From Dom Helder Camara (February 7, 1909 – August 27, 1999), Catholic archbishop of Recife, Brazil:
We must have no illusions. We shall not walk on roses, people will not throng to hear us and applaud, and we shall not always be aware of divine protection. If we are to be pilgrims for justice and peace, we must expect the desert.
Dom Helder Camara: ¡Presente!
This is the last question and answer of James Wilt’s interview with Carol Adams, the author of the vegetarian and feminist classic The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990) in the current issue of Geez Magazine:
You make it clear in Sexual Politics that you’re a cultural worker, not an academic. You’ve been involved in advocating for and helping battered women and involved in animal rights for many decades. What keeps you grounded, from getting depressed, or anxious, or saying it’s not worth it in the end?
There’s a quote from Susan B. Anthony about how she always had great company. She wasn’t doing it alone. Václav Havel said we have to do what we’re doing to change the world not because we know that we’ll prevail, but because it’s the right thing to do. We can’t measure success by some sort of end goal. We have to simply subsume ourselves in the process of it. I think that ties into an ecofeminist philosophy.
Continue reading “The Source of Joy Can Change”
From Evo Morales’ Ten Commandments Against Capitalism, For Life & Humanity.
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Sisters and brothers: We are living in a society in which everything is globalized and homogenized, in which cultural identities seem to smack of the past that everyone wants to ignore. The ancient and ancestral cultures are marginalized in economic and political processes and their cultural and spiritual force and energy are discounted. This has led to a profound dehumanization in the world and discrimination in the spiritual and cultural resources that can give us the necessary strengths to stop the brutality of capitalism. We must:
From Janet Malcolm in The Journalist and the Murderer (1990):
What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject’s blind self absorption and the journalist’s skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject’s account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.
From Pope Francis’ recent earth-loving encyclical:
Christian spirituality proposes an alternative understanding of the quality of life, and encourages a prophetic and contemplative lifestyle, one capable of deep enjoyment free of the obsession with consumption. We need to take up an ancient lesson, found in different religious traditions and also in the Bible. It is the conviction that ‘less is more’…Our goal is not to amass information or to satisfy curiosity, but rather to become painfully aware, to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it.
Anytime you have an opportunity to make a difference in this world and you don’t, then you are wasting your time on earth.
Roberto Clemente (1934-1972)
It was six decades ago that Roberto Clemente–black and Puerto Rican–made his major league baseball debut. Throughout his career, he endured discrimination and hatred based on his skin color, ethnicity and nationality. It was so bad that, in 1960, Clemente led the Pirates to the World Series title and the MVP was given to Bobby Richardson, a white player from the losing Yankees.
After the ’72 season, a vicious earthquake devastated Managua, Nicaragua. Clemente immediately began organizing relief efforts, sending plane loads of basic necessities. When he discovered these goods were being diverted by the corrupt Somoza government, he chartered a jet and joined the mission. It plunged into the ocean almost immediately after takeover on New Year’s Eve.
I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.
Mary Oliver
Now, almost a month away from the closing ceremonies of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), there are two images I can’t get out of my mind. One is a word picture painted by Commissioner Marie Wilson who asked those pressed into rooms to hear the findings of the TRC to think of “graveyards where there should have been playgrounds.” She was speaking of the 6000 estimated deaths at residential schools (odds of dying almost identical to those of Canadians serving in World War II) and the dehumanization of unmarked graves and families who still do not know what happened to their child. She was speaking of the 150,000 children whose childhood was robbed when they were forcibly removed from their families, subjected to neglect and child labour, denied their language and culture, taught they were inferior, and, in many cases, abused by the people who were charged with their care. It is an image that should have made every Canadian hold their breath. Children not allowed to be children. Children who never made it home.
Continue reading “Reflections on the Close of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation”
Happy 100th Birthday this weekend to Grace Lee Boggs: activist, author, animator of Life. To celebrate: a word of inspiration from her book The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (2011):
When you read Marx (or Jesus) this way, you come to see that real wealth is not material wealth and real poverty is not just the lack of food, shelter, and clothing. Real poverty is the belief that the purpose of life is acquiring wealth and owning things. Real wealth is not the possession of property but the recognition that our deepest need, as human beings, is to keep developing our natural and acquired powers to relate to other human beings.
Since September 11, 2001, however, we can no longer rest comfortably with such domesticated pictures of Jesus. We can no longer ignore the impact of Western imperialism on subordinated peoples and the ways in which peoples whose lives have been invaded sometimes react. The “coincidental” historical analogy is too disquieting, that is, that the Roman Empire had come to control the ancient Middle East, including Galilee and Judea, where Jesus operated.
Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder
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The legendary Vern Ratzlaff (above), Canadian Mennonite pastor and professor, was sporting his 5-inch beard long before practically every American white guy under 35 started growing theirs. Vern is spending free time at his outpost in Saskatoon reading dense anti-imperial theology and writing concise summaries for the rest of us. Here is a recent submission on an earlier work of Richard Horsley’s entitled Jesus and the Spiral of Violence (1993)–more important than ever:
Horsley summarizes the political and social times of Jesus and Jesus’ reactions to these, especially the role of violence in Palestine during Jesus’ time. The reality of violence extends well beyond the direct, personal and physical; there is also psychological or spiritual violence, acts that impair other persons’ dignity or integrity…. To make (people) live on a subhuman level against their will, to constrain them in such a way that they have no hope of escaping their condition, is an unjust exercise of force (p 21,22).
Continue reading “From Vern’s Empire Subverting Library”
From Benedictine nun Joan Chittister:
It is not what others think of us; it is what we think of others that singles the contemplative out in a crowd. Our role in life is not to convert others. It’s not even to influence them. It certainly is not to impress them. Our goal in life is to convert ourselves from the pernicious agenda that is the self to an awareness of God’s goodness present in the other.
Radical Discipleship 