Category: Subverting Empire

Vote or Don’t: The Issues are Larger than Elections

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VoteBy Ken Sehested

To my friends who question the value of voting, or have ethical qualms about choosing between the lesser of two evils: Vote, or don’t. Its significance will always lie somewhere between essential and useless. None of us is allowed to assess any action as ultimate—but that’s no license for skepticism or despondence.

Voting is such a small part of our commonwealth duty. I spend more time in grocery store lines every month than in polling stations every year. Elections are but the end result of an advocacy for the common good that starts in each watershed. Imagine a different future, find collaborators, and spend yourself extravagantly. Continue reading “Vote or Don’t: The Issues are Larger than Elections” →

Like a Roadmap of Resistance

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4.2.7By Chava Redonnet, Oscar Romero Inclusive Catholic Church (Rochester, NY)

When I first visited El Salvador in 2005 with a class from Divinity School, we went to the Divina Providencia cancer hospital where Monseñor Romero lived (because he refused to live in the bishop’s palace when the people were living in such terrible conditions). We were there again, on Thursday, October 11, just a few days before his canonization. A Carmelite nun showed us around, and I told her the story of how on my first visit there, I looked at all of his things – daily objects, so lovingly preserved – all so male and old-fashioned and foreign – and they felt strange and distant. But then I saw a pair of clip-on sunglasses that had been his. They were identical to a pair of my own! I could have bought them at Wegmans. And it hit me: this struggle is not some strange, distant, foreign thing. It’s here and it’s now, and the work continues. I am also a part of the struggle; the work is mine, as well. Continue reading “Like a Roadmap of Resistance” →

Seeking True Vision

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Binding30 years in and Ched Myers’ Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (1988) is more relevant than ever. We’ve got five more Sundays to celebrate it! This week’s commentary homes in on Mark 10:46-52.

The community now approaches the suburbs of Jerusalem. Mark opens this second story of a blind man as he did the first: “And they came into” (kai erchontai; see 8:22) Jericho. Mark sets a scene for this episode, which was no doubt familiar to anyone who had gone to Jerusalem on pilgrimage. Jericho was the last stop en route to the city of David; the road out of town, representing the final, fifteen-mile leg of the pilgrim’s journey, would have been the standard beat for much of that city’s beggar population. The odds were good that pilgrims would have the mood and means to give alms. There Jesus, the disciples, and a great crowd meet Bartimaeus, the destitute blind man. Continue reading “Seeking True Vision” →

Our Polarized Landscape

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Hidden TribesFrom a recent piece in The Atlantic summarizing the recently released report Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape.

If you look at what Americans have to say on issues such as immigration, the extent of white privilege, and the prevalence of sexual harassment, the authors argue, seven distinct clusters emerge: progressive activists, traditional liberals, passive liberals, the politically disengaged, moderates, traditional conservatives, and devoted conservatives.

According to the report, 25 percent of Americans are traditional or devoted conservatives, and their views are far outside the American mainstream. Some 8 percent of Americans are progressive activists, and their views are even less typical. By contrast, the two-thirds of Americans who don’t belong to either extreme constitute an “exhausted majority.” Their members “share a sense of fatigue with our polarized national conversation, a willingness to be flexible in their political viewpoints, and a lack of voice in the national conversation.”

Most members of the “exhausted majority,” and then some, dislike political correctness. Among the general population, a full 80 percent believe that “political correctness is a problem in our country.” Even young people are uncomfortable with it, including 74 percent ages 24 to 29, and 79 percent under age 24. On this particular issue, the woke are in a clear minority across all ages.

…

Progressive activists are the only group that strongly backs political correctness: Only 30 percent see it as a problem.

So what does this group look like? Compared with the rest of the (nationally representative) polling sample, progressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly educated—and white. They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than $100,000 a year. They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree. And while 12 percent of the overall sample in the study is African American, only 3 percent of progressive activists are. With the exception of the small tribe of devoted conservatives, progressive activists are the most racially homogeneous group in the country.

Into the Jaws of a Crocodile

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Cross in desert (1)
PC: Rebecca Heskamp

By Joyce Hollyday

To our right the desert sunset was a dazzling blaze of gold with streaks of red behind towering saguaro cacti, as my partner Bill, our friend Becca, and I drove south from Phoenix to the Arizona-Mexico border. To our left a glowing, salmon-colored full moon rose and perched on a blue-gray mountain peak. We were on our way to participate with a hundred other people of faith from around the country in a week of prayer and protest, communion and confrontation, organized by the Southwest Conference of the United Church of Christ. Continue reading “Into the Jaws of a Crocodile” →

Help Wanted

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By Tommy Airey, co-curator of RadicalDiscipleship.net and the author of Descending Like a Dove: Adventures in Decolonizing Evangelical Christianity

