Category: Art as Resistance

Advent Longing

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light-in-the-darknessFrom author and activist Ken Sehested, a resident of the French Broad watershed of the Southern Appalachian Mountains in Asheville, NC. Ken just launched a subversively informative site called Prayer & Politiks:

Oh Wondrous One, Who rides the skies and consorts with the earth— haunting the heavens, hounding mere mortals with the expectation of ecstasy—come and rouse hungry hearts with the aroma of your Presence.

Let the song of angels sound again, announcing glory to God and peace for the earth.

Give your people wombs of welcome to the news of reversal: the annulment of enmity and the Advent of promise.

Let every lip echo the jubilant manifesto of creation’s destiny with justice and with joy.

Set our hearts on the edge of our seats, shivering in hope, longing, longing for the age when bitter memory dissolves into Magnificat.

Holy One of heaven, mark these dark nights with the brilliance of your star to guide emissaries of exclaiming grace.

The grace of contradiction and scandal to the insolent innkeepers of this age.

The grace of blessing and bounty to the indigent, and to all who find no lasting home save in the age to come.

Positioning by Rose Berger

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oakRose Berger is an award-winning religion journalist, author, public speaker, poet, and Catholic who specializes in writing about spirituality and art, social justice, war and peace.

Positioning

I didn’t count the rings
on the oak we took down

—crane and all—but think
there must have been a hundred

or more. I’d rather,
I’m sure, count the hairs

on your head
or finger the span

of your spine, my hand
on your smooth skin,

until we are old enough
to have limbs

that can no longer bear
the weight of a high wind

or surprise snow. Continue reading “Positioning by Rose Berger” →

Idle No More

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The impetus for the recent Idle No More events, lies in a centuries old resistance as Indigenous nations and their lands suffered the impacts of exploration, invasion and colonization. Idle No More seeks to assert Indigenous inherent rights to sovereignty and reinstitute traditional laws and Nation to Nation Treaties by protecting the lands and waters from corporate destruction. Each day that Indigenous rights are not honored or fulfilled, inequality between Indigenous peoples and the settler society grows.
Continue reading “Idle No More” →

New World Border

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Artist Nancy Hom was born in China and immigrated to the U.S. when she was five.

New World Border

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

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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

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carnival 7

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

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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

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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” →

Carnival de Resistance

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Carnival Mask Image

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.

Continue reading “Carnival de Resistance” →