Category: Art as Resistance

The History of Love

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It’s National Coming Out Day! To celebrate, we are delighted to post this poem by Adella Barrett, read at the wedding ceremony of Jeannette Ban and Lola West (October 1, 2022)

I do not know exactly where we stand in the history of love,
but that so many came before us,
some who bore our faces, some who carried our genes and our names,
some who labored a labor I cannot understand.

The history of love, inscrutable and longer than time,
is not rose colored, I must say, it is laden with sacrifice.
We are born of this history, and we inherit this story,
the same as we inherit in our flesh the banquet of desire, the soft need to be seen,
for our bones to be held and read as holy.

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Time for Another Wilderness Vigil

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance, Subverting Empire1 Comment

An announcement and invitation from Tevyn East, director of Dreaming Stone Arts and Ecology Center

In early 2020, a group of comrades (Jay Beck, Jimmy Betts, Tevyn East, Tim Nafziger, Jonathan McRay, and Todd Wynward) first gathered together in response to a call from friend and colleague, Dave Pritchett. Sparked by his attendance of a “Vision Fast” held by the School of Lost Borders, where participants experienced a 4 day solo fast, bookended by group process, Dave had a desire to deepen into this practice amongst peers. His call, “to gather a cohort of folks to re-imagine how we can use the wilderness vigil to empower people in our movements, and how we can do so in ways that better pay attention to place, to history, and to the political moment we inhabit.” And thus, the first Wilderness Vigil was born. It was a significant, supportive and meaningful event for all.

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Intercessions are Being Launched

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By Ken Sehested

Written in response to a friend’s agonizing note reporting on the
harrowing violence unfolding in Ukraine

We, from this distance and in our negligent comfort and
delinquent affluence, lack the ability to stretch our hands to
yours to feel your shivers; to enlarge our hearts so that they
beat in rhythm with your sobs; to train our eyes so that they
rise above the frivolous, paltry distractions, immune to grief,
comforted in our colonized minds, asking only
what more is there to drink?
what more, to eat?
what more, to abduct our attention from the brutal fate
of distant, disposable victims of imperial lust and
bloated arrogance?

Kyrie eleison, Lord have mercy.

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Now Let Us Sing!

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By Johari Jabir, Juneteenth 2021, originally posted on University of Chicago Divinity School’s Sightings website (June 17, 2021)

Now let us sing
Sing til the power of the Lord come down
Lift up your heads, don’t be afraid
Now let us sing til the power of the Lord come down. (Gospel Song)

June 19, 2021 marks the 156th anniversary of Juneteenth, the celebration enacted by formerly enslaved Africans who received official word of Emancipation on June 19, 1865 in Galveston, Texas.  Juneteenth combines June 19th, the empirical date of the announcement of emancipation with the “Day of Jubilee” from the Jewish Calendar. This significant reference to Jewish calendar has its roots in the ingenuity of enslaved Africans. Letting the soul journey into that sacred temporality where past, present, and future come together to form a Divine Diasporic sense of time, I connect this early history of how enslaved Africans drew inspiration from the children of Israel to the troubled but valuable Black/Jewish struggles of solidarity in the twentieth century.

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