Category: Subverting Empire
Sabbath Economics
By Ched Myers (above, at the US/Mexico border), a commentary on Luke 12:13-21, reposted from the BCM July 2022 E-News
Note: The comments (and slides) below were crafted for the Los Angeles Catholic Worker community this month. The lectionary reading for the 8th Sunday in Pentecost (July 31st) features the unequivocal, doesn’t-mince-words Jesus offering a warning tale about persons and systems. Those of us who come from economic and social privilege should pay special attention to this passage. So we offer this piece (part of my new book project entitled Jesus against Plutocracy: Sabbath Economics in Luke’s Gospel)…
When we approach this text we need to acknowledge that economics is exceedingly difficult to talk about in most of our churches, more taboo than politics or sex. Jesuit theologian John Haughey summarized the dilemma. Yet no aspect of our individual and corporate lives is more determinative of our personal and political world than economics—and few subjects are more frequently addressed in our scriptures.
To read the rest, click here!
Chronofeminism
By Bayo Akomolafe, re-posted from Facebook (08.14.22)
I’m of the Yoruba people of West Nigeria and some parts of West Africa. We don’t think of time as an arrow of God flowing from a fixed past through the elusive present, and to an always fugitive future. That notion of time being a straight line is missing from our cosmology. Time is slushy. It’s not even cyclical. It’s slushy— it falls in on itself. It’s rhizomatic. And in this sense, the past is yet to come (to quote Karen Barad); the past is not yet done; the future has already happened. This notion of time is melty and trickly. Sugary and sticky. It is what allows us to face ancestry as a serious matter in civilizational endings. It’s the invitation for us to sit with the past—with the crack of time—and do other kinds of work there.
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New Paths of Action
An excerpt from Vine Deloria, Jr.’s Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969).
I strongly doubt that American Christianity has the foresight or flexibility to embark on new paths of action. It has always been torn between being good and being real and generally chosen to be good.
Contagious
An excerpt from adrienne maree brown’s article in Yes! Magazine called “Murmurations: Love Looks Like Accountability.”
It’s intentional that we think about internal accountability as a solo practice. So much of being in relationship with another is about being able to have deep awareness of what it is we want and need in a given moment, and what we’re feeling—be it safety or vigilance.
This can be immensely uncomfortable. We might be feeling some combination of vulnerable, insecure, scared, disrespected, angry, or other emotions that we aren’t always raised to hold with dignity. If we can’t be aware of—and responsible for—our own feelings, then anyone else we are relating to can easily become a site of our projections or unharnessed energy. We can have negative and harmful impacts we did not intend.
Continue reading “Contagious”Back It Up
By Tommy Airey
The year George Floyd and I were born, Paul Simon came out with a song called “American Tune.” Simon sung it to the melody of a Medieval Christian hymn. It hummed on the heavy, confusing mood of the country, caught up in the Watergate scandal and the bloody Vietnam conflict. It concludes with these verses.
We come on the ship they call The Mayflower.
We come on the ship that sailed the moon.
We come in the age’s most uncertain hours
And sing an American tune.
Last week, fifty years later, “American Tune” made an appearance at the Newport Folk Festival. But this time, it was sung by Rhiannon Giddens, a banjo-playing woman in her forties boasting Black, Native and white ancestry. Simon backed her up on acoustic and she tweaked the lyrics at the end.
We didn’t come here on the Mayflower.
We came on a ship on a blood red moon.
We come in the age’s most uncertain hour
And sing an American tune.
Distorted
From the Twitter feed of Rev. Dr. Bernice King, the daughter of MLK (July 15, 2022).
A cartoon about my father from the 1960s. At the time he was assassinated, a poll reflected that he was one of the most hated men in the United States. Today, his message is distorted by many who would have hated him then, but evoke him now to deter justice and truth. #MLK
Time for Another Wilderness Vigil
An announcement and invitation from Tevyn East, director of Dreaming Stone Arts and Ecology Center
In early 2020, a group of comrades (Jay Beck, Jimmy Betts, Tevyn East, Tim Nafziger, Jonathan McRay, and Todd Wynward) first gathered together in response to a call from friend and colleague, Dave Pritchett. Sparked by his attendance of a “Vision Fast” held by the School of Lost Borders, where participants experienced a 4 day solo fast, bookended by group process, Dave had a desire to deepen into this practice amongst peers. His call, “to gather a cohort of folks to re-imagine how we can use the wilderness vigil to empower people in our movements, and how we can do so in ways that better pay attention to place, to history, and to the political moment we inhabit.” And thus, the first Wilderness Vigil was born. It was a significant, supportive and meaningful event for all.
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Radical Discipleship 