle by which we evaluate everything and everyone else. For example, in Christianity, Jesus is the way and there is no other way. In Islam, there is no god but God, and Muhammad (Peace be upon him) is the Messenger of God. Historically, Judaism believes that there is only one God who has established a covenant, or special agreement with those of the faith (or traditions). Buddhism believes that life is one of suffering, and that meditation, spiritual and physical labor, and good behavior are the ways to achieve enlightenment, or nirvana and to overcome. In general, Hinduism believes that there are four goals in human life – kama, the pursuit of pleasure; artha, the pursuit of material success; dharma, leading a just and good life; and moksha, enlightenment, which frees a person from suffering and unites the individual soul with Brahman. There are many other cultural- religious understandings in the course of human thinking and they all grapple with the meaning of life, how to effectively live life, and how to live righteously in the human community. Each cultural-religious perspective emerges out of geography and context that frames language, perspective, and understandings.
One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice — though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. “Mend my life!” each voice cried. But you didn’t stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do — determined to save the only life you could save.
This is reposted from American Indians in Children’s Literature (AICL) which provides critical analysis of Indigenous peoples in children’s and young adult books. AICL was established in 2006 by Dr. Debbie Reese of Nambé Pueblo. Dr. Jean Mendoza joined AICL as a co-editor in 2016.
The year is 2023.
People continue to take from Native peoples and Native Nations. It started with our lands and our children. It included efforts to destroy our nationhood and cultures by making it illegal for us to speak our languages and tell our stories and practice our religions.
We persevered.
In recent years more and more of us are being published. Through books, we are using our voices, telling our stories to our children and yours, too, in pre-school and kindergarten story times and in high school classrooms.
But now, our books–our voices–are being removed from libraries and classrooms.
The concurrence of two calendars brings together two significant historical episodes.
The Sunday morning terrorist bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killed four children and injured or maimed many others, on 15 September 1963. Bombs targeting the Black community in that city were common, which gave rise to the nicknaming of the city as “Bombingham.” This one, however, was especially hideous.
Though the FBI concluded that known members of Ku Klux Klan were responsible, no one was brought to trial until 1977, when the ringleader, Robert Chambliss, was convicted in the murder of one of those children. Not until 2001 were the other culprits convicted.
Can you imagine the whipsaw emotions of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.? Eighteen days before he had been the singular figure in the largest demonstration (to that date) in US history, the 28 August March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. His “I Have A Dream” speech is considered by many to be the most important speech of the 20th century.
And then he had to pivot to planning funeral services for these murdered children.
Sunset on Friday, 15 September, also happens to be the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, the opening act of the 10-day High Holy Days of Judaism, ending with Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish liturgical cycle.
Roberto Sirvent: You were recently interviewedon the podcast Millennials are Killing Capitalism about counterinsurgency in various corporate and non-profit spaces. The conversation has helped many academics re-think their relationship to the university and the academy, a distinction you emphasized in an interview with BAR last year. Why do you think it’s so hard for academics to hear about their vocation’s predatory, counterinsurgent, and colonial structuring forces?
Dylan Rodriguez: I generally don’t care, or more honestly, i trynot to care, about most academics’ feelings. I think academics don’t like being reminded (or maybe being told for the first time) that they are generally, at best, politically irrelevant. At worst, they are actively providing (diversity) cover andtraining on behalf of an occupying, extractive force—that is, the college and university—that’s a skip and a sneeze away from the actual machinery of violent global racial capitalism and empire. Academics get in their feelings when people suggest they are operating as apologists and, at times, disempowered operatives for an institutional/state liberalism that is central to the antiblack colonial empire war machine.
Check out the Dream Defenders, a Black woman led org of Black and Brown youth building power in order to advance a new vision for the state of Florida.Watch their brilliant session at the Socialism 2023 conference last weekend.
WE ARE ABOLITIONISTS
We are fighting for a world without prisons, policing, surveillance and punishment. We know that prisons aren’t about safety or accountability but about control and domination over large segments of the population, especially Black people, in order to make a profit. We are different from prison reformers because reformers often create situations where incarceration becomes even more entrenched in our society. Instead, we are fighting for solutions that will produce decarceration, fewer people behind bars and a future world without prisons.
This is why Dream Defenders will never fight for the conviction of a police officer: prisons are not about safety, accountability, or justice.
In order to get us closer to this vision, we must begin to build community alternatives to dealing with harm and violence. Dream Defenders practices transformative justice, an abolitionist way of dealing with conflict and holding people accountable in opposition to the punitive nature of the prison system that treats people as disposable, locks them up and throws away the key.
This week, 61 community organizers working to block the building of Cop City in Georgia were charged with organized crime. The original Jesus movement was also considered by authorities a criminal enterprise. As “democracy” is diminished, we ask ourselves what our solidarity with the Stop Cop City movement might mean in both word and deed.
Radical Discipleship 