Category: Biography as Theology

A Letter from Open Door Community

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Uncategorized1 Comment

open door.jpgJune 2016

Dear Friends,

This is a letter we never thought we would have to write, and it’s breaking our hearts.

We have come to a time that the Open Door Community cannot move forward in the way that we have lived and worked for the past 35 years. While we plan to continue some parts of our ministry including our newspaper, Hospitality, we anticipate that in January 2017 our house at 910 Ponce de Leon Avenue, the location of our residential community and hub of our ministry, will close. The building will close; some of the ministry will continue. There are three primary reasons for this change. Continue reading “A Letter from Open Door Community” →

A Prophetic Week at Proctor

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Cloud of Witnesses, Race1 Comment

By Tommy Airey

Michael Brandon McCormick
Photo: Ct Carmello

I brought you my son because there is a spirit trying to kill him and whenever it seizes him…whenever it grasps him, whenever it grabs him, whenever it accosts him, whenever it subjects him to force without his consent. Let me try it this way: whenever it arrests him! We’re dealing with folks who know what it means to deal with search and seizure. We are people who have been subject to seizure: seized from Africa, seized and thrown into the belly of slave ships. We’ve had our bodies seized, our language seized, our culture seized, our history seized, our resources seized, our economy seized, our possibilities seized, our hope seized, our dreams seized.
Dr. Michael Brandon McCormack (photo above), on Mark 9:14-29 (the episode of the young man seized by a demon)

Measured by its very spirit and structure, the every-four-year American political party national convention is nothing but an intoxicating religious revival meeting, a well-choreographed (mega)church service. Last week’s Republican National Convention in Cleveland highlighted the privilege-blind, fear-based, power-hungry religion of (mostly) white American elites and their Southern and suburban foot soldiers. Imperial chants of “Blue Lives Matter,” “Make America Safe/Great Again,” “Build The Wall” and “Lock Her Up” liturgically scripted delegates into worship. Continue reading “A Prophetic Week at Proctor” →

Embracing the Personalist Approach

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Subverting Empire, Theological Animation1 Comment

By Wes Howard-Brook and Sue Ferguson JohnsonMartha

“Some people are Marys, and some are Marthas.”

Uh, no.

The little story of Mary and Martha in Luke’s Gospel is one that we regularly hear interpreted as a choice between two lifestyles, the “active” and the “contemplative.” Read in context, though, Luke’s message is not that at all. Let’s try to listen to this familiar story with fresh ears. Continue reading “Embracing the Personalist Approach” →

To Do Is To Know

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Theological Animation1 Comment

the-good-samaritan-1907By Ched Myers, the 8th Sunday after Pentecost (Luke 10:25-37; right: “The Good Samaritan” by Paula Modersohn-Becker)

Note: This is part of a series of weekly comments on the Lukan gospel readings from the Revised Common Lectionary during year C, 2016.

The famous Parable of the Good Samaritan is often sentimentalized, but its subversive character and genuine profundity can never be exhausted. It comes on the heels of Jesus’ sending out of the “seventy,” and his long “missionary discourse” (Lk 10:1-24).  How different the history of Christianity would have been had disciples in every age followed these relatively simple but incisive instructions to travel with the gospel in a vulnerable and provisional mode, rather than a dominating one! But if the unholy joining of mission and empire has been the first pillar of Christendom’s apostasy, surely the second has been the church’s tendency to define faith through dogma. It is this religious bad habit that Luke addresses in this Sunday’s parable. Continue reading “To Do Is To Know” →

I Don’t Speak Dari Yet

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sarah thompsonA report from Christian Peacemaker Teams executive director Sarah Thompson:

Our Christian Peacemaker Team is accompanying refugees in Mytilene, Lesbos, Greece. As Executive Director I have a chance to do a two week team visit. I sat across the table from a man from Afghanistan yesterday. Neither he nor I are from Greece or speak Greek. I don’t speak Dari yet, and he just began the English classes offered to refugees. We don’t know each other’s names and yet we are deeply and violently connected. My village paid for his village to be bombed (through the US led war in Afghanistan).

Continue reading “I Don’t Speak Dari Yet” →

Just Mercy

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Bryan StevensonFrom lawyer Bryan Stevenson on DemocracyNow.org:

I think that we have too little compassion in our criminal justice system. We’ve been corrupted by the politics of fear and anger. We’re doing harsh, extraordinarily torturous things to people. And I think we’ve forgotten that, you know, it’s not mercy, it’s not justice, it’s not compassion, when we give it to people who haven’t done anything wrong. You earn the right to call yourself compassionate and merciful when you expose people who have fallen down, who have done bad things to your justice, to your mercy. And I see a criminal justice system completely devoid of mercy, which makes us completely devoid of justice. And we’ve got to do better.

*See also Stevenson’s latest project: a museum on slavery.

What is Prayer?

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ed loringBy Eduard Loring, from the April 2016 issue of Hospitality, the newsletter of Atlanta’s Open Door Community

“I will never pray again. I have prayed and prayed and nothing ever happens. I am finished.” So said the 90-year-old grandmother last week when her grandson Mark overdosed on heroin. Mark’s father died 6 years ago from esophageal cancer. Face, mouth, throat deranged. Spoken word distorted. Unintelligible if more than one syllable. Tobacco kills. God forgives a repentant addict; God does not stop the side effects of the sin, though the power of Love’s prayer, and medicine, exercise and nutrition can mitigate the fury of the Evil One and her daughters Tobacco and Heroin. Often heal. Continue reading “What is Prayer?” →

I Will Not Serve As An Empire Chaplain

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AntalFrom former U.S. Army Reserve Chaplain Captain Chris Antal, who spent time based in Afghanistan. In April, he wrote an open letter to President Obama detailing his reasons for leaving the U.S. Army Reserves, citing his opposition to the administration’s use of drone strikes, its policy on nuclear proliferation, and what he calls the executive branch’s claim of “extraconstitutional authority and impunity for international law.” Continue reading “I Will Not Serve As An Empire Chaplain” →

Be welcomed again and again

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RDnetlogo1.jpgAn Invitation. By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann

This is a space that lives in the
unknowable interweb,
that lives beyond the boundaries
of state or nation.
It is rootless
and yet is always honoring the rooted.

It is a space that is dreamed
and humanly kept
with love and foibles
for a movement of radical disciples. Continue reading “Be welcomed again and again” →

To Will The Story Into Existence

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DietrichFrom Jeff Dietrich (right: at the L.A. Catholic Worker) in Broken and Shared: Food, Dignity, and the Poor on Los Angeles’ Skid Row (2011):

I believe the gospels are the best story we have.  They are the singular counter-narrative to our consumerist, war-mongering, media-saturated, technologized, dehumanized, death-oriented culture.  The story of the gospels–the triumph of goodness and mercy over the powers of death and domination–cannot be proven; and we cannot accept the story on faith alone;  but we love the story so much that we want it to be true.  To will the story into existence by our own living testimony to its veracity, thus giving witness to our deepest hopes for humanity–that is what attracted me as a young person to the Catholic Worker, and that is what attracts young people still to this day.