Category: Subverting Empire

This is Where You Start: Letter to a White Child on Choices, Ancestors, and the Future

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Subverting Empire, Theological Animation2 Comments

By Rev. Margaret Anne Ernst

PC: Kelly Sikkema

October 2020 

I started writing this letter to you four years ago on the kitchen table, the winter after a man had been elected to the highest office in our land who represents such meanness, such smallness of imagination, and such hostility towards humanity that I had to start writing to someone. Best, I thought, to someone not fully grown, or even here yet. If I write to you, I must believe in you.  I must believe in something past this moment, this nightmare, as many people behind me have imagined past the terrifying circumstances of their times. 

Your world is, to me, barely glimpsed, like the moon showing itself from behind the clouds. And yet I will hang on to that moonbeam like I would clutch a breadcrumb after having not eaten for days. I choose to believe in the future.

Continue reading “This is Where You Start: Letter to a White Child on Choices, Ancestors, and the Future” →

10 Ways to Stop a Coup

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

From Daniel Hunter, re-posted from Waging Nonviolence. Go to Choose Democracy to sign the pledge and take action.

We have a president who has openly said he might not respect the outcome of our election. We have to be ready if he claims victory before votes are counted, tries to stop counting, or refuses to accept a loss.

Some days I feel confident it will happen. A poll showed over 75 percent of Democrats think this is possible — and a shocking 30 percent of Republicans do too!

Other days I feel confident this is tough talk from a president not good at planning ahead. Still, he is good at the kind of misdirection that can keep us complacent and reactionary — which could lead us to stop doing the important groundwork of getting out the vote, protecting the post office and fighting voter suppression. KEEP READING…

Hope as an Intervention upon America’s Antiblackness

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

Note: This is part of a series of short posts, in the lead-up to the election, from leaders reflecting on hope and/or resistance.

By Rev. Nick Peterson

Hope, for me, owes nothing to politics. The extent to which we think hope alongside and within the American political apparatus is discouraging at best and soul-killing at worst. At present, the religious right imagines American politics as the right site to enact a near-theocratic rule of law. Holding fast to an American exceptionalism established by the puritans, the right’s religious imagination appeals to a moral yesteryear that never was. Meanwhile, the left opts for a liberal humanism that, on the one hand, narrates inclusion and acceptance as an American God-given birthright. While on the other, liberals insist that the unceasing acts of anti-black violence are not reflections of who we are. On both sides, hope is a means to America.

Continue reading “Hope as an Intervention upon America’s Antiblackness” →

Hope is a Verb, a Song Called “Anyhow”

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation1 Comment

Note: This is part of a series of short posts, in the lead-up to the election, from leaders reflecting on hope and/or resistance.

By Johari Jabir (right)

Hope is a verb, a form of action not based on feelings or what is seen in ordinary time. To hope is to advance a stubborn, aggressive optimism.  

On January 1, 1863, a large gathering of Black and white people assembled beneath a sprawling oak tree in Beaufort, South Carolina, to hear the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. Standing on a platform behind military officers, dignitaries, and abolitionists was the nation’s first Black regiment, the 1st South Carolina Volunteers. After the proclamation was read, the regiment was presented with an American flag donated by a New York congregation. All of the ceremony and pageantry had gone along as planned, until one speaker’s comments were interrupted by an elderly Black man who stood to sing,  

Continue reading “Hope is a Verb, a Song Called “Anyhow”” →

Anchored in a Reality Different from Our Own

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

Note: This is part of a series of short posts, in the lead-up to the election, from leaders reflecting on hope and/or resistance.

By Rev. Tiffany Ashworth

A few months ago, I preached a sermon on Psalm 1. During my preparation, I kept stumbling over the phrase their delight is in the law. Delight and law? From where I’m standing, those are contradictory. Images of law conjure drudgery, burden, and weight. Law all too often represses rather than restores, closes in rather than opens up, belittles rather than inspires. It can be anxiety-making, self-preserving, and power-seeking rather than peace-imparting, generous, and life-giving. How can anyone delight in a law? Law, to me, often belongs on the path of dried up chaff not well-watered trees.

