Tonight, Christians for a Free Palestine will be hosting a virtual community call at 8pmEST. Register here.
Advent! A coming in the middle of endings! Join CFP witnesses and friends from across the country for a time of biblical reflection, action testimony, and ritual reinforcement to conclude the “season of actions” carried out by Solidarity Circle participants. CFP Solidarity Circles across the land have been organizing their voices and bodies enjoining Chevron to cease its support for the continuing Israel-U.S. genocide against Palestinians. The hour and a half will ramp up with sharp commentary provoked by apocalyptic visioning and counsel in the biblical text. It will feature 1st person reportage from the previous week of hands-on protest against fossil fuel complicity with the Gaza genocide, and conclude with worship honoring both grief and resistance. Come, watch, wait, prepare!
From Dr. Farah Al-Sharif, a scholar of Islamic Intellectual History, re-posted from her Substack.
Not that I want to give it any airtime, but I had not seen any intelligent responses to this so I felt compelled. I had the misfortune of watching a clip in which rabid Islamophobe Bill Maher is having a discussion with supposed “friend” of Palestine
Ana Kasparian wherein he slings the typical gendered imperialist tropes of “where in the Middle East could you wear that dress” to which she shrinks and concedes. She agrees “jihadism” is a problem and makes a whimper about “destabilized” societies.
First of all, no one cares about your dress, Ana. I grew up in more than one Westernized postcolonial Arab city and trust me, your dress would not make anyone bat an eyelid. Even if it did, that does not give anyone license for Israelis/Americans to kill, colonize and pillage innocents as they are currently doing.
It is 2025. A genocide has been committed and you are talking about mini skirts?! Could we drop the obsession with womens’ dress? Gazan women have been sniped for their hijabs and they have been mocked for their lingerie by their genociders. Muslim men have shown more tenderness and honor than that decrepit and racist Bill Maher could ever fathom. Maybe Muslim women don’t need to dress provocatively to make a name for themselves and be heard?
An offering from Red Candle, a new organization encouraging Christians to light a red candle during Advent in solidarity with Palestinian liberation. Click here to sign the pledge. Click here to order prints from Palestinian artists. Click here for resources, including a weekly Advent devotional.
American Palestinian Kendra Savusa reflects on her own experience as a peacemaker through this piece – a red candle burning against a black background. It speaks to the loneliness many Palestinians have felt while witnessing this ongoing genocide, and the isolation many advocates have faced within their own communities. Yet the light continues to shine. This candle symbolizes the hope we find in Christ, whose love drives out every darkness and calls us to keep shining, even when it feels lonely.
🍉 Mon, Dec 1 – Microsoft is perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal occupation, apartheid regime and ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza – which is why Microsoft is also now priority BDS target. Before the Christmas shopping season, take the pledge to boycott Xbox. Invite a person in your life (who plays Xbox!) to join you.
🍉 Tues, Dec 2 – Eat something you consider to be a treat today. Remind yourself that liberation work is sweet and the revolution ends with dancing.
🍉 Sun, Dec 7 – Find the nearest Chevron-linked target near your community on this map. (Note: they are not all gas stations!) Share the story of it with your network this week. Can you imagine a collective action you might participate in together?
🍉 Mon, Dec 8 – Plan a local Boycott Chevron caroling action with friends or family. Not prepared for that stage of action yet? Make a plan to play or share Boycott Chevron carols while hosting people at your house one day in Advent. Plan to discuss what you’ve learned about boycotts with them. (Shout out to our friends at CFP for these awesome caroling action materials!)
🍉 Tues, Dec 9 – Print or adapt these flyers and ask a local community or your favorite local business to pass them out over the Christmas shopping season.
🍉 Sun, Dec 14 – Request with your church’s worship team or leadership that Palestine (not simply “Gaza”) to be added to the prayers of the people on Sunday or Christmas Eve.
