Category: Subverting Empire

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

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

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. 

Unwrapped

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Sabbath Economics, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment
St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Washington D.C. (PC: Lindsey Jones-Renaud)

By Tommy Airey, re-posted from his weekly newsletter (12.22.2004)

On the first Christmas day, right after Mary the unwed pregnant teen gave birth to her first child, the Gospel of Luke says that she wrapped him in bands of cloth and laid him in a manger.

Because there was no room in the inn.

On Good Friday, much later in Luke’s story, a rich man named Joseph took down the body of Jesus from the cross, wrapped him in a linen cloth and laid him in a tomb.

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To Advance Our Collective Understanding

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Our friends and comrades at Mennonite Action are offering a great opportunity to learn in community tomorrow night.

Don’t miss Mennonite Action’s next opportunity to be in community together — and to advance our collective understanding of the connections between antisemitism and Christian nationalism.

Join our mass call on Thursday, December 19 at 8 pm ET / 5 pm PT to learn more about the history of antisemitism and the rise of present day antisemitism.

We will be joined by authors, academics, and organizers to discuss how antisemitism is deeply interwoven with the far-right Christian nationalist politics of many of our country’s leaders.

We are excited to welcome the authors of Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism, Shane Burley and Ben Lorber, as well as University of Notre Dame Professor Atalia Omer. These speakers will help us think through how we can stand in solidarity with other members of our communities to push back against rising violence toward the Jewish people.

We hope to see you on our December 19 call to learn more about how we can organize against all manifestations of hate and oppression in our work for liberation in Palestine — and continue our work for the liberation of all of God’s children.

No Matter What the Colonizers Say or Do

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation3 Comments

White Christians and Jewish Americans have been socialized to be scared of images like this. But isn’t this is pretty much what Mary the Palestinian Jewish teen mother of Jesus would have looked like?

In the Gospel of Luke, it says that Mary prayed to a God who brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly. A God who has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty!

Mary was part of the resistance.

As she called on a Power greater than empire, Mary summoned what Palestinians call sumud.  Steadfastness. Standing firm in the face of occupation. Never surrendering their humanity and dignity. No matter what the colonizers say or do.

Here’s to all the courageous young people on college campuses in 2024 who pitched tents and got arrested as they demanded that their campuses divest from companies profiting off of land theft and genocide.

And Every Mountain Brought Low: The Voice in the Wilderness

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By Jim Perkinson, a sermon on Luke 3:1-6 for St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Detroit, MI (December 8, 2024)

So, we’ll begin way out in left field.  The indigenous teacher my wife and I have been frequenting for more than 12 years now—half white, half Native, growing up among the Pueblo folk of northern New Mexico, adopted into, trained by, and living among the Tzutujil Maya of Guatemala for more than 10 years before being sent back to the States to keep their traditions alive as the civil war there was destroying their culture and indigenous ways—wrote a book a few years ago called The Unlikely Peace of Cuchumaqiq: The Parallel Lives of People as Plants: Keeping the Seeds Alive.  In it, he—Martín Prechtel— recounted his experience of the Feb. 4, 1976 earthquake in Guatemala whose 7.6 rumble on the Richter scale killed more than 22,000 people and displaced some 1.2 million. 

Curiously, Prechtel begins that book with stories of Native kids running 15-kilometer races in area high school competitions, through the canyons near the Pueblo, which they almost always won, but refused to win as individuals.  Rather they would wait for each other before crossing the finish line, so only the entire Native group of kids, not an individual, would be crowned winner.  Or not. Running wasn’t about winning.  It was about running.  Being magnificent in your movement.  Interesting, but why begin a book on a mega-earthquake experience by talking about running?  We’ll get to that later.

Continue reading “And Every Mountain Brought Low: The Voice in the Wilderness” →

Quite Literally in our DNA

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire2 Comments

The conclusion of Susan Abulhawa’s epic debate performance at the Oxford Union last week. Please take time to study it in its fullness. Abulhawa is one of Palestine’s most compelling and accomplished novelists.

You will not erase us, no matter how many of us you kill and kill and kill, all day every day. We are not the rocks Chaim Weizmann thought you could clear from the land. We are its very soil. We are her rivers and her trees and her stories, because all of that was nurtured by our bodies and our lives over millennia of continuous, uninterrupted habitation of that patch of earth between the Jordan and Mediterranean waters, from our Canaanite, our Hebrew, our Philistine, and our Phoenician ancestors, to every conqueror or pilgrim who came and went, who married or raped, loved, enslaved, converted between religions, settled or prayed in our land, leaving pieces of themselves in our bodies and our heritage. The fabled, tumultuous stories of that land are quite literally in our DNA. You cannot kill or propagandize that away, no matter what death technology you use or what Hollywood and corporate media arsenals you deploy.

Someday, your impunity and arrogance will end. Palestine will be free; she will be restored to her multi-religious, multi-ethnic pluralistic glory; we will restore and expand the trains that run from Cairo to Gaza to Jerusalem, Haifa, Tripoli, Beirut, Damascus, Amman, Kuwait, Sanaa, and so on; we will put an end to the zionist American war machine of domination, expansion, extraction, pollution, and looting.

…and you will either leave, or you will finally learn to live with others as equals.

The Palestine Exception

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This is a letter signed by hundreds of students and community members in Southeast Michigan demanding that Attorney General Dana Nessel drop the charges she slapped on members of the University of Michigan Gaza Solidarity Encampment. Nessel’s criminalization of protest shamefully seeks to protect U-M’s investments in the genocide of Palestinians—and also reflects Nessel’s personal and financial ties to the Regents themselves, as The Guardian recently reported.

Attorney General Nessel,

We write to demand the immediate dropping of the felony and misdemeanor charges against eleven pro-Palestine protestors associated with the University of Michigan Gaza Solidarity Encampment. These charges are legally absurd, racist, and motivated by political self-interest. As such, they are an unjustified and unprecedented escalation against a movement advocating for divestment from genocide and for Palestinian life and liberation.

Your press release suggests these cases were pursued due to their supposed multijurisdictional nature; however, the charges only involve a single jurisdiction. Your justification is a lie. Further, these charges appear to be motivated by your relationships to the Regents at the University of Michigan, six of whom have donated to your election campaign prior to requesting these horrifying charges against protestors – a clear conflict of interest. If that weren’t enough, your history of anti-Palestinian bias raises serious concerns about your ability to act as a fair arbiter in this situation. You have previously condemned Representative Rashida Tlaib for her pro-Palestinian advocacy, distorting her words to fit your racist narrative. Furthermore, your actions have been praised by sites like Canary Mission, which target and harass pro-Palestinian activists. These facts indicate that the charges are politically motivated rather than grounded in any legitimate legal rationale.

Continue reading “The Palestine Exception” →