In 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)
—————–
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.
——————
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”
Category: Subverting Empire
Reflections on the Close of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation
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.
Continue reading “Reflections on the Close of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation”
From Vern’s Empire Subverting Library
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
———–
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).
Continue reading “From Vern’s Empire Subverting Library”
The Fellowship of Heretics
We are a community of faith, rooted in justice and peacemaking, guided by the Holy Spirit to express God’s unbiased love for all of creation by providing a Christian framework for social righteousness in the Southeast.
The statement of purpose written by the Mercy Junction community
Compelling Christian community is percolating down South in Chattanooga at the Mercy Junction Justice & Peace Center. They are recruiting 100 radical disciples by September 1 for their Fellowship of Heretics. See details below copied from their Facebook Events Page.
—————
The “Fellowship of Heretics” is a community of good-hearted rabble-rousers, rebels, malcontents, radicals and other cool people supporting the Justice and Peace Center by being card-carrying heretics. This is our first membership drive for the “Fellowship of Heretics” and we’re aiming to grow the Fellowship to 100 members by Sept. 1. Continue reading “The Fellowship of Heretics”
Repentance & Resistance
Ched Myers (right, at La Posada Sin Fronteras in December 2013) on the importance of repentance and resistance in the lives of radical Christian disciples–from Binding The Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (1988).
Repentance is not only the conversion of the heart, but a concrete process of turning away from empire, its distractions and seductions, its hubris and iniquity.
Resistance is shaking off the powerful sedation of a society that rewards ignorance and trivializes everything political, in order to discern and take concrete stands in our historical moment, and to find meaningful ways to impede imperial progress.
A Post Evangelical Pilgrimage, Part III
John Main
*This is the final post in a three-part series exploring more compelling ways to follow Jesus.
During the summer of 2013, Lindsay and I took a 75-day, 12,000-mile road trip. We simply wanted to meet people whose lives of faith were compelling. We wanted to get a taste test of what some might call “Movement Christianity” or “Radical Discipleship” (radical in Latin means “roots”), a particular strand of faith and action that goes all the way back to the roots of Judeo-Christian faith: Moses’ contemplative meeting with the Divine at the burning bush and his ensuing confrontation with the beastly bastards of Egyptian Empire, calling the underdogs out of enslavement and into a whole new Way of being.
Continue reading “A Post Evangelical Pilgrimage, Part III”
Kansas City Here We Come: The Pink Mennos Dis-Cover Diversity
To achieve healing and hope for the Mennonite Church through the inclusion and welcome of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) individuals and their supporters.
Pink Menno Vision Statement
Originally posted on the Pink Menno website:
At the Mennonite Church USA (MCUSA) bi-annual convention (in Kansas City, MO), Pink Menno will convene a symposium focused on intersectionality. “On the Way: Dis-Covering Diversity” will be held in Pink Menno’s hospitality space in Room 2504B of the convention center, right around the corner from the Grand Ballroom on Level 2.
Continue reading “Kansas City Here We Come: The Pink Mennos Dis-Cover Diversity”
When Nonviolence Is Preached
From TA-NEHISI COATES:
When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is “correct” or “wise,” any more than a forest fire can be “correct” or “wise.” Wisdom isn’t the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the community.
81 Years Later: The Barmen Declaration
We reject the false doctrine that the Church could have permission to hand over the form of its message and of its order to whatever it itself might wish or to the vicissitudes of the prevailing ideological and political convictions of the day.
An Excerpt from the Barmen Declaration, May 29-31, 1934
This weekend, we celebrate the anniversary of the birth of the “confessing church” in Germany, standing up against the idolatry of the State. This is a nice summary from the United Church of Christ “beliefs” page:
The Barmen Declaration, 1934, was a call to resistance against the theological claims of the Nazi state. Almost immediately after Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, Protestant Christians faced pressure to “aryanize” the Church, expel Jewish Christians from the ordained ministry and adopt the Nazi “Führer Principle” as the organizing principle of church government. In general, the churches succumbed to these pressures, and some Christians embraced them willingly. The pro-Nazi “German Christian” movement became a force in the church. They glorified Adolf Hitler as a “German prophet” and preached that racial consciousness was a source of revelation alongside the Bible. But many Christians in Germany—including Lutheran and Reformed, liberal and neo-orthodox—opposed the encroachment of Nazi ideology on the Church’s proclamation. At Barmen, this emerging “Confessing Church” adopted a declaration drafted by Reformed theologian Karl Barth (above photo) and Lutheran theologian Hans Asmussen, which expressly repudiated the claim that other powers apart from Christ could be sources of God’s revelation. Not all Christians courageously resisted the regime, but many who did—like the Protestant pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Roman Catholic priest Bernhard Lichtenberg—were arrested and executed in concentration camps. The spirituality of the Barmen Declaration profoundly influenced many of the first generation of pastors and laypeople who formed the United Church of Christ in 1957
Unmothered & In Halves: From The Center of Babaylan Studies Conference
*This post is excerpted from a longer piece entitled “Lamuwan Kata: Experiencing Loob at CfBS Conference,” written in the aftermath of The Center of Babaylan Studies Conference, last weekend.
Lamuwan kata means “we are one.” It speaks of the relational connectivity that ties a tribe, a community, a people together. It spoke volumes to me this past weekend at the Center of Babaylan Studies Conference held in Glouster, Ohio, a very small, almost hidden town on the outskirts of Columbus. I came to the conference seeking guidance, hoping to quell a heavy, unmothered heart that burdened me since youth. And I say “unmothered” in so many ways: unmothered by my biological mother who abandoned me a few months after I was born; unmothered by the country I grew up in, America, as if I were an outsider, a pariah, in the city that raised me with its unloving arms; and unmothered by diaspora–unmothered because the land that gave birth to my ancestors was colonized and enslaved, and the caprices of history flung its children to the farthest corners of the earth.
Continue reading “Unmothered & In Halves: From The Center of Babaylan Studies Conference”
Radical Discipleship 