Continue reading “Idle No More”
Category: Art as Resistance
New World Border
Artist Nancy Hom was born in China and immigrated to the U.S. when she was five.
The wall, now being constructed across the length of the US/Mexico border is like a knife cutting off neighbors, wildlife, indigenous people, and families. The wall is inflaming hatred and contributing to an atmosphere of vigilantism and oppression. While the US walls itself off from the world in the name of “security” what is it sacrificing? What is the price of this imprisonment? What is at the root of this fear based policy of building walls? (courtesy of CreativeResistance.Org)
Photography As Resistance: Securing The Vote
Just in time for Voting Day: remembering the long-suffering to ensure suffrage for people of color…and the vigilant & virtuous sacrifice that it’s going to take to keep working for a more just and equitable electoral process. A witness to history, Bob Adelman’s voluntary work as a photographer for the Congress of Racial Equality, the NAACP Legal Defence Fund, and other civil rights organizations allowed him to capture the stories of the Civil Rights Movement in a way that projects both the vulnerability and passion of its activists. Adelman’s unique vantage point is in part due to his close relationships with civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and John Baldwin. Right & Below: Selma 1965.
Reflection on Carnival de Resistance by Sarah Thompson
The following is Sarah Thompson’s reflection on the Carnival de Resistance, an art intervention and communal lifestyle experiment that set up residencies first in Harrisonburg, Va and Charlottesville, Va in the fall of 2013 then in the Wildgoose Festival in the summer of 2014. Sarah Thompson is the Executive Director of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, an organization that is partnering with nonviolent movements around the world, seeking to embody an inclusive, ecumenical and diverse community of God’s love.
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As a theologian and scholar-activist, I loved sharing circus theology and inviting the curious and the apathetic, the annoyed and the skeptic, into our whirling-twirling experiment of life together under the shelter of God’s big tent. Continue reading “Reflection on Carnival de Resistance by Sarah Thompson”
Art as Resistance: The Pacific Climate Warriors
From the Pacific Climate Warriors, whose climate-catastrophe action on Friday blocked 8 of the 12 ships in a full-day blockade of the Newcastle Coal Port in Australia:
Every morning, we wake up and the ocean is there, surrounding our island. But now the ocean, driven by climate change is creeping ever closer. Unless something changes, many of our Pacific Islands face losing everything to sea level rise. Continue reading “Art as Resistance: The Pacific Climate Warriors”
I Just Thought Of Something by Ricardo Levins Morales
Minneapolis-based artist Ricardo Levins Morales on his craft:
I am an artist/activist…or is it activist/artist? It’s impossible to put one before the other or separate them…I believe that art can contribute to changing people’s perceptions, hearts and understandings of what has been, what is and what’s possible. I’m enough of an organizer to understand that art can’t do it alone; people getting together and acting together is the real source of social change. The dignity and possibility in all people is the underlying message of my work.
Continue reading “I Just Thought Of Something by Ricardo Levins Morales”
If You Come Softly (Audre Lorde)
If you come as softly
As wind within the trees
You may hear what I hear
See what sorrow sees.
Carnival de Resistance
Beginning today, we are excited to hold Mondays as a day to celebrate and give voice to the role of art in discipleship. Today we highlight the Carnival de Resistance!
The Carnival de Resistance is an arts carnival, unconventional school and “village demonstration project” that focuses on ecological justice and radical theology. The Carnival Crew seeks to experiment with how art can teach, play can inspire, practices can transform, and resistance can be embodied. They intentionally look to the wisdom of indigenous and other earth based cultures whose music, spirituality and life-ways preserve a liberating way to resist the dominant culture of oppression. The Carnival de Resistance first launched in the fall of 2013, sequentially residing in and building the Carnival world in two church lots in Virginia. In the summer of 2014, they re-built the Carnival experiment in the context of the Wildgoose Festival.
the strait is not straight
In a paper he delivered at the AMBS Rooted & Grounded Conference last month, the Ecumenical Theological Seminary professor Jim Perkinson reflected on the deep meaning found in the renaming of his beloved Detroit River Watershed in 1701:
“Wawiatonong” the Ojibwa say, the place “where the river goes around,” a name conveying at once respect and locale and abundance. I, however, write from a Detroit become the epitome of thirst and lack. Three centuries ago, the Jesuits came around the bend and re-named the Ojibwa curve a “strait,” “de-troit,” the link between Lakes Erie and Huron, shifting its orientation toward the priority of trade and commodities, a mere conduit in the circuits of global capital, and now the country’s most heavily trafficked “commercial” border.
Por que Cantamos
Adapted from 
Mario Benedetti, Uruguay 1979
Voice 1: if each hour brings death
If time is a den of thieves
The breezes carry a scent of evil
And life is just a moving target
People: you will ask why we sing
Voice 2: if our finest people are shunned
Our homeland is dying of sorrow
And the human heart is shattered
Even before shame explodes Continue reading “Por que Cantamos”
Radical Discipleship 