Category: Biography as Theology

What Are You Thankful For? Gratitude as a Way of Life

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prison

Joyce Hollyday is a co-founder and co-pastor of Circle of Mercy, an ecumenical congregation in Asheville, North Carolina as well as Word and World. She served for fifteen years as the Associate Editor of Sojourners magazine and is the author of several books, including Clothed with the Sun: Biblical Women, Social Justice, and Us and Then Shall Your Light Rise: Spiritual Formation and Social Witness.

I walk through the opening as the steel door clangs open and head toward the vending machines with my fistfuls of quarters. Nothing new, unfortunately. The same sugary, neon-colored sodas, salt-laden chips, and dry, mystery-meat sandwiches on bread as thin and tasteless as cardboard, wrapped in cellophane. But these will be my friend Wiley’s only chance at lunch. The prison doesn’t serve lunch on Saturdays. Continue reading “What Are You Thankful For? Gratitude as a Way of Life” →

An Invitation

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Picture3From Lydia Wylie-Kellermann

It’s been two months since this blog went live and it has been a joy to read the stories and gather a circle of writers and activists to participate. Yet, there is so much still dreamt for what this could be. We invite you to join us in collaborating and giving life to this space. The words, questions, invitations, struggles, pondering, poetry, rememberings are uttered by a community crying out for justice from a biblical vision living within the empire of the day. This space is offered as gift with the hope of collective ownership. Continue reading “An Invitation” →

Book Recommendation: Transforming Addiction

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jpgVictoria Marie, PhD, MDiv. is a Roman Catholic Woman Priest who studied Anthropology of Education at the University of British Columbia, attended seminary at Vancouver School of Theology, is a member of the Vancouver Catholic Worker and pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe Tonantzin Community, Vancouver BC.
“I know from my own experience as a member of a racialized group that racism, if internalized, can result in an individual seeing their identity as tainted. Even when negative self-conceptions are overcome, the tenacity of racism does not instil in those who are continuously injured by it the vision of a future that is different than the past.”

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A Happy Birthday Poem for Liz McAlister

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November 17, 2liz014

From Bill Wylie-Kellermann

Thanks be to Glory in you…
for a heart to hear and see and know this love
for conscience, spirit-hatched in convent walls, breaking out the door;
for community found, nourished of bread, and breathed as one
(and for the love which will bear its wounds)
for the fracture of good order in a time of sanctioned insanity
for conspiracies, east coast to west, scattered by missive, by car and thumb Continue reading “A Happy Birthday Poem for Liz McAlister” →

Onion Day

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By Joyce Hollydayonions

In mid-September of 1998, my dear friend Jeanie Wylie-Kellermann learned that she had an aggressive brain cancer and a medical prediction of less than six months to live. The news was devastating to her two young daughters. Six weeks later, on October 25th, 8-year-old Lucy grabbed an onion out of the pantry, placed it on the dining room table, and announced, “Today is Onion Day.” She answered the quizzical looks of her family with, “Well, with all this dying going on, we have to have something to laugh about.” Continue reading “Onion Day” →

A Love Letter to Word and World

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From Lydia Wylie-Kellermann Picture1

Word and World was birthed three hundred feet away from my freshman high school classes. I have been lovingly molded by this thing as I began to imagine my own vocation in activism and faith. I came to my first school (Philly) when I was seventeen years old. In Minneapolis, the community wrapped my mom in a quilt in her dying months when I was nineteen. The mentoring program called me deeper into relationship with mentors and mothers so deeply needed inspiring and allowing for a love of writing. From marriage to giving birth, anti-war activism in Baltimore to local economies in Detroit, Word and World has been home, church, school, community, and family. My heart aches with gratitude. Continue reading “A Love Letter to Word and World” →

The Black Prophetic Struggle Against Injustice

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Cloud of Witnesses, Subverting Empire1 Comment

By Tommy Airey
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The great irony of our time is that in the age of Obama the grand Black prophetic tradition is weak and feeble.
Cornel West, Black Prophetic Fire (2014)

The Union Theological Seminary professor & prominent American public intellectual Dr. Cornel West has teamed up with Christa Buschendorf, the professor and the chair of American Studies at Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt am Main, for the newly released Black Prophetic Fire from Beacon Press, a series of extended conversations on six compelling prophetic leaders: Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, Ella Baker (above), Malcolm X & Ida B. Wells. It is a well-timed buffet for people of faith & conscience yearning to eat at the table of a nutritious historic tradition that will energize & sustain subversive lifestyles within the context of 21st century American Empire. Continue reading “The Black Prophetic Struggle Against Injustice” →

An open letter to my students after my arrest for disorderly conduct

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kim redigan 2

Kim Redigan teaches theology at University of Detroit Jesuit High School and blogs at www.writetimeforpeace.com. She is a nonviolence trainer and peace educator with Meta Peace Team.

Dear students:

Some of you have contacted me after seeing news of my arrest for a nonviolent action around the water shutoffs here in Detroit. While I am touched by your concern, I implore you to reserve your support for those being affected by the shutoffs and your own generation, which, unless things change, is on track to inherit a commodified world in which beauty, nature, life itself will be sold off to the lowest corporate bidder, an affront to all that is good, decent and human. Continue reading “An open letter to my students after my arrest for disorderly conduct” →

A Penny For The People

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology1 Comment

By Tom Airey, RadicalDiscipleship.Net
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To choose what is difficult
all one’s days
as if it were easy,
that is faith.
W.H. Auden, For The Time Being (1944)

When Penny Lernoux graduated from the University of Southern California, she took her SoCal suburban privilege, Phi Beta Kappa intellect, lapsed Catholicism & journalistic brilliance to Latin America to work for U.S. Information Agency, an organization promoting American policy overseas. Little did she know that circumstances on the ground–unjust & violent–would soon prod her to write prophetic denunciations of the American cluster of principalities and powers (corporations, the CIA, Congress, armed forces, etc) that jimmy-rigged massive parcels of land away from the people of Latin America while propping up military dictatorships in virtually every single country to the south: all in the name of fighting communism.

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Hot off the Press: It Runs in the Family by Frida Berrigan

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It Runs in the Family: OR Book Going RougeOn Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood

By Frida Berrigan

“A moving chronicle of the things that make for love and peace, elegantly written by a woman who knows more than most about both. How to balance family, children, intimate partnership with urgent rescue of the gravely endangered planet? With wit, stark honesty, and deep compassion, Frida Berrigan suggests a simple answer, drawing on the bliss and grit of her own life as a mother — and as an activist. …This book matters enormously.”                                                        —James Carroll Continue reading “Hot off the Press: It Runs in the Family by Frida Berrigan” →