Category: Subverting Empire

Ecstasy and Agony

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By Ken Sehested

Lent is when the ecstasy and the agony of life collide.

Monday, 28 February, was the next-to-last-day of Mardi Gras, celebrated in the US along the Gulf Coast, New Orleans being its epicenter.

As the sun was going down in New Orleans, the eve of “Fat Tuesday,” the party hardying prior to the abstinence of Ash Wednesday, a man in California killed his three daughters and the woman supervising the girls’ visit with her father, part of the terms dictated since his divorce. Then killed himself. In a church sanctuary.

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A Stunning Experience of Grace

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The introduction to Lee Camp’s latest podcast interview with Janet Wolf. Listen HERE.

“I did not go to divinity school to become a pastor,” says Janet Wolf. “I thought clergy were probably the problem and not the solution. I went to figure out how people could read the Bible and not do justice.”

And yet, at the age of 40, after the end of a struggle with the Boards of Ordained Ministry, she found herself ordained in the Methodist Church and sent to pastor four congregations in Lawrence County, Tennessee.

This was no easy task: she was the first female Methodist pastor the county had ever known.

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Divine Dialysis: A 7-Minute Sermon

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By Tommy Airey, re-posted from Easy Yolk

To the leader. A Psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.

Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your steadfast love;

The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.—excerpts from Psalm 51

This week, I read Psalm 51 in the wake of dear friends sharing the details of a sexual assault they experienced. My response was rage. I struggled to tap into tears. I was just so angry. At the perpetrator for what he did. At the police for what they did not do. Lindsay asked me if our friends’ story was triggering my own trauma. I wasn’t sure. I needed to go away to reflect—and sit with this Psalm, attributed to David who was called “a man after God’s own heart.” He was also a sexual predator.

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On the Way to Knowing Love

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An excerpt from All About Love: New Visions (2001) by bell hooks.

How different things might be if, rather than saying “I think I’m in love,” we were saying “I’ve connected with someone in a way that makes me think I’m on the way to knowing love.” Or if instead of saying “I am in love” we say “I am loving” or “I will love.” Our patterns around romantic love are unlikely to change if we do not change our language.

That’s All You Can Do, Brother

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

Last week on CNN.

DON LEMON: I’m not excusing what they did at all, but aren’t these people and even the Ahmaud Arbery, the hate crimes trial, aren’t these people in many ways, in a big way caught up or coopted in a system even now that is refusing to even teach people about race, to talk about race, to call people who try to bring light to it race-baiting? Do you understand what I’m saying? Who don’t want to confront the issue even to bring it to a positive place? Aren’t they caught up by that, they’re victims of that system?

CORNEL WEST: Yeah, in some sense we’re all wrestling with it. But keep in mind the attempt to do away with critical race theory means what? 1619 Project number one “The New York Times” bestseller week after week after week after week. So we can use the various kinds of ways to be narrow to continually broaden, deepen, universalize our vision and our efforts. It’s just we should never, ever get so discouraged that we think all we do is just react to all these vicious acts. No. We are taking off with vision, with power, with courage, with compassion regardless. Now, if we end up — if it ends up that America’s just over and it dissolves and it’s disintegrated because of hatred and the greed completely took over, we can say we went down swinging. We held on with integrity. That’s all you can do, brother.

Grief Doesn’t Fade

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An excerpt from Jesmyn Ward’s memoir Men We Reaped.

I found the adage about time healing all wounds to be false: grief doesn’t fade. Grief scabs over like scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief. We are never free from the feeling that we have failed. We are never free from self-loathing. We are never free from the feeling that something is wrong with us, not with the world that made this mess.

the brow of nazareth

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by jim perkinson, ps 71: 1-6, lk 4:21-30, performed at st. peter’s episcopal church (detroit, mi), 1-30-22

“they lead him to the brow of the hill
that they might throw him off”
says the lectionary text for the
4th week-take on epiphanies and magi
and comet-streaked skies of the season
but they failed to catch the snatch—
the orator at nazareth was a rock-kvetched
match for their outraged snit, hatched
like a birthed-again chic from rugged
outcrop, spirit-born and dove-mourned
just back from a 40-day stretch

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A Brief Consideration of Language

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By Dwight L. Wilson, originally posted to Facebook on January 27, 2022

When my ancestors were kidnapped from Africa, the overlords employed white supremacy philosophy to both claim they themselves believed in freedom of religion and strip the victims of their ties to ancestral religion. In the enslavers’ minds, surely the Holy One was named Jehovah, not Nyame. Any black saying otherwise was dismissed as uncivilized if not inhuman. Refusing to stop inflicting trauma, we were forced to change African personal names, and forbidden African languages so that the powerful could feel more comfortable. In partial response, I gave my sons African names 1) Kai Ashante (thank you for the surprise), 2) Rai Imani (strong faith), 3) Tai Amri (an eagle is leading) and 4) Mai Hakili (a leader who is both spiritually and intellectually strong).

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The Precursor to Really Deep Transformation

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From an LA Times interview with author and professor Imani Perry on her new book South to America.

Wow. [laughs] I mean, there are many wonderful things about L.A., but having had family that moved from Alabama to L.A., that would be a huge mischaracterization. Everyone has gone back South. The promise of L.A. proved not to actually be as promising. I’ll say, having left Alabama young and spent most of my time coming of age in Massachusetts, one of the things that’s interesting for me is I experienced many more acts of racial aggression in Boston than in Alabama. Slurs, physical aggression of a sort I’d never experienced.

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Thich Nhat Hanh and Radical Discipleship

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By Ric Hudgens

In the past six weeks, our community has lost bell hooks (December 15) and Jim Forest (Jan 13). Then earlier this week, on January 22, the great teacher of engaged Buddhism, Thich Nhat Hanh, passed. All three were linked. bell hooks wrote a foreword to The Raft Is Not the Shore, which are the transcribed dialogues between Thich Nhat Hanh and Daniel Berrigan. The final book that Jim Forest published was entitled Eyes of Compassion: Living with Thich Nhat Hanh.

Thich Nhat Hanh also had a connection with Dr. Martin Luther King and Thomas Merton. This places him as a surprisingly central figure in the history of our community. Because I already was finding these intersections fascinating, I was and was not surprised to discover an encounter between Thich Nhat Hanh and the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

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