Category: Subverting Empire

Between The World & Me: A Review

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Coates BetweenBy Tommy Airey

The mettle that it takes to look away from the horror of our prison system, from police forces transformed into armies, from the long war against the black body, is not forged overnight. This is the practiced habit of jabbing out one’s eyes and forgetting the work of one’s hands. To acknowledge these horrors means turning away from the brightly rendered version of your country as it has always declared itself and turning toward something murkier and unknown.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between The World & Me (2015)

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a national correspondent for the The Atlantic, received numerous awards last year for his ground-breaking cover story, “The Case for Reparations.” His much-anticipated Between The World & Me is a 152-page letter to his 15-year old son in the grievous aftermath of the Michael Brown non-indictment.
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The Source of Joy Can Change

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Carol AdamsThis is the last question and answer of James Wilt’s interview with Carol Adams, the author of the vegetarian and feminist classic The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990) in the current issue of Geez Magazine:

You make it clear in Sexual Politics that you’re a cultural worker, not an academic. You’ve been involved in advocating for and helping battered women and involved in animal rights for many decades. What keeps you grounded, from getting depressed, or anxious, or saying it’s not worth it in the end?

There’s a quote from Susan B. Anthony about how she always had great company. She wasn’t doing it alone. Václav Havel said we have to do what we’re doing to change the world not because we know that we’ll prevail, but because it’s the right thing to do. We can’t measure success by some sort of end goal. We have to simply subsume ourselves in the process of it. I think that ties into an ecofeminist philosophy.
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Taking the First Step: Addiction, Ecology & Recovery

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SNGBy Rev. Solveig Nilsen-Goodin of the Wilderness Way Community in Portland, a team of Jesus-followers committed to “discovering wisdom for our time, healing for ourselves and our planet, and the power of untamable (resurrection!) life!” She and her partner Peter are also active participants with Eco Faith Recovery, a growing network of faith-based people and institutions within the Christian tradition, waking up to the enormity of the ecological-economic-spiritual crisis before us. Their children, Soren & Stig, recently interrupted our dinner conversation with chants of “We hate coal! We hate coal!” (above: the Nilsen-Goodin family)
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The profound ecological degradation we are currently witnessing and the rise of addictive behaviors such as alcoholism and drug addiction are two sides of the same coin.
Albert LaChance

Waking up to the developing global ecological crisis is like moving from being a child in an alcoholic family to growing up and going into recovery.
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Ratzlaff Reviews: How to Read the Bible and Still be a Christian

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VernThe heart of God’s justice is to make sure that the “weak and the orphan” have received their share of God’s resources for them to live and thrive. Retributive justice comes in only when that ideal is violated.
John Dominic Crossan, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian: Struggling with Divine Violence from Genesis Through Revelation (2015)
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The legendary Vern Ratzlaff (above), Canadian Mennonite pastor and professor, was sporting his 5-inch beard long before practically every American white guy under 35 started growing theirs. Vern is spending free time at his outpost in Saskatoon reading dense anti-imperial theology and writing concise summaries for the rest of us. Here is a recent submission on John Dominic Crossan’s latest publication: How to Read the Bible and Still be a Christian: Struggling with Divine Violence from Genesis Through Revelation (2015, Harper Collins)
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Do we have to deal with a bipolar G-d, a G-d of vengeance and retribution in the Old Testament and a G-d of mercy and love and rehabilitation in the New Testament? A violent G-d and a non-violent Jesus? Crossan develops a way to deal with this conundrum. He takes seriously the full sweep of biblical data. For example, the Year of Jubilee, Leviticus 25, spells out that the land belongs to G-d and every fiftieth year was to be a Jubilee, a year of liberation, redemption and restoration. But if this was the understanding of land tenure, why is there so little mention of it in later texts? Eg Isaiah 5:8 is a diatribe against expansion of real estate ownership. Why the move from divine decree to mere suggestion? Continue reading “Ratzlaff Reviews: How to Read the Bible and Still be a Christian” →

80 Years Later: War Is A Racket

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SmedleyAn excerpt from a speech given in the 30s by retired U.S. Marine Corps General Smedley D. Butler, published later in 1935. A classic:

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

White Supremacy: The Air We Breathe

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An alley just off 23rd & Butternut in Detroit.
An alley just off 23rd & Butternut in Detroit.

