From Brendan Byrne in The Hospitality of God: A Reading of Luke’s Gospel (2000):
We retain the doctrine of the “Second Coming” in our affirmations of faith, not because we literally believe–as fundamentalists do–that Jesus will one day appear as Son of Man on the clouds of heaven, but because we believe that the biblical assertions to that effect affirm the eventual triumph of God’s sovereignty in the universe and that all is provisional till that occurs.
By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann as part of her series on parenting- Learning from Laughter.
With the table covered in newspaper, the three of us began carving pumpkins. Isaac embraced the gunk helping to pull it out while the Halloween music played and the moon shown out the window. When it came time to cut the faces, I sat beside him and asked what he wanted. We drew it out together in marker. He told me he wanted square eyes and a triangle nose. Out of the blue he insisted that the pumpkin have a mustache. Then I asked about the mouth. Do you want a smile? “No. It’s a sad pumpkin.” I tried to draw a sad mouth. Then he said “Pumpkin crying.” He was asking for tears. I carved out some tears falling from the square eyes. He smiled in total delight and pride at his sad pumpkin. Continue reading “Learning from Laughter: The Pumpkin that Cried Tears”
By Lindsay Airey
The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free.
Audre Lorde
Tangela. Dear, fierce and tender Tangela. I just heard the news. I don’t even know how you died. I just got word pouring in over social media. 40 years old. How can you be dead? How can it be true?
Mind racing with questions. And tears. Tears and tears and tears. How can it be so? You were so ALIVE! Oh, and the children. The babies who must be grieving your loss. You were so beloved. So depended upon. So ready to respond in the time of need. So true a human. Oh, and how great were the burdens you carried. Rest now, dear Sister. Though our tears and cries long to bring you back, to fill the great void you have left.
Continue reading “Tangela Harris—Remembering a Fierce Midwife of Justice”
This All Saints Day, we pause to remember those saints who have crossed over this year especially mindful of those who have filled these pages and gifted our movements. Here are those we have covered this year, we invite other to add names and stories and to cry out Presente!
We give thanks for their lives and rejoice that they are among us still. Presente!
By Tommy Airey
Whatever confusion there may be among Christians about redemption today, it must be small compared to that which accompanied the birth of the Christian movement in the first century…Yet we can be sure of the upshot: the disciples’ recognition that Jesus’ story that had engaged them was not ended by his death. For him and for them, there was a new beginning. Strangely but surely a new era had begun.
James McClendon, Doctrine (1994)
Today, on the 15th anniversary of his passing, we honor James McClendon, one of the most underrated Christian theologians of the 20th century. McClendon, raised in Southern Baptist Louisiana, became the first Protestant theologian to ever be hired by a Catholic theology department (University of San Francisco). His contract was mysteriously not renewed at USF after he passed around a petition denouncing American military adventures in Vietnam. Later in the 70s, McClendon became a pioneer in postmodern theological endeavors after reading John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus and attending a conference in Manhattan with his wife (the philosopher and theologian Nancey Murphy) called “The Church in a Postmodern Age.” From there, McClendon did ground breaking work at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union and Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.
Continue reading “Honoring St. James”
An announcement from the Boggs Center
Philosopher-Activist Grace Lee Boggs Dies in Detroit: A Champion for the People
October 5, 2015–Grace Lee Boggs died peacefully in her sleep at her home on Field Street in Detroit this morning. She had recently celebrated her 100th birthday at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.
Grace was an internationally known philosopher activist for justice. She had been politically active since the 1930’s working with A. Phillip Randolph’s first march on Washington and later C.L.R. James. For 40 years she worked closely with her late husband James Boggs in advancing ideas of revolution and evolution for the 20th and 21st Centuries.
She helped organize the 1963 March down Woodward Avenue with Dr. Martin Luther King and the Grass Roots Leadership Conference with Malcolm X. Grace Lee Boggs was active in Labor, Civil Rights, Black Power, women and environmental justice movements. Later, with her husband James, she helped organize SOSAD, WePros, Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice, Gardening Angels and Detroit Summer. Grace was a founding member of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership and was a strong advocate for place based education and supported the James and Grace Lee Boggs School.
“Grace died as she lived, surrounded by books, politics, people and ideas,” said Alice Jennings and Shea Howell, two of her Trustees.
By Tim Vivian, Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies,
California State University Bakersfield
In Honor of William Stringfellow (1928-1985), Prophet to a Land of Unlikeness, Near the Thirtieth Anniversary of His Death. With thanks to Bill Wylie-Kellerman.
In the midst of babel, speak the truth. . . .
And more than that, in the Word of God,
expose death and all death’s works and
wiles, rebuke lies, cast out demons,
exorcise, cleanse the possessed, raise
those who are dead in mind or conscience.
William Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and other Aliens in a Strange Land (1973), 42-43
Imagine someone (you can), in 1856,
inviting you to a slave auction, not as
an observer, certainly not as slaver, Continue reading “Imagine”
From James Cone in The Cross & The Lynching Tree (2011)
The real scandal of the gospel is this: humanity’s salvation is revealed in the cross of the condemned criminal Jesus, and humanity’s salvation is available only through our solidarity with the crucified people in our midst. Faith that emerged out of the scandal of the cross is not a faith of intellectuals or elites of any sort. This is the faith of abused and scandalized people—the losers and the down and out.
*Click here for a free PDF of the Introduction and Chapter 1 of The Cross & The Lynching Tree.
Radical Discipleship 