Arrest (1)On that Spring day in Lansing, when Lindsay joined the band of holy rebels getting arrested for civil disobedience (right), I participated in civil discourse with a police officer hired to keep the peace at the peaceful demonstration. Despite the overtime pay, he wasn’t happy. He confessed that he was reluctant to support anyone too lazy to get off their butts to get a job. I shared with him the data—there are hundreds of jobs for hundreds of thousands of applicants. But he had a comeback: “No way. I see help wanted signs everywhere.” Continue reading “Help Wanted” →

I Speak of Jesus of Nazareth

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will-headshot4-225x300By Will O’Brien

While I loathe almost everything about the Trump Administration, it is fitting to applaud and be grateful for the release of Pastor Andrew Brunson after two years of detention in Turkey. Now it is time to turn our attention to another tragic case of a religious leader being unjustly imprisoned in a hostile country.

I speak of Jesus of Nazareth, who for many years has been imprisoned under harsh circumstances in the United States.  Reports suggest he has suffered brutal torture during his detention – some followers who have glimpsed him in prison say he has been beaten so badly they could hardly recognize him.  The regime insists that Jesus is not being detained and in fact has complete freedom to function in society, though in fact he has not been seen in public for many years.  Regime supporters also frequently mention him in positive terms, but his followers say the statements about him are utterly false and distorted, which they cite as further proof that Jesus himself is not in fact active in ministry.  Scattered appearances of “Jesus” are, according to human rights observers, highly staged state events, using a poorly disguised double.

The regime denies claims of Jesus’ imprisonment, labeling them “fake-Good New propaganda” by Jesus’ supporters, who it asserts are a threat to the social order.  International observers say that the Trump regime’s treatment of Jesus is a departure from similar situations under modern authoritarian rule, such as the case with Pastor Brunson:  Rather than charging the religious leader with crimes against the government as a justification for detention, the U.S. is instead denying the detention and instead promoting the notion that Jesus is free, active, and working in support of the government.  One regime spokesperson, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said, “We saw how Rome tried to handle Jesus through state-sanctioned law-and-order violence – which obviously didn’t work.  We felt that the strategy of Constantine was more appropriate to the U.S. situation, and so far it is working quite well” …

Alas, a little levity is in order, … but conscientious disciples must undertake the hard work of “liberating Jesus” if we are to have the power to be liberators.

 

On the Right and the Left

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Binding30 years in and Ched Myers’ Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (1988) is more relevant than ever. This week’s commentary homes in on Mark 10:35-45.

The petition by James and John shows that the disciples are still “deaf” to Jesus’ portents, continuing to understand his talk of the manifestation of the Human One’s “glory” (en te doxe sou) to mean some kind of messianic coup. Convinced their leader will prevail, they are already considering the administration of the new regime; they lobby for “first and second cabinet position.” The image of “sitting on the right and left” could be an allusion to Psalm 110:1, or to places at the messianic victory banquet, or subordinate thrones. In either case, it is an overtly political euphemism. Continue reading “On the Right and the Left” →

Functioning Democracy

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NoamAn excerpt from Noam Chomsky’s brilliant speech “Prospects for Survival.”

Let’s return finally to the main line of defense: functioning democracy. We can begin with the leader of the free world, the model of democracy for centuries.

In a democracy, the voice of the people is heard. Let’s ask what might happen in the United States if this principle were upheld. One consequence would be that the most popular and respected political figure in the country would have an influential role, maybe even be president. That’s Bernie Sanders, by a very large margin. Continue reading “Functioning Democracy” →

A Spirituality of the Feet Moment

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OzBy Dr. Oz Cole-Arnal (far left in photo), former professor emeritus at Waterloo Lutheran Seminary

As a “once upon a time” born-again fundamentalist Lutheran, nurtured and raised in a Pennsylvania steel town near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who bought into that epoch’s anti-Catholicism and anti-Communism, I reflected the standard “White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant—Male” (WASP-M) privilege while being blithely unaware of the advantages this reality provided. My intense discovery of the quintessential Protestant core belief that we are made right with God, through no works of our own but solely though divine love manifested through Christ’s cross and made personal through trust in this radical God of love, combined with my academic love and success, led me to the ordained Lutheran ministry and the hope of teaching New Testament after a stint in parish ministry. Such a dream was turned on its head by a more profound conversion on the evening of April 4, 1968 when the blood of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. poured out on the balcony of Memphis, Tennessee’s Lorraine Motel. At the very moment I heard the news of his death, I feel to my knees and through my tears, vowed never to be silent in the face of injustice. Whether or not I have been true to that pledge remains in God’s loving hands, precisely where it belongs, but I highlight here one glorious moment of a fifty-year pilgrimage that I celebrate to this very day. Continue reading “A Spirituality of the Feet Moment” →