“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
Category: Subverting Empire
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
rights as to water or life are violated as practical policy, a financial necessity.
The Decisive Moment of the Struggle
A warning from Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (1963):
The unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps.
This Bethlehem Dream
by tommy airey
We script & sing this Bethlehem Dream
Of Life reflecting divine Reality,
Light illuminating every dark cavity,
When the lion and the lamb
Dance to a silent tune sung by all humanity.
Continue reading “This Bethlehem Dream”
Art Resisting Torture
From comedian Ted Alexandro:
All you need to know about America is #TheInterview not being released inspires more outrage than the #TortureReport being released.
From political cartoonist Dan Wasserman:
9 Advent Practices For Radical Disciples
by tommy airey
The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.
Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (1978)
Radical discipleship in North America entails much. A life devoted to spirituality, social analysis, simple living & suffering service can overwhelm us, leaving us with the same symptoms of the systems we are struggling against: addiction, alienation and anxiety. This final week of Advent season creates intentional space & time for us to reconsider and repent, alerting us to times we find ourselves sleepwalking an imperial trance. Here are 9 commitments that we can hold up to the light through Epiphany.
——————- Continue reading “9 Advent Practices For Radical Disciples”
To Fight At Their Side
From Paulo Freire in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968):
[T]he more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.
Help Wanted: White Allies
By Tommy Airey
…large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.
Martin Luther King
**This post was updated, edited and reposted on December 11 at 12:45pmEST.
Last week, an old friend checked in on me. He’s a kind-hearted, hard-working and sincere follower of Jesus. He sent me a series of texts in light of the Ferguson decision and in response to what I have written about it. Here’s a sample:
I don’t think the thought ever crossed my mind that the life of a person of color was somehow worth less than that of a white person. I doubt very much that is the mindset of many police or judges either. Hard to believe the kid from Ferguson was killed because of that mindset given the facts in that case. Would be interesting to research the number of black people killed by white people vs. black people killed by black people. God dislikes all taking of life from the womb to the point of natural death. #Alllivesmatter