🍉 Sun, Dec 21 – Join the Freedom Church of the Poor’s Longest Night service tonight (6p ET / 5p CT / 3p PT; join here) or spend a moment in quiet lament for all who we have lost on the way to liberation.
🍉 Mon, Dec 22 – Eat another treat today. Remind yourself that liberation work is STILL sweet.
🍉 Tues, Dec 23 – Write your Congressperson a Christmas card! (Here’s an example to get you started.)
🍉 Wed, Dec 24 – Name Palestine in your local Christmas Eve service. (Get creative! Submit it in a prayer request form. Wear a keffiyeh to worship. Bring it up in conversation with your pastor, leadership board, or congregation.)
🍉 Thurs, Dec 25 – Begin to organize your community (church, town, business) to become Apartheid Free in 2026.
Today marks the 70th anniversary of forty-two-year-old Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on that Jim Crow bus in Alabama. It was not a spontaneous act. It was not a mid-life crisis either. It was the choreographed move of a community conspiring against a system built and maintained by racial segregation.
Rosa Parks was the spark that lit the 381-day movement wildfire called the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Rosa Parks was not new to the movement. Rosa Parks was true to the movement.
In her early twenties, Rosa Parks courageously stood up to a white man attempting to rape her while she was working as a nanny. “If he wanted to kill me and rape a dead body,” she wrote years later, “he was welcome, but he would have to kill me first.”
In her early thirties, despite blatant efforts to threaten and intimidate her, Rosa Parks launched “The Alabama Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor” to defend a 24-year-old Black mother and sharecropper who was gang-raped by six white boys.
In her early forties, a few months before she refused to give up her seat, Rosa Parks attended a two-week training facilitated by Septima Clark at the Highlander School in Tennessee, one of the only places in the South that dared to host integrated meetings.
Highlander was started during the Great Depression by a white man named Myles Horton, a Union Seminary graduate who sought to multiply democratic leadership through the training of what he called “non-charismatic people.”
Myles Horton used this jargon to challenge the wide-spread belief that a just society would only come about when a well-intentioned, good-looking, smooth-talking alpha male was in charge.
Myles Horton knew that mustard seed revolutions spread through well-organized communities of peers, where everyone has a role, especially soft-spoken seamstresses like Rosa Parks and public-school teachers like Septima Clark, whose father was born into slavery.
Myles Horton knew that transformative leadership does not drip down from on high. It percolates from below.
Gratitude is certainly a great thing—a spiritual practice, a discipline of noticing the gifts we receive. Festivals of gratitude honor the generosity and abundance of the earth and reinforce human interdependence with the more-than-human world. They have the power to restore relationship.
In this country, at this time, what we have as a festival of gratitude is Thanksgiving. How does that land for you? How is this holiday for you?
I know that so many of those reading this email are spiritual deep-divers. I’m wondering if Thanksgiving rings hollow for some of you, if you find yourself longing for something with more authenticity and depth.
After digging into the history of this holiday, I’ve come to think that Thanksgiving is “under occupation.”
From Ailey Jolie, a psychotherapist blending the principles of depth psychology, relational somatics, intersectional feminism, and interpersonal neurobiology. Re-posted from Substack here.
There is a dangerous misunderstanding circulating in the wellness world right now. Nervous system regulation has become a catchphrase; casually tossed into conversations and stamped onto nearly every offering in the self-help space. In every corner of wellness, we are taught that if we breathe deeply enough, ground consistently enough, and meditate just a little longer, we will be able to meet every hard and harsh moment life throws our way with serene neutrality. I want you to know: this isn’t true.
Beneath this false promise lies something far more insidious. In our rush to self-soothe, we risk severing ourselves from something sacred; the body’s instinctive knowing. True somatic work was never intended to make us endlessly calm. It was designed to return us to right relationship; with ourselves, with the world, and with the irreducible wisdom that lives within sensation.
That wisdom does not always whisper ‘be still’. Sometimes, it says this is intolerable. And sometimes, it demands that we rise.
