Five Years In: Let’s Keep Composting Empire Together!

On September 10, 2019September 9, 2019 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire2 Comments

A Message from our Curators:

It’s really hard to believe that RadicalDiscipleship.net has been curating posts every day for five years. These voices have provided inspiration and challenge for those of us subverting popular and powerful versions of colonial Christianity. As we move into Year Six of this journalistic vocation, we’ve made an undemocratic executive decision to scale down our content. We believe this is good news as we’ve heard consistently from folks that it is quite a challenge to “keep up” with our daily onslaught of deep posts. Continue reading “Five Years In: Let’s Keep Composting Empire Together!” →

Why Faith Must Learn the Language of Flood: Water as Apocalyptic Witness of Last Resort

On September 9, 2019September 9, 2019 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

By Jim Perkinson (09.01.2019)

*Note: This is a sermon Dr. James Perkinson (right, performing spoken word at the Heidelberg Project in Detroit, MI) did for the liturgical “season” being adopted by some churches including St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Detroit. It is called the Season of Creation (Sept 1 to Oct 4). The focus on this Sunday (September 1, 2019) was on the oceans. J-Perk included a number of biblical passages related to the seas and water and asked a few questions/made some comments [as indicated], before getting into the sermon proper.

Background

In the beginning, God created the Heavens and Earth. The Earth was without Form and Void, and Darkness was upon the Face of the Deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the Waters—Canaanite Mythology (Gen 1:1-2). Continue reading “Why Faith Must Learn the Language of Flood: Water as Apocalyptic Witness of Last Resort” →

Don’t Touch

On September 7, 2019September 8, 2019 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Cloud of Witnesses, Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

An excerpt from Daniel Berrigan: Essential Writings (ed. John Dear, p.50).

One day, as we were being taken handcuffed from the jail for a court appearance, a young nun who was a dear friend reached out her hand to mine in solidarity as we issued from the jail. One of the marshalls came forward in a swift, reptilian move. He crashed down between our hands with a karate blow. “Don’t touch!” It was the epitome of the system; he had said it all.

Don’t touch–make war. Don’t touch–be abstract, about God and death and life and love. Don’t touch–make war at a distance. Don’t touch your enemies, except to destroy them. Don’t touch, because in the touch of hand to hand is Michelangelo’s electric moment of creation. Don’t touch, because law and order have so decreed, limiting the touch of one person to another, to the touch of nightsticks upon flesh. Continue reading “Don’t Touch” →

The Way Costs Exactly Everything

On September 6, 2019September 5, 2019 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

By Wes Howard-Brook & Sue Ferguson Johnson (on Luke 14:25-33)

*Note: this piece was originally posted to Radical Discipleship during the summer of 2016.

It is no mystery who Luke’s audience is in this week’s Gospel (14.25-33): “For which of you, intending to build a tower (Gk, purgon)…” (14.28). Clearly, this is not a building plan envisioned by landless peasants, lepers and other poor and marginalized people. Luke is speaking here to the young elite of the Roman Empire, seeking to instill in them the cost of rejecting their imperial formation and choosing Jesus’ Way of discipleship. Continue reading “The Way Costs Exactly Everything” →

White Ain’t God

On September 2, 2019September 2, 2019 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Subverting Empire, Theological Animation2 Comments

As RadicalDiscipleship.net approaches Her 5-year birthday this month, we will start posting more frequently from the archives. This classic is from the prophetic imagination of Nick Peterson, currently pursuing his PhD in Liturgics and Ethics at Emory University.

*Originally re-posted from social media in April 2016.

As a powerful but vain imagination, white supremacy attempts to imprison God to whiteness. In a white supremacist framework – God has a white sentence without parole. While confined, God must look white, talk white, think white, affirm white, bless white, and value, above all things, “his” own image made in whiteness. White supremacy attempts to hold the very God of the universe in chains – theological, liturgical, spiritual, creedal, geographical, social, emotional, and political. Continue reading “White Ain’t God” →

I Speak from the Deep Throated Voice of a Survivor

On September 1, 2019August 28, 2019 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Feminist/Womanist/Queer Liberation and Theology, Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

Biography as Theology from the Front Porch of Mother Ruby Sales (posted to Facebook August 28, 2019).

