Category: Subverting Empire

Declining Empire

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By Dr. Shea Howell, re-posted from the Boggs Center (above)

Relationships around the globe are shifting rapidly. These shifts are not because of Donald Trump.  Although his policies are likely to make things worse for everyone, the reality is that the American Empire is declining.  All the bluster over tariffs  and territorial expansion from Greenland to Gaza will not restore it. The ability of the U.S.A. to dominate others has been diminished by economic and political realities far beyond this current administration.  Whatever moral influence we represented was lost long ago. The cruel ending of humanitarian aid is the latest act of a country that has given up all sense of compassion.

The US Empire emerged out of the devastation of WWII. With the industries of Europe and Japan destroyed, US manufacturing, strengthened by war, dominated the production of consumer goods. People drove US cars, listened to US radios, watched US TVs, depended on US refrigerators, washing machines, lamps and gadgets of all sorts. Movies made in the USA entertained audiences everywhere. But gradually, industries in Europe and Japan rebuilt. And more importantly, manufacturing industries left the USA. Following the logic of capitalist production, companies pursued lower wages and weak environmental controls. And nations began to organize in their own interests.

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White Supremacy’s Epigenetic Survival Response

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By Dr. Stacey Patton, re-posted from social media with permission. Dr. Patton is research associate professor at Morgan State University and teaches journalism at Howard University. She is posting these brilliant Black History Month mini-lectures on her Facebook account. Follow her here.

Black History Month 2025 Mini-Lecture #3

I really need Y’all to stop getting upset over the dismantling of DEI initiatives. I need Y’all to shift your thinking about what’s really behind the backlash.

The dismantling isn’t just a political move. Hold your drink . . . The dismantling of DEI is a BIOLOGICAL, EPIGENETICALLY-DRIVEN response to a perceived existential threat among conservatives and rabid white supremacists. This is why DEI isn’t just being resisted, it’s being attacked with a SURVIVAL-LEVEL intensity.

First, let’s start with Donald Trump, how he embodies this moment, and why the MAJORITY of white people in America voted for him.

Trump is the living embodiment of white supremacy’s epigenetic survival response. He is a man whose every action reflects the deep, inherited panic of a system that senses its own decline. His obsession with dominance, his pathological need for control, his paranoia about “replacement,” and his compulsive, irrational aggression are not just deviant personality traits. No, they are the INSTINCTIVE BEHAVIORS of a power structure in BIOLOGICAL DISTRESS.

Let the church say, BIOLOGICAL DISTRESS.

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The Bipartisan Imperialism that led to this Moment

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By Rev. Redeem G. Robinson (above), re-posted with permission from his Substack newsletter. Read more about his work at holytrouble.com.

Donald Trump has openly declared that the U.S. will take over Gaza, a proposal that amounts to nothing short of ethnic cleansing. Yet, rather than directing their outrage at the bipartisan imperialism that led to this moment, many Democrats have instead chosen to lash out at Jill Stein and third-party voters on social media. Their response is not a condemnation of Trump’s genocidal plans, nor is it an admission of how the Biden administration or previous administrations paved the way for this atrocity. Instead, their first reaction is a smug “We told you Trump was worse.”

This is the defining feature of neoliberal politics: a refusal to take responsibility for their complicity in imperialism, and then guilt those who refuse to “fall in line.” But let’s be real—Trump’s plan to take over Gaza didn’t just pop up out of no where. It is an extension of the genocidal policies already in place under Biden, who has armed Israel as it massacres hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. To act as though Trump’s rhetoric is some shocking departure from the status quo is pure gaslighting.

For months, the Biden administration has supplied Israel with weapons, and unwavering support as it bombs Gaza to clear it out for “development.” The U.S. vetoed multiple ceasefire resolutions, ensured that humanitarian aid was blocked or delayed, and rewarded Netanyahu’s war crimes with more military funding and even welcomed him with applause in Congress. Even as videos of starving children, children with missing limbs, and mass graves circulated globally, Biden stood firm in his defense of Israel’s so-called right to defend itself. Kamala Harris’ pathetic attempt to call for “pauses” in the genocide while continuing to arm the perpetrators should be a clear indication that this administration has never cared about Palestinian lives. Also, let’s not act like we forgot that the Palestinian voices were blocked and excluded at the Democratic National Convention. 

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Kirkridge Retreats for 2025

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Kirkridge Retreat Center in PA is offering a compelling line-up of retreats in 2025.

Dear Radical Discipleship community,

I wanted to reach out to this beloved circle to let you know about retreats that are happening at Kirkridge Retreat Center in 2025. We would love to have you here at some point this year.

You can also see our full list of retreats here: https://kirkridge.org/retreat-programs/

Grateful for you all,

Lydia Wylie-Kellermann

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Spiritual Genius

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The opening paragraphs of “Communities of Care and Concern” by Rev. Dr. Nick Peterson, an assistant professor of Homiletics and Worship at Christian Theological Seminary in Indy. As a practical theologian, Nick interrogates how intentional and unintentional practices shape Christian identities and configure worldviews. Click on The Political Theology Network here to read it in its entirety.