By Tommy Airey
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The Confederacy is a southern thing, but white supremacy is not.
Bree Newsome

Economist Paul Krugman came out with a piece last week in The New York Times lambasting the South for its ongoing racist drama, while proclaiming “we really have become much less racist, and in general a much more tolerant society on many fronts.”

He scaffolded his arguments with two key economic studies: one that studied the massive white working class exodus away from the Democratic Party in the 70s and 80s (the Southern Strategy) and another that pegged the downsizing of the U.S. welfare state to racial discrimination. Krugman argues that, unfortunately, these forces are still very powerful in the U.S., beckoning readers to take a quick glance at the states that have denied Medicaid expansion to its residents. Surprise, surprise: almost of them are in the South.
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The Good News on Masculinity: There is Another Way

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jim harbaughIn patriarchal culture males are not allowed simply to be who they are and to glory in their unique identity. Their value is always determined by what they do. In an anti-patriarchal culture males do not have to prove their value and worth. They know from birth that simply being gives them value, the right to be cherished and loved.
bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (2004)
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Lydia Wylie-Kellermann and Tommy Airey, co-editors of RadicalDiscipleship.Net & “backdoor neighbors” in Detroit, are both white and both come up solid INFJs on the Myers-Briggs personality test. When it comes to the Enneagram, Lydia is a 2 with a 3 wing. Tommy is a 3 with a 2 wing. But the similarities may end there. Lydia grew up in Detroit, is in a traditional same-sex marriage, the mother of a 2-year-old, a disciple of the Harry Potter series, an avid gardener and knitter. Tommy grew up in suburban Southern California, is scandalously married to a former student, an avid distance runner and starts every morning sipping on home-roasted coffee, journaling and reading the sports page and academic theology. Below is the transcript of an eDialogue we recently had on the current state of North American masculinity.
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TA: I’m not sure if you are familiar with Jim Harbaugh (photo above: in a recent game of shirts and skins). He might be the most popular white guy in Michigan right now. The University of Michigan recently signed him to a $7 million per year contract to be their football coach. He’s coaching football clinics all over North America to try to recruit the best players to play in your native Michigan. I came across this quote last week: Continue reading “The Good News on Masculinity: There is Another Way” →

Reflections on the Close of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation

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Jingle dress dancers at the Heart Gardens Ceremony, Rideau Hall, Ottawa, Canada. June 3, 2015
Jingle dress dancers at the Heart Gardens Ceremony, Rideau Hall, Ottawa, Canada. June 3, 2015
By Jennifer Henry

I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.
Mary Oliver

Now, almost a month away from the closing ceremonies of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), there are two images I can’t get out of my mind. One is a word picture painted by Commissioner Marie Wilson who asked those pressed into rooms to hear the findings of the TRC to think of “graveyards where there should have been playgrounds.” She was speaking of the 6000 estimated deaths at residential schools (odds of dying almost identical to those of Canadians serving in World War II) and the dehumanization of unmarked graves and families who still do not know what happened to their child. She was speaking of the 150,000 children whose childhood was robbed when they were forcibly removed from their families, subjected to neglect and child labour, denied their language and culture, taught they were inferior, and, in many cases, abused by the people who were charged with their care. It is an image that should have made every Canadian hold their breath. Children not allowed to be children. Children who never made it home.
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From Vern’s Empire Subverting Library

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vern ratzlaff
Since September 11, 2001, however, we can no longer rest comfortably with such domesticated pictures of Jesus. We can no longer ignore the impact of Western imperialism on subordinated peoples and the ways in which peoples whose lives have been invaded sometimes react. The “coincidental” historical analogy is too disquieting, that is, that the Roman Empire had come to control the ancient Middle East, including Galilee and Judea, where Jesus operated.
Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder
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The legendary Vern Ratzlaff (above), Canadian Mennonite pastor and professor, was sporting his 5-inch beard long before practically every American white guy under 35 started growing theirs. Vern is spending free time at his outpost in Saskatoon reading dense anti-imperial theology and writing concise summaries for the rest of us. Here is a recent submission on an earlier work of Richard Horsley’s entitled Jesus and the Spiral of Violence (1993)–more important than ever:

Horsley summarizes the political and social times of Jesus and Jesus’ reactions to these, especially the role of violence in Palestine during Jesus’ time. The reality of violence extends well beyond the direct, personal and physical; there is also psychological or spiritual violence, acts that impair other persons’ dignity or integrity…. To make (people) live on a subhuman level against their will, to constrain them in such a way that they have no hope of escaping their condition, is an unjust exercise of force (p 21,22).
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