Category: Cloud of Witnesses

A Two-Sided Transformational Process

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graceFrom Grace Lee Boggs in The Next American Revolution (2012):

Radical social change had to be viewed as a two-sided transformational process, of ourselves and of our institutions, a process requiring protracted struggle and not just a D-Day replacement of one set of rulers with another. The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56 was the first struggle by an oppressed people in Western society from this new philosophical/political perspective…not only desegregating the buses but creating the beloved community.

Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, and Martin Were Movement Men: The Demand Before Us Today

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J PerkBy. Dr. Jim Perkinson, Keynote at the Islamic House of Wisdom (Detroit, MI, 1-18-15)a
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One of those shot in the Charlie Hebdo incident in Paris on Jan. 7 was a Muslim policeman named Ahmed Marabet killed while trying to defend that newspaper’s staff. The next day, Dyab Abou Jahjah, a Belgian news columnist and Muslim, responded to all the “I am Charlie” signs appearing in the Paris streets with a tweet saying: “I am not Charlie, I am Ahmed the dead cop. Charlie ridiculed my faith and culture and I died defending his right to do so.
Continue reading “Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, and Martin Were Movement Men: The Demand Before Us Today” →

Catastrophe

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cornel-westCornel West on the four persistent American catastrophes that Martin Luther King identified at the end of his life:

Militarism is an imperial catastrophe that has produced a military-industrial complex and national security state and warped the country’s priorities and stature (as with the immoral drones, dropping bombs on innocent civilians). Materialism is a spiritual catastrophe, promoted by a corporate media multiplex and a culture industry that have hardened the hearts of hard-core consumers and coarsened the consciences of would-be citizens. Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. Arbitrary uses of the law — in the name of the “war” on drugs — have produced, in the legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s apt phrase, a new Jim Crow of mass incarceration. And poverty is an economic catastrophe, inseparable from the power of greedy oligarchs and avaricious plutocrats indifferent to the misery of poor children, elderly citizens and working people.

An Underground Counter-Culture

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RubemAlves_relogioFrom Brazilian theologian Rubem Alves:

The early Christian community was…an underground counter-culture. The reason it was so ruthlessly persecuted was because the dominant powers perceived it as a basically dysfunctional and subversive social reality. The values it wanted to realize and live out implied in the long run the abolition of the very foundations of the Roman Empire.

We Are Not Alone

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From Vincent Harding:

vincenthardingWe are not alone in this struggle for the re-creation of our own lives and the life of our community.  It has long been written and known that those who choose to struggle for the life of the earth and its beings are part of an ageless, pulsating membrane of light that is filled with the lives, hopes, and beatific visions of all who have fought on, held on, loved well, and gone on before us.  For this task is to magnificent to be carried by us alone, in our house, in our meeting, in our organization, in our generation, in our lifetime…  we are all a part of one another, and we are all part of the intention of the great creator spirit to continue being light and life.

[ We are to seek out ] … a path that expresses our own searching – expanding the confidence in the healing power of the universe, in the presence of a loving, leading Power, exposing us always to the harsh and the tender, to the dreadful and the compassionate, prying our lives open to the evidence of things unseen.

Apostolic Work

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thomas mertonDo not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all,if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it get much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that save everything.

– Thomas Merton

Frohe Weihnachten: A Century After The Truce

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Christmas Truce 1914, as seen by the Illustrated London News.If the well-meaning Christian boys from England, France, Germany, Russia, Austria, and other nations had been, in their childhoods, thoroughly exposed to the ethical teachings of their Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, they might have had the capacity to refuse the invitation to kill their co-religionists on the other side of the battle lines.
Gary Kohls

This year marks the 100 year anniversary of the 1914 Christmas Truce, just months into the first World War.   Continue reading “Frohe Weihnachten: A Century After The Truce” →