Category: Subverting Empire

Do Something That Won’t Compute

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Plenty of radical runners participated in the 14th Annual Pete De Mott Peace Trot last weekend, on Father’s Day, in Ithaca, New York. The race is named after the veteran Catholic peace activist who spent time in federal prison for numerous anti-war protests. This is the pre-race pump up speech from Pete’s daughter Cait De Mott Grady (above, with Mike Williams of Three Lyons Creative).

My mom asked me to say a few words about this year’s Peace Trot t-shirt. The shirt is based on a ceramic tile I made this spring with words from a Wendell Berry poem called Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front. The full poem is on the back of this year’s t-shirt, and I encourage you to give it a read.

For those who knew my dad, you likely heard him recite the Mad Farmer poem. This poem was a mantra for my dad, a poem he knew by heart, a poem he looked to as a guide, and a poem whose wisdom became a part of everyday life.

The first stanza of this poem calls out the dominant culture of the United States – a culture that Dr. King powerfully named for us as a culture of rampant materialism, militarism, and racism.

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True Prophets

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An excerpt from a 1993 interview with Walter Brueggemann entitled “Why Prophets Won’t Leave Well Enough Alone.” Thank you Rev. John Maine (Kitchener, Ontario) for passing it along!

I believe the large truth surrounding us today is that the white, male, Western, colonial hegemony has collapsed by the mercy of God.  The collapse of that hegemony means that we have a chance to reorganize and reconfigure all social relationships.  True prophets are prophets who act in the direction of that collapse and are working at reorganizing social relationships, and false prophets are people who want to keep pretending that they can jack up the white, male hegemony and keep it going.  The pastoral task, then, is to help people face the reality of the collapse and relinquish those old assumptions of privilege, priority, and power

A God Who Confuses

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By Tommy Airey

And at this sound the crowd gathered and was confused… – Acts 2:6a

Last weekend, I preached a Pentecost sermon at a church down in Kentucky. The text brought me back to my roots. When I was ten, I transferred to the Christian school where my mom got hired to teach 5th grade. Every single morning, we pledged allegiance to the American flag, to the Christian flag and to the bible. We would pray together. We would read something from the scriptures – and then my teacher, Mr. Cavallaro, who I absolutely loved, would proclaim, “God said it. I believe it. And that settles it.” His triumphalism is all it took to hook me.

I was ten – and I was being scripted into Christian Supremacy. My pastors and teachers propagated a world that was black and white, saved and damned. They taught me that we get to heaven by believing what God said, but also that some people are just better than others. Some people earned their wealth, their power, their sun-splashed perch overlooking the Pacific. Other people made bad decisions. They live in ghettos, reservations, barrios, slums, cells and socialist countries because they swerved from God’s Holy Word. Game Over.  

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Christian Nationalism: An Existential Agreement with God

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By Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler

Newt Gingrich broke onto the national political scene with his “Contract with America.” It was the offering of an agreement, that if the public allowed the Gingrich coalition to lead, that coalition would then deliver on a number of points in the contract. Whether you agreed with the framing of this contract or not it conjured the image of the covenant between God and the people in the wilderness established through Moses on Mt. Sinai. There is an “If” and “then” equation to a covenant. One act is related to the other. One thing is related to the next. One thing is required in order to get to the other thing. A covenant is where at least two parties enter into an agreement.

So-called Christian Nationalism addresses the concept of a covenant, or a contract. In this view, America is the promise of God, and blessings will unfold, fulfillment will be realized, and the country will be the “City on the Hill” as long as its people uphold their part of the bargain. If the nation fails in upholding its agreement the blessings will be squandered, the country will be in decay, and the hopes found will become lost. Hence, we hear the assertions that America was founded on Christian values and principles, and its laws should reflect that. Christian norms should be upheld lest the country fall into decadence and decay. All of the assumptions, of course, are built on concepts of a conquering god, patriarchy and white supremacy. The cultural wars are attempts to uphold these sense of values, and keep the country from falling into perceived decay and obsolesce. Therefore, other religions, other peoples, like immigrants of darker hue, defy the dominant idea of “American”. Blended sexual and family structures, bended genders, and expanding expressions of sexuality suggest a crisis and the need to assert and re-assert the perceived so-called Christian American agreement into the covenant or the blessings and the nation will eventually be lost. This is where the tension emerges. 

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“As a Mighty Wind”: Or, Which Pentecost?

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By Jim Perkinson, a homily for St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Detroit, MI (May 28, 2023)

So, Pentecost!  We will begin deep in the weeds.  Literally.  “Pente-cost”—in Greek, the 50th day!  But 50th day after what?  After Passover.  But why 50?  Well, 49 + 1.  Huh?  We scratch our heads.  But of course, the early Christians, though working in the language of the Greeks—pentekoste—are translating practice and memory of the Hebrews.  So hard this biblical faithfulness business—plunges us straight into serious cross-cultural labors and mistakes.  Such a big history of mistakes!  More on that later.  But the Hebrews! They didn’t call it Pentecost, but Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks.  7 weeks after Passover, but with the counting starting on the 2nd day of Passover—so 49 + 1. 

