Category: Subverting Empire

Wild Lectionary: Guided by the Spirit

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TreeThird Sunday After Pentecost
Proper 8(13)

Galatians 5:1, 13-25

By Christy Thomson

I recently returned from a month-long work trip to Europe where I spent some time in Slovenia facilitating a training. My work as a trainer and mentor for ANFT (Association of Nature and Forest Therapy guides and programs) is rewarding, challenging and gives me ample opportunity to face the questions this week’s reading brings to mind; am I living in the Spirit? Do I allow the Spirit to be my guide? What does it look like/feel like to live in the Spirit?

If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit. Galatians 5:25 Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Guided by the Spirit” →

A Scandalous Shock to the System

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CenturionBy Wes Howard-Brook and Sue Ferguson Johnson, on this Sunday’s Gospel text (Luke 7:1-10)

*Originally posted on May 27, 2016.

All the dynamics of this week’s passage from Luke’s Gospel are “wrong.” For instance, how are we to imagine Jewish elders in Capernaum speaking on behalf of a Roman centurion? Further, they paint him as the primary patron of their synagogue. And not only this, but the centurion sends the elders to Jesus, at this point in Luke’s narrative, an itinerant preacher and healer with no official authority at all. Finally, Jesus praises the centurion for having a faith that Jesus has not found among the people of Israel. What could be going on here? Continue reading “A Scandalous Shock to the System” →

The Sources We Choose

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation1 Comment

MurchThis is the conclusion of an essay in The Guardian written by Donna Murch, professor of history at Rutgers University and author of the prize-winning book Living for the City: Migration, Education and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. Murch reflects on a controversial essay recently published by the American historian David Garrow in a conservative British magazine about alleged sexual misconduct of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Garrow utilizes FBI records that will not be released to the public until 2027.

…it is worth thinking about what lessons can be drawn from the larger historical debate. The most obvious is the importance of responsibly using state sources, particularly those from law enforcement and intelligence agencies that may be actively involved in shaping the events they purport to represent. Given the vast expansion of policing, incarceration and surveillance in the US over the past half century, this concern extends well beyond the particulars of Garrow’s claims. Continue reading “The Sources We Choose” →

We Sat up There Singing “This Little Light of Mine”

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Cornel WestAn excerpt from a New York Times interview with Dr. Cornel West.

What is distinctive about our moment is the relative cowardliness of the liberal and neoliberal middle. The right wing in the last 10 to 15 years has simply become more visible, but they don’t constitute the vast majority of the people. What you do have is a neoliberal and liberal center that is so weak and feeble, so cowardly and milquetoast, that they don’t have the enthusiasm or the energy that the right wing has.

You know, when I was in Charlottesville, they looked at me in the eye and I looked at them in the eye. They got their guns, their ammunition, they got their gas masks on, and we sat up there singing “This Little Light of Mine.” Continue reading “We Sat up There Singing “This Little Light of Mine”” →

The Realities of a Democratized Base

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RubyFrom the Front Porch of Mother Ruby Sales (June 11, 2019).

Dear Speaker Pelosi,

You continually say that impeachment will divide the country. Madame Speaker the country is already divided from White nationalism and White heterosexist elitist White Christian patriarchy.

Further there can not be unity when Trump carries out a reign of terror against Black and Brown adult and child refugees who seek refuge at the gates of US. Nor can there exist unity when Black women’s babies are dying at the birthing stool from medical neglect in a medical industrial complex where our bodies matter less than all other women. Continue reading “The Realities of a Democratized Base” →

Thoughts on an Imperial God

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CPIBy Mark Van Steenwyk of the Center for Prophetic Imagination (Minneapolis, MN)

This piece was originally posted on Patheos.

Ours is a civilized god. He is distant, floating high above the world, refusing to be dirtied by it. He is the Supreme Hierarch, the Ruler of All. The Great Architect, looking down over all of creation and ordering it according to his Divine Blueprint. Of all of the things he’s created, he likes human beings the best. Sometimes he communicates to some of these humans, revealing to them part of his Divine Blueprint. Our primary relationship with this god is one of obedience; we are to do his will so that things can work according to the Blueprint. Continue reading “Thoughts on an Imperial God” →

Changing Out Our Western Lenses

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Randy WoodleyFrom the introduction of Randy Woodley’s May 2019 Sojourners Magazine piece “The Fullness Thereof.”

CHANGE YOUR LENSES, please. Okay, maybe you can’t simply change lenses right now, but would you at least notice the lenses you are currently wearing? If you are like, say, 99.9 percent of us in the U.S., you have been influenced by a very particular set of perspectives that interpret life from an Enlightenment-bound Western worldview.

All of our lenses have various perspectival tints, but Western worldviews seem to have several in common, including the foundational influence of Platonic dualism, inherited from the Greeks. This particular influence absolutizes the realm of the abstract (spirit, soul, mind) and reduces the importance of the concrete realm (earth, body, material), disengaging them from one another. In dualistic thinking, we are no longer an existing whole. Continue reading “Changing Out Our Western Lenses” →

Dad’s “Heart Shield” Bible

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By Ken Sehested

Pictured below is my Dad’s “Heart Shield” Bible, a copy of the New Testament on to which a metal plate front cover has been attached. The engraved cover, now smudged by corrosion, reads “May this keep you safe from harm.” It was sold by the Know Your Bible Sales Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, manufactured by the Whitman Publishing Company, Racine, Wisconsin, and was designed to fit into a soldier’s uniform shirt pocket. Multiple stories exist of soldiers reportedly spared serious injury when bullets struck this tiny piece of body armor.

Dad's _Shield and New Testament_

An inscription inside the cover indicates that Dad’s sister, my Aunt Juanita, gave him this gift. No date is listed, but it was sometime before Dad landed with the first wave of soldiers storming Omaha Beach in the June 1944 Allies’ D-Day invasion on the French coast in World War II. Dad was among the fortunate survivors, though he carried for the remainder of his life a piece of German artillery shrapnel embedded in bone behind his right ear. Continue reading “Dad’s “Heart Shield” Bible” →

To Flip the Script of What a Christian Minister Can Be

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Ben2By Ben Wideman, campus minister for the 3rd Way Collective in State College, PA

*This is part of a series of pieces from contributors all over North America each answering the question, “How would you define radical discipleship?” We will be posting responses regularly on Mondays during 2019.

Discipleship is a word that gets tossed around a lot in campus ministry. It is at the core of many different organizations on our campus. We even have a campus ministry that was founded at Penn State and now present on more than a dozen campuses across the country called DiscipleMakers. Most of these organizations see discipleship as a sending call to embody a literal biblical call to make non-believers or non-practicing Christians into disciples of Christ (based on the Matthew 28 passage often referred to as the Great Commission). Continue reading “To Flip the Script of What a Christian Minister Can Be” →