From Daniel Berrigan, priest, peace activist, poet:
One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible to turn the US around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better.
We live in a society that has been oppressively controlled and dominated by white people for about 400 years. To put it bluntly and succinctly, a society dominated by white control can’t be fixed by white people taking control of the situation. The failure in the white privilege stewardship model, is that it inherently affirms and utilizes the very thing that it is called to resist and counter. If the answer to our racial problems is that white people must run things, call the shots, and be the saviors to the world, then we have missed the mark.
Drew Hart, “Beyond A White Privilege Model” (The Christian Century, September 9, 2014)
We end this week with a cross-post from The Christian Century, where Drew Hart tackles the issue of white privilege. Continue reading “Beyond a White Privilege Model”
By Tom Airey, Editor, RadicalDiscipleship.Net
The 1st of a two-day report from Detroit.
———————
Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand. It is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.
Wendell Berry
A couple of weeks ago, less than 48 hours from the time we moved in to Southwest Detroit, my wife and I visited the water payment station on the west side. When we arrived, about a hundred people (every single one of them African-American!) were lined up to make payments or inquire about a payment plan. Continue reading “Let It Roll Down”
Eduard Nuessner Loring is a Partner at the Open Door Community in Atlanta (right), seeking to dismantle racism, sexism and heterosexism, abolish the death penalty, and proclaim the Beloved Community through loving relationships with some of the most neglected and outcast of God’s children: the homeless and our sisters and brothers who are in prison. Below are some highlights from a talk he gave at a worship service at Central State Prison in Macon, Georgia on October 28, 2013. Approximately 200 prisoners attended, and one has since come to live at the Open Door Community. Access the entire text in the July-August 2014 Hospitality newsletter. Continue reading “A Hunger For Home”
We join all other activists & artists of faith & conscience in praying for the ailing Grace Lee Boggs, 99 years into a Life of visionary organizing: May she experience clarity, compassion & comfort in the days ahead:
The next American Revolution, at this stage in our history, is not principally about jobs or health insurance or making it possible for more people to realize the American Dream of upward mobility. It is about acknowledging that we Americans have enjoyed middle-class comforts at the expense of other peoples all over the world. It is about living the kind of lives that will not only slow own global warming but also end the galloping inequality both inside this country and between the Global North and the Global South. It is about creating a new American Dream whose goal is a higher Humanity instead of the higher standard of living dependent on Empire. It is about practicing a new, more active, global, and participatory concept of citizenship. It is about becoming the change we wish to see in the world. (The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism For The 21st Century, 2012)
From Edwina Gateley in Christ In The Margins (2009, with illustrations by Robert Lentz):
It is time for the people of God to stop marching along with the status quo in search of security, power & control, but to stumble instead towards the margins where we will encounter a magic & a mystery that will plunge us trembling but rejoicing into the Realm of God.
We sat down for a little email interview with Mark Van Steenwyk of the Mennonite Worker (right) in Minneapolis a few days ago. He is spearheading a new “School For Revolution” debuting October 23rd to 25th this year:
**This post was edited on September 13, 2014 at 8amEST.
————————————————————
RD: What led to the start of this new “school?”
MVS: Dorothy Day referred to Catholic Worker communities as “schools for revolution.” I resonate with that idea. Our goal at the Mennonite Worker is to ruin people for productive life in the empire; we want all of our residents to be captivated by Jesus’ kingdom vision. Continue reading “School For Revolution: Exploring Ways To Ruin More People”
I don’t have a minute to hate. I’ll pursue justice the rest of my life.
Mamie Carthan (the mother of Emmett Till)
Tomorrow, on the anniversary of Frederick Douglass’ escape to freedom, Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries and Word & World will be officially launching a daily-updated blog to highlight the unique strand of North American “movement” Christianity. We are committed to being collective (welcoming a multiplicity & diversity of voices), convictional (unapologetically theological), constructive (creating a new world out of the shell of the old) and concrete (covering a range of personal to political practices, from reformist to revolutionary). Continue reading “RadicalDiscipleship Launching September 3”
An authentic cross-post from Heidi Thompson, the CEO of Religion News Service:
I’m ashamed to admit that I was a fan of Michelle Rhee when she first arrived.
In 2006 when I got to town, DC schools, like so many of our big city public schools, were (and in many cases, still are) horrible warehouses of despair and corruption. Previous school officials had been found guilty of stealing from the kids they were supposed to be helping. The elementary school around the corner from my first DC apartment looked more like a prison than anything else – bars on the windows and a concrete pad overgrown with weeds for a play area. Close to 40 percent of the kids in the city didn’t graduate from high school.
I wanted someone to kick butt and take names. I wanted a hero, someone who could bring powerful change that would help kids. Looking back, I can see now the sin of my thinking. It was idolatry, plain and simple. It was idolatrous to think that one person could turn around that much neglect and dysfunction.
But the sin I and lots of others committed was even worse than the idolatry of hoping for an easy-fix with a hero. What Rhee and her kind of so-called “reformers” have done is distract all of us from dealing with child poverty. In Rhee’s world, we as a nation can tolerate the astronomical rate of child poverty in this country (something like 20% of kids are in families where there is weekly food insecurity) if we just get rid bad teachers and bad schools. Rhee and her corporate donors would much rather have us talk about anything other than the deep re-ordering of our national priorities it would take to make sure every American kid got an excellent education.
This piece lays it all out. And reading it, I knew the shame belongs to me, too.
“Together, the chapters make the case that historically high imprisonment rates and the intensive policing and surveillance that have accompanied them are transforming poor Black neighborhoods into communities of suspects and fugitives. A climate of fear and suspicion pervades everyday life, and many residents live with the daily concern that the authorities will seize them and take them away. A new social fabric is emerging under the threat of confinement: one woven in suspicion, distrust, and the paranoiac practices of secrecy, evasion, and unpredictability.”― Alice Goffman, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (2014)
Radical Discipleship 