Ok—but then, what anchors Passover, when does it begin?  Ah, now we’re getting down to it, yes, getting down, “gettin’ down,” heavy on the down beat!  But what is down?  What direction?  There—pointing to your feet?  Yes, but what is down there?  A tile floor, you say?  And under that?  Wood floor joists?  And under that?  Pipes?  Yes, yes, and a basement and then cement.  And, and . . . But finally, even in the city, we get to it.  Earth.  What all of life stands on and grows in.  The big assumption.  The Big Momma we take for granted again and again! 

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An Act of Defiant Hope

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Another subversive bible study from Walter Brueggemann. Re-posted from churchanew.org.

This is an unabashed commendation of a book. The book by Franck Prevot is entitled Wangari Maathai: The Woman Who Planted Millions of Trees (2015). This children’s book, with its winsome art work, tells the story of Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan woman who learned from her mother that “a tree is worth more than its wood.” As she grew up she became aware that her people were deprived of much of their land for agriculture. She saw the devastation of the forests as her country gained independence from Britain. In the face of all the deforestation, her mother taught her:

A tree is a treasure that provides shade, fruit, pure air, and nesting places for birds, and that pulses with the vitality of life. Trees are hideouts for insects and provide inspiration for poets. A tree is a little bit of the future (21).

In response to the destruction of deforestation that she could observe, Maathai organized the Green Belt Movement to encourage villagers to plant many, many trees. She encountered much opposition from business interests and from the authoritarian government of Daniel arap Moi. She was imprisoned by the government for her oppositional stance, but slowly she is able to gain public support for her democratic vision of society. Her great courage led not only to many trees, but to the flourishing of democracy in her home country of Kenya. It is clear that her story is one that our children and grandchildren urgently need to hear, a story of courage in devotion to the wellbeing of the earth and its creaturely population. Click here to read the rest.

The Big Deception

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An excerpt from the newsletter of Alec Karakatsanis (May 18, 2023).

Over forty years into the War on Drugs, the following are true:

  • The U.S. has spent trillions of dollars; detained tens of millions of people for hundreds of millions of years; separated tens of millions of children from parents; chemically destroyed millions of acres of rainforest and pristine ecosystems in Latin America; killed hundreds of thousands of people; stopped, searched, sexually violated, and arrested hundreds of millions of people; surveilled the communications of billions of people globally; stolen billions of dollars in property from poor people through civil forfeiture; deported hundreds of thousands of people; deprived tens of millions of people of highly effective therapeutic treatments for cancer, mental illness, PTSD, chronic pain, etc.; caused millions of people to become infected with infectious diseases; kicked millions of families out of public housing and public benefits; put tens of millions of poor people into an endless cycle of debt; and cost tens of millions of people their jobs at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars to the economy.
  • The use of prohibited drugs has increased, prohibited drugs are more potent than ever, and overdose deaths have skyrocketed to their highest levels in U.S. history.  

People in power making drug policy are not universally incompetent. Most of the people crafting U.S. drug policy know the above facts. 

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Will Not Sit Silently

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From The Howard University Graduates for Solidarity, Written Statement Regarding the Howard University Graduates’ Protest of President Joseph R. Biden Jr. at Howard University’s 155th Commencement Ceremony at Capital One Arena

The Howard University Commencement Ceremony is a joyous occasion, a celebration of achievement in the face of generational, ongoing, and systemic adversity. For Black students, graduating college is a success beyond measure. We are proud to have attended the illustrious Howard University, our historically Black University, our Mecca. 

Yet, while we are excited to finish our last endeavor at Howard University, we are infinitely angered and exhausted by the many forms of ongoing white supremacist violence in the United States of America and internationally.  We are exhausted by the lack of resources we had as Howard Students, struggling to keep up with increasing tuition rates and inadequate housing options amidst the corporatization of our board of trustees and the fight to renew student, faculty, and community voting representation within it, let alone the ongoing gentrification of DC at large to which Howard University and its affiliates are a party. We maintain countless grievances and will not sit silently and allow them to go unrecognized, especially in light of campaign season. On today, May 13th, 2023, our graduation day and the 38th anniversary of the MOVE bombing, we choose to advocate. When there is no justice, there should be no peace. 

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The Aftermath of Title 42

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A missive from John Fanestil, on the frontlines of the fight for immigrant justice. If you are in the Southern California next Sunday, May 21, join people of faith and conscious at Fandango at the Wall at 11am (1250 Monument Road, San Diego)

May 13, 2022 – San Diego

The lifting of Title 42 has brought national attention to the extreme conditions of human suffering on our nation’s southern border. But these conditions are nothing new. They are the product of a misguided approach to the border that has been embraced by Presidents of both parties since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. This approach mistakenly frames the challenges on the border as matters of “national security,” and then mistakenly attempts to address them with the administrative apparatus of the Department of Homeland Security. The results have been disastrous.

In recent weeks here in San Diego alone:

— Thousands of desperate migrants have entered into U.S. territory in hopes of seeking asylum. Last night I witnessed many hundreds trapped between the walls separating San Diego and Tijuana. Onsite I heard not just Spanish, but Chinese, Turkish, Haitian Creole, and several Eastern European and South Asian languages. These hundreds have been left stranded by U.S. authorities for as many as three days with minimal assistance, and now rely for their basic human needs on the extraordinary support of San Diego community organizations and volunteers.

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