My story which is both a Black story and an American one. It is a story shaped by more than fifty years of watching and wading in the ebb and flow of White supremacy in America. It is the story of both a survivor and freedom fighter who has experienced the best and worst of America.

Our story

“They are bringing drugs and sending their criminals.”

“Go back to where you come from.”

“Go back to your crime ridden neighborhoods.” Continue reading “I Speak from the Deep Throated Voice of a Survivor” →

Too Big—and Failing! Jesus’ Cure for Affluenza

On August 30, 2019August 21, 2019 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Sabbath Economics, Subverting Empire, Theological Animation1 Comment

By Ched Myers, on Luke 14:1-14

Note: This is part of a series of weekly comments on the Lukan gospel readings from the Revised Common Lectionary during year C, 2016. This week’s gospel text is related to last week’s; see the background comments for last week here. Much of the post below is adapted from a sermon given at Downers Grove (IL) First United Methodist Church on 10/10/10.

Luke 14:2-6 is unaccountably skipped over in the lectionary. Yet it is profoundly germane to last week’s reading, and moreover introduces the theme of the whole sequence through 14:24: namely, the issue of how social power and privilege is mirrored in meals, and what to do about it. So I strongly advocate re-instating this beginning episode as part of this Sunday’s gospel. Continue reading “Too Big—and Failing! Jesus’ Cure for Affluenza” →

Scaffolding This Appalling Silence

On August 26, 2019August 25, 2019 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation2 Comments

By Tommy Airey

Late last month, Ruby Sales lobbed me my first reading assignment: The Awful Grace of God: Religious Terrorism, White Supremacy and the Unsolved Murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock. Over the phone, she delivered a tutorial on its fresh relevance for late stage racial capitalism. We hung up a week before white men targeted Black and Brown bystanders in El Paso and Dayton.

As it turns out, the real terrorists are white Christians. The Awful Grace of God details the ways and means of white pastors and their KKK-congregants who conspired to kill Dr. King in the 50’s and 60’s. This clandestine movement fused religious passion, reactionary politics and the spirituality of hatred. By 1967, the price on Dr. King’s head was $100,000. The news of this rapidly circulated through federal prisons, where King’s supposed killer James Earl Ray was about to escape. Of course, this strand is still alive and well, but as King himself noted time and time again, the greatest tragedy remains “not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.” The grandest conspiracy of all is the collective denial of white supremacy in all its insidious forms. Continue reading “Scaffolding This Appalling Silence” →

Seeking Right Relationship

On August 24, 2019August 18, 2019 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

An excerpt from Clare Grady’s oral arguments earlier this month in Georgia. Clare is a member of the Kingsbay Plowshares 7.

At this point, I would like to take a moment to look at the word religion. I learned that it has its roots in the word re-ligament. I translate that as re align, or to be in right relationship. Before I finish my time, I would like to share a few paragraphs from my affidavit and my testimony from the evidentiary hearing. All of my testimony was about religion, was about seeking right relationship. I will begin with a passage I quoted from Mark’s gospel chapter 12. It was the Sunday Mass reading on November 9, 1958, the day that I was born. In many ways it has been a rudder in my faith journey, one that has informed my religious beliefs, choices and practices. Continue reading “Seeking Right Relationship” →

Healing as Liberation from Crippling Debt

On August 23, 2019August 21, 2019 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Sabbath Economics, Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

By Ched Myers, on Luke 13:10-17

Note: This is part of a series of weekly comments on the Lukan gospel readings from the Revised Common Lectionary during year C, 2016.

This part of Luke’s gospel offers two symbolic stories about the healing of “political bodies” that signify pathology in the body politic: the “bent over” woman (13:10-17) and the “too big” man (14:1-6). Sadly, the second of these is (literally) skipped over by the lectionary. These intimately related healings bracket a series of Jesus’ sayings concerning the Kingdom as surprise and mystery (13:18-21), the “narrow Way” (13:22-30) and the cost of prophetic discipleship (13:31-35). Continue reading “Healing as Liberation from Crippling Debt” →