Continue reading “Anchored in a Reality Different from Our Own” →

True Solidarity

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

From Ashley Bohrer, professor, author and activist, in a May 2020 interview with George Souvlis on the Salvage site. Bohrer was asked about “solidarity” as both an analytical concept and a political reality.

True solidarity is life. There’s no other way, I don’t think, to orient ourselves to the struggle and to each other. There’s something really beautiful about solidarity, about the ways that millions of people work together and for each other, not on the basis of personal connection or individual acquaintance, but out of clarity and conviction that we all deserve a better world. We’re doing this interview in the midst of the Covid crisis and the mutual aid work I and so many other have been participating in, I think, has brought a whole new group of folks into understanding that feeling.

Continue reading “True Solidarity” →

Other Fields to Open Up

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

By Bayo Akomolafe, re-posted from social media (October 10, 2020)

I come from the largest black nation on earth, Nigeria. You would suppose that having almost uniformly black skins means we live in a de-racialized territory of mutual wellbeing and abundance – like the fantastical world of Wakanda. You might think that such a country wouldn’t have problems with their police force, for instance. But racialization transcends our phenotypic fixations with, say, skin colour. Even within our corporeal homogeneity lies troubling cuts, lingering imperial legacies, haunted bodies, toxic institutions, and incarcerated imaginations. We are frozen in a colonial moment. We are not free.

Continue reading “Other Fields to Open Up” →

Possibly Even Magic

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

Note: In the lead-up to the election, RD.net is prodding leaders to submit creative and concise pieces (500 words or less) on both hope and resistance.

Bree Newsome, June 27, 2015.

By Ric Hudgens

In the early 1980s, not long after the death of Steven Biko, I registered for an independent study on the nonviolent struggle in South Africa. I knew little of nonviolence or South Africa and wanted to learn more. Based on my semester-long research, I concluded that there wasn’t much chance without bloodshed for a peaceful outcome in South Africa. Of course, I was wrong. Academic research is linear, but real life isn’t. There were things below the surface and things about to surface in South Africa that I couldn’t predict.

Continue reading “Possibly Even Magic” →

On Getting Stoned: A Sermon on Outback/Wilderness

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

By Jim Perkinson, for the St. Peter’s Episcopal community in Detroit, MI on October 4, 2020 (Romans 8:18-27; Matthew 3:1-4:11)

Detroit Will Breathe

So we are up against the wall now, facing the logic of the country, as our settler colonial and white supremacist history rises up incarnate in an orange-headed inciter.   We have lived without yet fully facing what we have visited on others—on Natives, genocidally eliminated to the tune of 95% (somewhere between 60-90 million killed over 500 years), African folk enslaved (behind the 12 million carried across the Atlantic and sold on the auction block, 30-40 million killed before getting here), 553 other places invaded over the course of 244 years, resources pirated, garbage and pollution outsourced to the rest of the globe, an ocean heating and full of plastic, 200 species pushed into extinction per day, Water and Fire as Great Living Beings, now shouting back, and a tiny microbe whispering warning: full halt, stop your self-absorption as a species, recognize the rest of the biosphere as well as the all the displaced marginalized people, as Creatures of Beauty and Worth and Mystery.  Do we—who have been the beneficiaries—think we should continue to be exempted from what we have visited on so many others?  We are on the Titanic, the iceberg is in full view, there is probably not time to turn the rudder, what now?! 

Continue reading “On Getting Stoned: A Sermon on Outback/Wilderness” →

Hope Vibrates Too

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation2 Comments

By Tommy Airey

Lawrence, Kansas

Note: In the lead-up to the election, RD.net is prodding leaders to submit creative and concise pieces (500 words or less) on both hope and resistance.

“Hope rises, She always does, did we fail to notice this in all the stories they’ve tried to suppress?”—Alice Walker

With only 29 days left ‘til the election, truth, beauty and goodness are being crucified in press conferences, social media posts and prayer meetings. I must confess: I’m struggling to rein in my resentment. However, I am actively resisting by seizing the hope set before us.

I find hope hiding under tents on my trips to the farmer’s market. Especially when there’s arugula.

Hope tarries during my trail runs on the banks of Towarnehiooks—as the scent of hops from the Deschutes Brewery wafts in the wind.

Continue reading “Hope Vibrates Too” →