Gustavo Gutierrez (June 8, 1928 – October 22, 2024).
But the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world. They are the oppressed, exploited proletariat, robbed of the fruit of their labor and despoiled of their humanity. Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order.
Rev. James Lawson died yesterday. He was 95. Here are some compelling things about his life that we can meditate on and emulate today (curated from a few biographies and obituaries).
Lawson became a “conscientious objector” during the Korean War. In April 1951, he was found guilty of violating the draft laws of the United States, and sentenced to three years in a federal prison. Upon his release from prison, Lawson returned to Baldwin-Wallace and earned his bachelor’s degree.
In 1956, Lawson entered Oberlin College’s Graduate School of Theology. In 1957, one of Lawson’s professors introduced him to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who urged him to move south and aid in the Civil Rights Movement.
“Don’t wait! Come now! We don’t have anyone like you down there,” MLK pleaded, according to author David Halberstam’s history of the civil rights movement, The Children. Rev. Lawson was outwardly “mild and gentle,” wrote Halberstam, “but he was a true radical Christian who feared neither prison nor death.”
An excerpt from James Baldwin’s letter to Angela Davis (November 1970).
The will of the people, in America, has always been at the mercy of an ignorance not merely phenomenal, but sacred, and sacredly cultivated: the better to be used by a carnivorous economy which democratically slaughters and victimizes whites and Blacks alike. But most white Americans do not dare admit this (though they suspect it) and this fact contains mortal danger for the Blacks and tragedy for the nation.
Or, to put it another way, as long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness—for so long as they are unable to walk out of this most monstrous of traps—they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered in their name, and will be manipulated into and surrender themselves to what they will think of—and justify—as a racial war. They will never, so long as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between themselves and their own experience and the experience of others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their country, their children, or their fate. They will perish (as we once put it in our black church) in their sins —that is, in their delusions. And this is happening, needless to say, already, all around us.
Only a handful of the millions of people in this vast place are aware that the fate intended for you, Sister Angela, and for George Jackson, and for the numberless prisoners in our concentration camps—for that is what they are—is a fate which is about to engulf them, too, White lives, for the forces which rule in this country, are no more sacred than Black ones, as many and many a student is discovering, as the white American corpses in Vietnam prove. If the American people are unable to contend with their elected leaders for the redemption of their own honor and the loves of their own children, we the Blacks, the most rejected of the Western children, can expect very little help at their hands; which, after all, is nothing new. What the Americans do not realize is that a war between brothers, in the same cities, on the same soil is not a racial war but a civil war. But the American delusion is not only that their brothers all are white but that the whites are all their brothers.
So be it. We cannot awaken this sleeper, and God knows we have tried. We must do what we can do, and fortify and save each other—we are not drowning in an apathetic self-contempt, we do feel ourselves sufficiently worthwhile to contend even with the inexorable forces in order to change our fate and the fate of our children and the condition of the world! We know that a man is not a thing and is not to be placed at the mercy of things. We know that air and water belong to all mankind and not merely to industrialists. We know that a baby does not come into the world merely to be the instrument of someone else’s profit. We know that a democracy does not mean the coercion of all into a deadly—and, finally, wicked— mediocrity but the liberty for all to aspire to the best that is in him, or that has ever been.
By Caitlin Johnstone, an Australian independent journalist. Re-posted from her Feb 26 newsletter
I watched the uncensored video of US airman Aaron Bushnell self-immolating in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington while screaming “Free Palestine”. I hesitated to watch it because I knew once I put it into my mind it’s there for the rest of my life, but I figured I owe him that much.
I feel like I’ve been picked up and shaken, which I suppose was pretty much what Bushnell was going for. Something to shake the world awake to the reality of what’s happening. Something to snap us out of the brainwashed and distracted stupor of western dystopia and turn our gaze to Gaza.
The sounds stay with you more than the sights. The sound of his gentle, youthful, Michael Cera-like voice as he walked toward the embassy. The sound of the round metal container he stored the accelerant in getting louder as it rolls toward the camera. The sound of Bushnell saying “Free Palestine”, then screaming it, then switching to wordless screams when the pain became too overwhelming, then forcing out one more “Free Palestine” before losing his words for good. The sound of the cop screaming at him to get on the ground over and over again. The sound of a first responder telling police to stop pointing guns at Bushnell’s burning body and go get fire extinguishers.
On this site, we are committed to celebrating the life and teaching of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 366 days a year. King represents what a radical, biblical Christian witness looks like in the context of empire. Dr. King broke rank with bogus Christianity. But he did not cast off the bible. He composted it. Dr. King knew secrets because he was inextricably tied to the long tradition of a biblical Black folk religion rooted in the spirit of the land, in the liberation struggle and in a love supreme. King was bound to a faith in Jesus that, in the words of Howard Thurman, redeemed a religion that white Christians profaned in their midst.
From the time they arrived on Turtle Island, enslaved Africans creatively counter-quoted the scriptures to call out white male preachers quoting the bible to support their destructive hierarchy of value. They transformed the sacred text into a liberation manifesto scripting hope in the midst of political, economic and social struggle. The bible proclaimed that Black people were beloved and that they belong – no matter what white folks said or did. They subverted supremacy and scripted Something Else.
In his book Conjuring Freedom, Johari Jabir, a cherished contributor to this site, wrote that enslaved Africans used the bible “to turn the toxic into the tonic.” In the same way that they salvaged remnants of cloth from garbage dumps and transformed them into quilts that kept their families warm – and in the same way that they kept hunger at bay by taking the intestines of pigs that plantation owners refused to eat and turning them into cooked chitlins. They made a way out of no way – and that way was abundant and beautiful.
From Ahmed Alnaouq (above), a Palestinian journalist based in London and the co-founder of We Are Not Numbers. Originally posted to Twitter on November 17, 2023.
I will never ever forget you. I will never forgive your killers. And I will keep your memory alive.
By Hiba Abu Nada. Re-posted from Protean Magazine. This poem was written on October 10th and is among the last pieces she composed before being martyred by an Israeli airstrike on October 20th. Huda Fakhreddine translated it from the original Arabic.
1. I grant you refuge in invocation and prayer. I bless the neighborhood and the minaret to guard them from the rocket
from the moment it is a general’s command until it becomes a raid.
every child has a dream, like a hummingbird born to sing everything god made is free, everything like you and me
trouble don’t last always – Sinead. hope to see you in the land of perfect day. where every day is howdy howdy never goodbye, and the mist is rolled away.
What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?
I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.
A timely 
Radical Discipleship 