Category: Subverting Empire

Confronting Legion

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation5 Comments

DemoniacBy Ched Myers, Fifth Sunday of Pentecost, Luke 8:26-39

Note: This is part of a series of weekly comments on the Lukan gospel readings from the Revised Common Lectionary during year C, 2016.

This Sunday’s text is Luke’s version of the infamous Markan “political cartoon” of the Gerasene Demoniac (Mk 5:1-20). Here Luke follows Mark relatively closely (whereas Matthew changes and shortens it significantly, Mt 28-34), including placing it on the heels of Jesus’ crossing and storm-stilling on the Sea of Galilee (which Luke insists on calling a “lake”). Continue reading “Confronting Legion” →

The Price of Political Ambivalence

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire3 Comments

water shut offsBy Tommy Airey

When I see an act of evil, I’m not accommodated. I don’t accommodate myself to the violence that goes on everywhere; I’m still surprised. That’s why I’m against it, why I can hope against it. We must learn how to be surprised. Not to adjust ourselves. I am the most maladjusted person in society.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

Detroit, Michigan

Last month, water shut-offs were ramped up for residents of this city two months behind on their bills. Tens of thousands already live in homes that do not have running water. Leaders of the city make claims that both payment plans and cash assistance are available for those who cannot afford water. Unfortunately, a vast majority of people take them at their word. Continue reading “The Price of Political Ambivalence” →

I Will Not Serve As An Empire Chaplain

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

AntalFrom former U.S. Army Reserve Chaplain Captain Chris Antal, who spent time based in Afghanistan. In April, he wrote an open letter to President Obama detailing his reasons for leaving the U.S. Army Reserves, citing his opposition to the administration’s use of drone strikes, its policy on nuclear proliferation, and what he calls the executive branch’s claim of “extraconstitutional authority and impunity for international law.” Continue reading “I Will Not Serve As An Empire Chaplain” →

Bodies in the Street

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Feminist/Womanist/Queer Liberation and Theology, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

SekouFrom Rev.Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou in an interview with sankofa.org:

The question I ask myself is ‘what does social justice as a spiritual discipline look like?’ Part of it looks like the way in which we do not become our oppressors. We do not take on their attributes. That we ‘envy not their ways.’ So I don’t want to tear gas children. I don’t want to lock up a generation. I don’t want to be part of an institution that has close to a thousand bases around the world, extracting natural resources, disciplining and punishing bodies and policing knowledge. I don’t want to do that. So for me, non-violence is part of that practice. It is not becoming them. Then we can sustain this movement… Continue reading “Bodies in the Street” →

I Have Nothing to Lose

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Cloud of Witnesses, Subverting Empire1 Comment

MuhammadFrom Muhammad Ali (1942-2016), at a fair housing rally in his hometown Louisville, KY:

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality…. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.

Some Much Needed Good News

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Church
Photo: Michael Smith

By Tommy Airey

The Gospel is the proclamation and conviction that there is a Force of good that governs the universe, a Power of Love imminently saturating everything, yet bigger than that too: beyond space and time, deep into a future, animated with hope. It woos, beckons and compels people to join in on a mission that bends everything towards justice, that prefigures that hopeful future into the now. Continue reading “Some Much Needed Good News” →

Confronting Neoliberalism

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire1 Comment

George MonbiotAn excerpt from George Monbiot’s recent piece “Neoliberalism–The Ideology at the Root of All our Problems” in The Guardian:

So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power. Continue reading “Confronting Neoliberalism” →

Guerrilla Gardening

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment
Luke
Luke Mattson, Guerrilla Gardener of Southwest Detroit

From Adbusters:

This week we’re calling for a massive worldwide reclaiming of urban space . . . for all you activists with a green thumb to join the global movement of guerrilla gardeners, silent revolutionaries who take to the streets in the dead of night to beautify, utilize and experience a thrill. Continue reading “Guerrilla Gardening” →

A New Poor People’s Campaign

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PPCAn excerpt from an conversation curated by Tim Shenk, a co-organizer of The Poor People’s Campaign (a ten-day tour of the Midwest from May 17-26) who interviewed John Wessel-McCoy, a Poor People’s Campaign Program Organizer for the Kairos Center, and Willie Baptist, Poverty Initiative Scholar-in-Residence and Co-Coordinator of Poverty Scholarship and Leadership Development for the Kairos Center, about the strategic importance of the Midwest in building a movement to end poverty. Continue reading “A New Poor People’s Campaign” →

Resisting Exotic Problems

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barnard2An excerpt from Courtney Martin’s essay “Western do-gooders need to resist the allure of ‘exotic problems'” in The Guardian:

It’s intimidating to throw yourself into solving problems that you’ve grown up with and around. Most American kids, unless they’ve been raised in a highly sheltered environment, have some sense of how multifaceted problems like mass incarceration really are. Choosing to work on that issue (one that many countries in the global south handle far better than we do) means choosing to nurture a deep, motivating horror at what this country is doing through a long and humble journey of learning. It means studying sentencing reform. The privatisation of prisons. Cutting-edge approaches, like restorative justice and rehabilitation. And then synthesising, from all that studying, the direction a solution lies in and steadfastly moving toward it.

The activists, entrepreneurs, advocates, designers, and organisers that I admire most these days are up for that kind of investment. They seem to lean in to systemic complexity with a kind of idealistic sobriety. They are people working on the least “sexy” issues imaginable: ending homelessness, giving more people access to credit, making governments work better.