Category: Just Peacemaking

It’s Not Part of Our Vision

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Cloud of Witnesses, Just Peacemaking, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

RamseyThanks to Detroit-based law student Cait De Mott Grady for passing along this profound interview Derrick Jensen did with former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark way back in 2000. His reflections are more relevant than ever. This is an excerpt, but the entire interview deserves a read.

Jensen: So how do we maintain our national self-image as God’s gift to the world, the great bastion of democracy?

Clark: But we’re not a democracy. It’s a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we’re a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy. Wealth has its way. The concentration of wealth and the division between rich and poor in the U.S. are unequaled anywhere. And think of whom we admire most: the Rockefellers and Morgans, the Bill Gateses and Donald Trumps. Would any moral person accumulate a billion dollars when there are 10 million infants dying of starvation every year? Is that the best thing you can find to do with your time? Continue reading “It’s Not Part of Our Vision” →

time(lessness)

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Just Peacemaking, UncategorizedLeave a comment

imagesBy Marcia Lee, Detroit, MI

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.
Albert Einstein.

Time in its measurements of hours, minutes, days, and years is a human construct that we have created to make order in our lives.  (Think of how many different calendars there are in different parts of the world and terms we use like people of color time, Asian time, etc.). We want a certain level of structure and having time to measure events allows us to have something outside of ourselves, a ‘science’ if you will, to give purpose and stability to our decisions.  This is how people come to say things like, “If only I had the time,’ or ‘there are not enough hours in a day.’ This, I call ‘human time.’ Continue reading “time(lessness)” →

The Violence Happening in Our Midst

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Just Peacemaking, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment
Clancy Dunigan
The Poor People’s Campaign resists and rises above systems of oppression in Olympia, Washington (PC: Clancy Dunigan)

The Poor People’s Campaign keeps on rolling. This is from Jeremy Porter in Kentucky:

There is a long history of nonviolent civil disobedience in this country and around the world. The goal is not to be arrested, but to bring attention to the violence happening in our midst. If we get arrested on the road to justice, then we are willing. This violence includes: People without dignified affordable housing (where an individual in KY has to work 77 hours a week on minimum wage just to afford a two bedroom apartment), the 40% of homeless youth who are queer, 200,000 people who die in this country annually from lack of wealth, 1 in 5 KY children who don’t know where their next meal will come from…these are just the tip of the iceberg of violence happening daily.

Our goal in the Kentucky Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival is to wage peace and justice against this violence, but first people must know it exists…and so we name it and make it known through nonviolent moral fusion direct action, which sometimes means risking the breaking of a law to bring attention to the unjust laws all around us.

Kings Bay Plowshares- a poem

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Just Peacemaking, UncategorizedLeave a comment

cards.jpgBy Kate Foran

Dissent without civil disobedience is consent. Philip Berrigan

Our friend Mark sits in a jail cell again
and I stand in the lunch hour line
under fluorescent lights
at the post office with my toddler
to buy a stack of pre-stamped postcards,
the only kind acceptable to mail,
written only in blue or black ink,
no stickers, glue, glitter, or pictures,
no letters or packages. Continue reading “Kings Bay Plowshares- a poem” →

We Are Not Anti-Police But Pro-Community

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Just Peacemaking, Race, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

FirstFirst Congregational Church of Oakland recently made a decision to reduce their reliance on the police with the goal of not calling them, period. This is a statement they made to the media. We just had to share this.

First Congregational Church of Oakland is a multiracial church, and some of our own members have been followed, harassed, and even sexually assaulted by police officers. In addition, we live in the middle of an urban area experiencing an extreme housing crisis, so there are many unhoused people on and around our campus, some of whom struggle with mental illness and addiction, and the statistics show that Black and Brown people suffering from mental illness and addiction are among those most at risk of being shot by police even when unarmed. Continue reading “We Are Not Anti-Police But Pro-Community” →

Veteran for Peace

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Just Peacemaking, UncategorizedLeave a comment

indexBy Kate Foran

For my father at the start of the second Iraq War, 2003

You enlisted thinking
you were protecting something,
thinking maybe even
you were protecting me
when I was just a “twinkle in your eye”
and the crossfire lit the night
and missed you.
You did not know then
that you’d want to protect me
not from some enemy
but from the question,
Did you kill anyone, Dad? Continue reading “Veteran for Peace” →

Prayer from Prison

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Just Peacemaking, Subverting Empire, UncategorizedLeave a comment

marthaReflection by Martha Hennessy
Camden County Jail, Woodbine, Georgia Jail
Kings Bay Plowshares

When they heard this, they raised their voices together in prayer to God. “Sovereign Lord,” they said, “you made the heavens and the earth and the sea, and everything in them. 25 You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David:

“‘Why do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
26 The kings of the earth rise up
and the rulers band together
against the Lord
and against the Lord’s anointed one. (Acts 4: 23-26)

We walked in the dark, stars overhead, with Orion at our shoulder and the waning moon rising late. Praise to you Dear God, for this gift of Eden. There were fire flies and croaking frogs to keep us company. And to think the logic of Trident is the obliteration of Creation. What did God whisper to my ancestors and then to me? Swords into Plowshares! We don’t mean to make everyone furious, but why turn our blood and hammers into spray paint and bolt cutters?* Why continue to set the desecrated altar to the false idols of war? We walked onto a military base that harbors the ultimate destruction, and we prayed for the power of a message, of a witness that could reach many ears; conversion of free will towards life- giving work and away from death dealing false constructs.

We strung up crime scene tape over the model missiles and over the door to the Strategic Weapons Facility Atlantic (SWFLANT), a place where war plans promise to take all we love. We wish to indict this war machine for what it is: immoral, illegal, and monstrous. Our foolish plans desire to see a world in which the suffering is lessened, our leaders begin to know what it means if they pull the nuclear trigger. Our action is an invitation to all for a change of heart that will bring us to true revolution.

*Editor’s note: the charging documents and the Magistrate referred to their possession of bolt cutters and spray paint, but ignored mention of the symbols of blood and hammers, which were used by the seven in their symbolic action.

How Do You Tell the Kids that Grandma Is in Jail for Resisting Nuclear Weapons?

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Just Peacemaking, UncategorizedLeave a comment

H14_Ploughshare-activist-arrest-on-US-submarine-base3By Frida Berrigan. Re-posted from truth-out.org.

“Our grandma is in jail,” Madeline tells a woman wrestling a shopping cart at Target.

“She went over a war fence and tried to make peace,” Seamus adds helpfully. “They arrested her, and she is in jail now.”

“Where?” the woman asks, looking from them to me in disbelief and maybe pity.

“We don’t remember,” the kids say, suddenly done with their story and ready to make passionate pleas for the colorful items in the dollar section over the woman’s shoulder. Continue reading “How Do You Tell the Kids that Grandma Is in Jail for Resisting Nuclear Weapons?” →

Plowshares on King’s Anniversary

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Just Peacemaking, Uncategorized1 Comment

pre-action-photo-King-banner-Plowshares-sign-crop-300x225.jpgFrom Ellen Grady

Seven Catholic plowshares activists were detained early Thursday morning at the Kings Bay Navel Base St. Mary’s Georgia.

They entered on Wednesday nightApril 4. Calling themselves Kings Bay Plowshares, they went to make real the prophet Isaiah’s command: “beat swords into plowshares”. Continue reading “Plowshares on King’s Anniversary” →