Category: Subverting Empire

The Recovery Room

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation2 Comments

By Tommy Airey

After a thirty-month delay, I finally went in for hernia surgery last week. Lindsay hauled me over to the hospital in Grosse Pointe, Michigan – Detroit’s eastern adjacent suburb. As soon as we crossed Alter Road, everything changed. The mourning turned into mansions. Dr. King gave a speech in the high school gym in Grosse Pointe three weeks before he was assassinated. He talked about the two Americas. Those who grow up in the sunlight of opportunity – and those barely surviving in the fatigue of despair. During the speech, he was shouted down – several times – by white people who did not appreciate some outsider telling them that racism was still a real thing.

The day before my surgery, I drove to the lab in Grosse Pointe to get my pre-surgery blood screening. A Black woman was working the front desk. While I was waiting, an unmasked white man in his seventies walked in asking where to sign in. She pointed to the table and told him he needed to put on a face covering. He looked at me and shook his head, muttering that he had one in his bag. I stared him down. He didn’t sign in. When he found his seat across the room, he looked at me again. I just stared back. We both grew up in the sunlight of opportunity, but I wanted him to know that I would not be signing off on his supremacy story.

Across Jefferson Boulevard from the hospital, the yards of the mansions are lined with election signs promoting the GOP candidate for Secretary of State who got her masters degree in Christian Apologetics from BIOLA and is adamant the 2020 election was stolen. Many signs say, “Vote No on Prop 3,” the reproductive justice measure that got more signatures than any initiative in Michigan history. When we arrived at the hospital on the morning of my surgery, everything was quick and convenient. Parking spaces were abundant and free-of-charge. It was a close walk to the lobby. The surgery wing was a well-oiled machine. I did not wait long to get in.

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Taking Sides

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An excerpt from Jonny Rashid’s new book JESUS TAKES A SIDE (2022). See below for details of an online event Jonny is hosting with The Alternative Seminary this Saturday!

Our church’s first love feast after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president of the United States changed me.

Our church celebrates something called the love feast, also known as an agape feast in some traditions. It is a worship meeting where we fellowship and reconcile among one another, letting our love and unity prevail. You can find references to love feasts in Jude and 1 Corinthians 1. At them, we eat together, welcome new members, and take communion. At our love feast in January 2017, our team had assigned me to offer the words of institution and the elements of communion to the assembly.

Admittedly, my mind was elsewhere. Donald Trump’s first executive action as the new president was in effect. We know it colloquially as the Muslim ban, but formally it is Executive Order 13769: Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States. It was a travel ban against people from a list of Middle Eastern countries and it had gone into effect that Saturday. It barred entry for anyone (with some exceptions) from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. I got a notice on my phone that there were Arab immigrants in airports and they could not enter into the country because the ban was in effect.

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Salvation as Wealth Redistribution

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation1 Comment

zaccheusBy Ched Myers, on Luke 19:1-10, re-posted from October 2016

First, as always, let’s put this Sunday’s gospel reading in its broader narrative context. The story of Zacchaeus represents the culmination of one of Luke’s important subplots: Jesus’ challenge to rich men (Gk plousios) to “turn their lives (and assets) around.” As pointed out in previous posts, this narrative strand forms the backbone of Luke’s “Special Section” (Lk 11-19), a pattern worth reiterating here (with links to my comments earlier this year):

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The Universe’s Hubs of Unspeakable Creativity

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation1 Comment

By Bayo Akomolafe, re-posted from social media (October 18, 2022)

An obstacle is the richest, thickest, densest place in the universe. This is so because it is where things stop and often die, failing to continue on their way. It is where carcasses of hope rot into the ground, inadvertently fertilizing it. It is a place of desperation and longing and roaming ghosts.

All of this is my way of saying that I think it is not empty. This place – an obstacle – is bursting with activity, with microbial adventures, with dancing generativity, with experiments into continuity, with playful meanings and alchemical shifts, with eloquent invocations and stuttered words.