Oppression overwhelms. Its incessant dehumanizing and dishonoring practices work together to undermine human dignity and quench the spark of hope that dreams of otherwise possibilities. Surviving and overcoming oppression require what Mother Ruby Sales has coined “spiritual genius.” This genius represents a determined refusal to surrender one’s value and worth to the deformed imagination of the oppressor.

Sales describes this genius as conscience-making work, where the fundamental narratives that make life meaningful affirm self-love without requiring hatred of others. For Sales, spiritual genius requires intimacy with the Creator and the ability to never let hate take root in the heart.

Similarly, Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday is on the 15th,  said in his final book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?,

“The worth of an individual does not lie in the measure of [their] intellect, [their] racial origin or [their] social position. Human worth lies in relatedness to God.”

The ultimate problem with oppression is its intention to profane – to render the oppressed beyond divine relationality – to violently desacralize the human subject.

Click here to keep reading.

Running in Circles on Racial Justice

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By Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler, Senior Advisor, The Fellowship of Reconciliation USA

We keep running in circles when it comes to addressing racial justice in the US. This means that with every advance we almost come back to the same place and must fight the battles all over again. It doesn’t mean that progress has not been made, but the progress retrogresses due to the immediate backlash that charges any advance to rectify past racial injustices as an affront to white people. At best there is an ebb and flow when it comes to rectifying the racial harms and damages of the past. Race history and the many initiatives to rectify past wrongs is more of a circle than a linear line. It may be an expanding circle considering advances, but for every victory won there is a vicious throw back. It is almost like the 1993 movie “Groundhog Day” where morning after morning we awaken to histories repeating itself, and where victories of racial justice are swept away by the courts or a change in the body politics. The struggle continues, and in many cases, we must begin again. 

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Collapse of the Veneer

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An excerpt from Chris Hedges’ piece “How Fascism Came.”

President-elect Donald Trump does not herald the advent of fascism. He heralds the collapse of the veneer that masked the corruption within the ruling class and their pretense of democracy. He is the symptom, not the disease. The loss of basic democratic norms began long before Trump, which paved the road to an American totalitarianism. Deindustrialization, deregulation, austerity, unchecked predatory corporations, including the health-care industry, wholesale surveillance of every American, social inequality, an electoral system that is plagued by legalized bribery, endless and futile wars, the largest prison population in the world, but most of all feelings of betrayal, stagnation and despair, are a toxic brew that culminate in an inchoate hatred of the ruling class and the institutions they have deformed to exclusively serve the rich and the powerful. The Democrats are as guilty as the Republicans.

Sanctuary Medicine

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Check out this compelling offering from March 31 to April 4, 2025 from our comrades at Dreaming Stone.

The Sanctuary Medicine training offers skills and strategies for mitigating harm and building a more healthy and just future, fortifying our relationships, growing our capacity, and building our readiness to care for one another.

Sanctuary Medicine flows from a spiritual, emotional, physical vision of care for individuals and communities in crisis resulting from increased vulnerability. In a world shattered by climate change, racial capitalism and failing democracy, devastating storms and fires, growing unhoused populations, and growing numbers of people targeted by dehumanizing state policies, such as migrants and trans people, Sanctuary Medicine recognizes that church buildings and other community spaces of refuge are still places of first response, and creates a framework of care that includes preparedness, emergency medicine, spiritual and emotional support, and liturgical community care and mutual aid in the face of trauma.

Sanctuary medicine imagines communities of care and refuge, prepared for and able to respond to disasters and community trauma, increasing resilience, relationship and solidarity. Participants will receive training in:

  • Field medicine focusing on specific rising needs of vulnerable community members including chronic wound care, weather exposure, stop-the-bleed instruction and chronic conditions faced by those who do not have access to medical support. Trainers include certified EMT’s and WFR’s with extensive street medic experience.
  • Emotional and spiritual support for crisis care by disaster first responders, street chaplains and mental health professionals.
  • Preparedness practices, including creating community specific plans and supplies as well as organizing community medicine gardens and mutual aid that centers the most vulnerable.
  • Liturgical and ritual response and care to allow for long term processes of grief, justice building and cultural transformation.
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The Spilled Guts of What My Language Has Become

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The opening of a recently published essay called “Notes to Gaza’s Beloved Dead” by Palestinian-American poet George Abraham. Click here to read the entire essay at Atmos.

A promise to our dead and (briefly, necessarily, though not consensually) resurrected: I am searching for a form through which my words might be capable of, one day, holding you. I will not make you object or spectacle. This world is already super-saturated with your viscera, and so, the only way I know to write to you is not with words but with the spilled guts of what my language has become. I cannot focus on anything but you these days. The world is spiraling onwards, intent on burying you, unmourned. The ruling class are reaching for an unmournable world through your bodies. But even in my inability to turn away, my looking itself becomes a violence. As you become content, become news and feed, my looking becomes a unit of capital from which corporations profit. I am hoping, instead, to wander with, and not from, you. To you, and to the living who commit themselves to you, I am responsible. To you, I owe what little life I have left to give.