Category: Subverting Empire

She is on her way

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“Our strategy should be not only to confront the empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of worldoxygen. 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 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

The Black Prophetic Struggle Against Injustice

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Cloud of Witnesses, Subverting Empire1 Comment

By Tommy Airey
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The great irony of our time is that in the age of Obama the grand Black prophetic tradition is weak and feeble.
Cornel West, Black Prophetic Fire (2014)

The Union Theological Seminary professor & prominent American public intellectual Dr. Cornel West has teamed up with Christa Buschendorf, the professor and the chair of American Studies at Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt am Main, for the newly released Black Prophetic Fire from Beacon Press, a series of extended conversations on six compelling prophetic leaders: Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, Ella Baker (above), Malcolm X & Ida B. Wells. It is a well-timed buffet for people of faith & conscience yearning to eat at the table of a nutritious historic tradition that will energize & sustain subversive lifestyles within the context of 21st century American Empire. Continue reading “The Black Prophetic Struggle Against Injustice” →

Ground the Drones in Michigan- Nov 8

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“We are building up a new world.battle creek drones 3
Do not sit idly by.
Do not remain neutral.
Do not rely on this broadcast alone.
We are only as strong as our signal.
There is a war going on for your mind.
If you are thinking, you are winning.
Resistance is victory.
Defeat is impossible.
Your weapons are already in hand.
Reach within you and find the means by which to gain your freedom.
Fight with tools.
Your fate, and that of everyone you know
Depends on it.”
-Flobots, “We Are Winning”

Calling all peace activists & nonviolent practitioners within the Great Lakes Region! Today’s blog post is asking for your hands, feet, minds, hearts, time & all the creativity you can muster. Continue reading “Ground the Drones in Michigan- Nov 8” →

I Just Thought Of Something by Ricardo Levins Morales

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

Minneapolis-based artist Ricardo Levins Morales on his craft:

I am an artist/activist…or is it activist/artist? It’s impossible to put one before the other or separate them…I believe that art can contribute to changing people’s perceptions, hearts and understandings of what has been, what is and what’s possible. I’m enough of an organizer to understand that art can’t do it alone; people getting together and acting together is the real source of social change. The dignity and possibility in all people is the underlying message of my work.

Continue reading “I Just Thought Of Something by Ricardo Levins Morales” →

Wendell Berry on Despair and Freedom

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stars
“When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be- I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

A Tradition of Resistance

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire1 Comment

set them free

 

“Alongside the history of empire we can study and reclaim the history of resistance to empire. Global capitalism did not appear fully formed at the dawn of time; its rise was engineered and was by no means unopposed. There is a rich tradition of resistance to tyranny throughout history; the things that we seek to do now and the ways we seek to live are neither new nor impossible. Christians who want to live outside empire have a legacy from our predecessors whose successes and failures can instruct and inspire us.”

Laurel Dykstra in Set Them Free: The Other Side of Exodus

Child Poverty Is Not An Act Of God

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From Marian Wright Edelman, President of the Children’s Defense Fund whose Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities:
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Just released U.S. Census Bureau data reveal 45.3 million people were poor in America in 2013. One in three of those who are poor is a child. Children remain our poorest age group and children of color and those under five are the poorest. More than one in five infants, toddlers, and preschoolers were poor during their years of greatest brain development and vulnerability. Black children saw no decrease and continue to have the highest child poverty rates in the nation. In 20 states  more than 40 percent of Black children were poor and nearly one in five Black children were living in extreme poverty with an annual income of less than half of the poverty level or $33 a day for a family of four.

Continue reading “Child Poverty Is Not An Act Of God” →

Coming This Weekend: A Wall Street Flood

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Watershed DiscipleshipLeave a comment

The climate crisis is not just a narrow ‘environmental’ problem of resources or jobs in need of better management. It is the supreme symptom of a political and economic system that is bankrupt to its core.
Flood Wall Street organizer Sandra Nurse

Today we excerpt from an article by Yates McKee over at Waging Nonviolence, detailing the upcoming People’s Climate March & follow-up action, Flood Wall Street, in NYC this Saturday to Monday. Continue reading “Coming This Weekend: A Wall Street Flood” →

Wes Howard-Brook on How Empire “Handles” Violence

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Just Peacemaking, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

Today, we share a Facebook Post (and highlights of an ongoing strand from Friday, Sept 12) from Dr. Wes Howard-Brook, former attorney and, currently, a professor of Theology & Scripture at Seattle University. Social media has all sorts of issues, but sometimes it can serve as a really helpful forum for “overhearing” conversations about vital issues. This strand focuses on the issue of ongoing violence in the Middle East, ISIS (and other “terrorist” groups) and, specifically, the role of the American Empire in the whole affair. Continue reading “Wes Howard-Brook on How Empire “Handles” Violence” →

Are We Activists or Inactivists?

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From Jeffrey Stout, Princeton Professor of Political Science in Blessed Are The Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America (2010)

To maintain a position of dominance, even the most powerful people in the world rely on the inaction of others and the resignation that lies beneath it. The powerful became powerful by organizing others to work for them and creating incentives for profitably cooperative activity. It appears to be against the interests of the rich and the lucky for everyone else to be similarly well organized. The rich and the lucky benefit from making large-scale democratic reform appear hopeless. Paradoxically, they also benefit from making large-scale change seem easily achievable, for example, by casting a vote every four years for a candidate who promises something called “change.”