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Unbroken Connection

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Cloud of Witnesses, Race, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

DinaFor Indigenous Peoples Day, an excerpt from Dina Gilio-Whitaker’s brilliant new release As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock (2019).

The very thing that distinguishes Indigenous peoples from settler societies is their unbroken connection to ancestral homelands. Their cultures and identities are linked to their original places in ways that define them: they  are reflected in language, place names and cosmology (origin stories). In Indigenous worldviews, there is no separation between people and land, between people and other life forms, or between people and their ancient ancestors whose bones are infused in the land they inhabit and whose spirits permeate place.

Between Red Bird Songs and Brown Squirrel “Skalds”: Learning from the Poetry Outside My Door

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation1 Comment

By Jim Perkinson, a sermon for St. Peter’s Episcopal, a riff on Luke 12:22-31 for “Animal Sunday” in the Season of Creation Readings: Year C

I woke up this morning an old man—an experience recurrent over recent months here at the far end of pandemic shifts in life and schedule and interaction.  I have not the energy I had before my classrooms miniaturized from a 20 by 30 ft space of animated bodies to a 12 by 15 inch screen flattened into pixelated colors and shapes.  I cannot strut and gesture, advance and retreat with my ideas taking on flesh and then resounding, reverberating, up-thrusting like rock or quieting like mist in the rhythmic back and forth of in-person engagement.  My body is bereft and grieving.  And that grief is but a minute fragment of what ghosts my bones now, as I become ever more aware of what I have lost—not just in recent years, but recent centuries and indeed millennia, that yet echo as traces and sighs, unspoken and unspeakable in my veins and hair, my nose and ear—ancestors that whisper and pulse and haunt, whose own grief and jubilation has no anatomical muscle adequate to its tones and cadence. 

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Be a Poll Chaplain

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A message from Sojourners Magazine.

Our vote and democracy are under attack in every state across this union. But on November 8th, we as a people of faith must be on the frontline to fight this Goliath that is trying to destroy our democracy. We cannot sit out the Midterm election.

The late John Lewis said best: “A vote is the most powerful non-violent tool we have – almost sacred.” For us, voting is rooted in the belief that everyone is created in the image of God and deserves to vote their values in free, fair, and safe elections. 

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Upstream

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Subverting Empire1 Comment

By Tommy Airey

“There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.” – Toni Morrison, Beloved

Last weekend, I hiked with friends on traditional land of Watlala people, about fifty miles southeast of Portland, Oregon. At the trailhead, there were a half dozen Chinook Salmon swimming in the cold shallow water below. They were traveling upstream, from the Pacific to the Columbia to the Sandy to the Zig Zag to Camp Creek. The females, returning to the place of their birth, were preparing to lay their eggs – and then die four days later. Despite all the dams that have been built, there are still a few of these Beings, so sacred to Native people here, who have the strength to swim against the current, teaching us how to give up our lives for the next generation.  

On my two-hour drive back to the Deschutes River, I was pondering the contrast between Chinook Salmon who swim upstream and those who built the dams, white people conditioned by conformity, always moving with the current, not against it. I was thinking about the white people I know who now refer to “wokeness” as a bad word, as a kind of far-left cult that is extreme and dangerous, existing only to shame white people. The conservative talking points are penetrating the language of white moderates and liberals. Right-wing strategists know what they are doing! Wokeness is the perfect pinata for people unwilling to swim upstream and shed their own whiteness.

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Normalize

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A repost from @mia.mingus on IG.

All Biden’s words have done is make clear–abundantly clear–what we already have known: that we are on our own for the pandemic and the little that still remain (for some), will be gone soon (obvi wealthy folks will be able access whatever they want whenever as per usual).

Our work now should be cultural changes, so that we can get (our) folks to get boosted, wear masks and continue other safety precautions. We should be *normalizing* masks. Taking pictures (esp with others) with your masks ON.

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