Category: Subverting Empire
Good Friday in Detroit: It’s a Sad Day
Today, the Detroit Peace Community walked the Stations of the Cross through the city as it does each year, led by the question: Where is Jesus being crucified in this time and place? Were a station written to represent each injustice that has Detroit in its grip at this moment, we would be walking for weeks rather than a mere three hours on Good Friday afternoon.
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Siouxper Man & Siouxper Woman
From Steven Paul Judd, Kiowa and Choctaw artist: “I just want to make cool stuff for Indians to have, and that gets white people to think. I want to make the stuff I never got to see as a kid.”
Back from the Crocodile’s Belly: Philippine Babaylan Studies and the Struggle for Indigenous Memory
S. Lily Mendoza is a native of San Fernando, Pampanga in Central Luzon, Philippines. Lily is especially known in the Philippines and beyond for her pathbreaking work on indigenization and indigenous studies. She is a scholar and associate professor of Culture and Communication at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan.
RD: What is the crocodile’s belly? Where does the title come from?
LM: I don’t know if I should even dare tell you what our original title was. But it was Towards a Postcolonial Indigeneity: Babaylanism as Critical Pedagogy for Diasporic Struggles (laughter). Continue reading “Back from the Crocodile’s Belly: Philippine Babaylan Studies and the Struggle for Indigenous Memory”
The Movement For God’s Beloved Community
Today, we honor those nonviolent freedom fighters who sparked the sit-in movement at lunch counters exactly 55 years ago. It is also the 50th anniversary of the first mass arrests in Selma–Dr. King and more than a thousand demonstrators, including more than 500 children were jailed on February 1, 1965 (many these same children prayed for Sheriff Clark’s speedy recovery from exhaustion outside a hospital days later). Lastly, we celebrate the 60th birthday of Ched Myers, a man who has committed his life to the legacy of Jesus & Martin Luther King. This is an excerpt from an article he published 10 years ago in Transmission (U.K) titled “Was Jesus a Practitioner of Nonviolence? Reading through Mark 1:21-3:19 and Martin Luther King”, an appropriate piece of vision-casting for all of us who dare to resist like it’s 1960 Greensboro & 1965 Selma:
At the end of their lives, Jesus and King were each hemmed in by all the factions of their respective political terrains. They had to navigate death threats from without, dissent from within their own movements, and had as colleagues only a relatively tiny group of feckless companions. But that is how it always is struggling for the Kingdom of God in a world held hostage by tyrants, terrorists, militarists, and kingpins, unaided by ambivalent religious leaders and insular academics and utterly distracted young folks. Despite all this, however, both Jesus and King chose nonviolent love without compromising their insistence upon justice. They believed that the movement for God’s Beloved Community was worth giving their lives to—and they invite us to do the same.
Breakin’ Down Messianism With Dr. Jim Perkinson
Jim Perkinson is a long-time activist and educator from inner city Detroit, where he has a history of involvement in various community development initiatives and low-income housing projects. He holds a PhD in theology from the University of Chicago and is in demand as a speaker on a wide variety of topics (especially race, class & colonialism). He is also a recognized artist on the spoken-word poetry scene in the inner city. Many of his works are published. In this interview, we home in on his 2014 work Messianism Against Christology: Resistance Movements, Folk Arts and Empire.
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RD: What’s the difference between “messianism” and “christology?”
J-Perk: Messianism Against Christology: Resistance Movements, Folk Arts and Empire is a work committed to re-thinking the Christian tradition from the point of view of social movements rather than magnified individuals. Jesus was a movement man—as were Moses and Elijah before him, and John the Baptist alongside him. “Messianism” is a word drafted into service as a movement term. Rather than focus on a great individual called “Jesus” comprehended as “the Christ,” the book examines his effort as part of a broader resistance initiative. The social movement launched by John was already in motion when Jesus first opts to begin public action. Continue reading “Breakin’ Down Messianism With Dr. Jim Perkinson”
She is on her way
“Our strategy should be not only to confront the empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness- and our ability to tell our stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling- their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
Arundhati Roy
Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, and Martin Were Movement Men: The Demand Before Us Today
By. Dr. Jim Perkinson, Keynote at the Islamic House of Wisdom (Detroit, MI, 1-18-15)a
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One of those shot in the Charlie Hebdo incident in Paris on Jan. 7 was a Muslim policeman named Ahmed Marabet killed while trying to defend that newspaper’s staff. The next day, Dyab Abou Jahjah, a Belgian news columnist and Muslim, responded to all the “I am Charlie” signs appearing in the Paris streets with a tweet saying: “I am not Charlie, I am Ahmed the dead cop. Charlie ridiculed my faith and culture and I died defending his right to do so.
Continue reading “Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, and Martin Were Movement Men: The Demand Before Us Today”
If Not Empire, What?
…this book is for those who have been disillusioned by the empire’s way of running the world and are curious about what insights the Bible may contain on how to think about, organize and act collectively to restore a just and sustainable life on Earth.
John Stoner & Berry Friesen in the Preface to If Not Empire, What? A Survey of the Bible (2014)
This week, we got an opportunity to sit down with John Stoner, the author (with Berry Friesen) of If Not Empire, What? (click here for free online PDF!) and co-curator (with Friesen) of the resource-rich site BibleAndEmpire.Net.
Continue reading “If Not Empire, What?”
Empire Christmas Poem
By Bill Wylie-Kellermann
empire,
crouched to devour,
breathes, like a dragon, winter darkness upon us:
decrees go out, are believed and obeyed, indictments
are suppressed, privilege covers the blunt ends of supremacy;
widescreen redundancies brutalize, dull, the mind; the most basic human
Radical Discipleship 