Another compelling offering from The Alternative Seminary.
Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart is a minister, professor, and movement strategist. Naomi has worked as a faith organizer and director for POWER Interfaith, the National LGBTQ Task Force, and the Mayor’s Office of Public Engagement in the city of Philadelphia. She teaches emerging scholars of religion and theology at Villanova University, Arcadia University, and Harvard School of Divinity. Registration is required. You can register here.
The deadline for registration is November 25.
If you have any questions, please contact Will O’Brien at willobrien59@gmail.com or 267-339-8989. The Alternative Seminary is a program of biblical and theological study and reflection designed to foster an authentic biblical witness in the modern world.
A really compelling online offering from Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center for 2026.
Apocalyptic Reading Group
First Sundays of every month from 4-5:30pm ET/1-2:30pm PT
Apocalypse means “revelation.” Certainly we are living through apocalyptic times, but what exactly is being revealed?
If the systems of US empire are collapsing, and it seems they are, what will we build in the gaps that empire leaves behind? How will we avoid replicating harmful ways, when those are all many of us have known?
With this book discussion series, we’ll look for wisdom in books. Chosen in conversation with folks whose lives they’ve changed, these books have the power to upend our assumptions, spark our imaginations, and point us toward possible liberatory futures.
These will not be solely intellectual conversations. We’ll weave in grounding moments, personal sharing (always optional!), and inspiration from a variety of sources to keep us encouraged.
We will meet the first Sunday of each month from 4-5:30pm ET/ 1-2:30 PT. Because these are rich, sometimes demanding books, there is no expectation that you will attend all sessions. That would be a lot of reading! We suggest you look through the list, pick the titles that are most interesting to you, mark your calendars, order the books now, and start reading! Please consider purchasing books from an independent bookstore, possibly our own online Book Nest! Every purchase made there contributes a small amount to Kirkridge.
In my forthcoming book on child lynchings, I argue that white communities routinely externalized their own intra-familial sexual vulnerabilities by imagining Black male sexuality as the primary danger to white girlhood, even as instances of incest and child abuse within white families were widespread and often unaddressed. The spectacle of lynching thus became a ritual performance of racial purification and an attempt to stabilize white domestic order by violently policing an invented threat while refusing to confront the pedophilia, incest, and rape occurring within white homes.
In this sense, the period’s child-protection reforms and racial terror were mutually reinforcing as both served to preserve white reproductive futures, fortify racial boundaries, and obscure the extent to which the true crisis of pedophilia was rooted not in Black communities but within white patriarchal households themselves.
Mandatory reporting laws, introduced in the 1960s, were the first attempt to treat child abuse systematically, but even these were born from medical rather than child-centered frameworks. Sexual abuse was added almost incidentally and remained inconsistently enforced for decades.
Institutions, from the Catholic Church to the Boy Scouts, responded to allegations of abuse by protecting predatorsand silencing victims. Elite men benefitted from networks of judges, bishops, lawyers, donors, and editors who saw institutional reputation as more valuable than children’s lives. Media organizations, universities, athletic programs, and political parties have followed the same pattern: delay, deny, discredit, and disappear the victims. These patterns did not occur accidentally. They are the logical extension of centuries-old norms that viewed children, especially nonwhite children, as expendable, and elite white men as pillars of national stability.
The American project has long depended on believing that powerful white men must not fall, because their fall would expose the fragility of the entire system. This is why every revelation about Trump’s involvement with Epstein feels anticlimactic, even predictable.
And Trump keeps surviving because his profile matches the oldest protected category in American life: the powerful white man whose predation must never destabilize the nation’s myth of itself. Until this country confronts the historical foundations of that protection, from the colonial household to the modern political machine, every “new” revelation will feel like déjà vu.
We are not learning anything new about Donald J. Trump. We are learning, again, what America has always chosen to be. A nation that does not simply fail children, a nation that fundamentally hates children.
Radical Discipleship 