Category: Subverting Empire

Mark as Manifesto

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BindingWe continue our every-Sunday-celebration of the 30th anniversary of Binding The Strong Man, Ched Myers’ political reading of Mark’s Gospel.

Mark’s Gospel originally was written to help imperial subjects learn the hard truth about their world and themselves. He does not pretend to represent the word of God dispassionately or impartially, as if that word were innocuously universal in its appeal to rich and poor alike.  His is a story by, about, and for those committed to God’s work of justice, compassion, and liberation in the world. To modern theologians, like the Pharisees, Mark offers no “signs from heaven” (Mark 8:11f). To scholars who, like the chief priests, refuse to ideologically commit themselves, he offers no answer (Mk 11:30-33). But to those willing to raise the wrath of the empire, Mark offers a way of discipleship (8:34ff). Continue reading “Mark as Manifesto” →

A Prayer for Sacred and Wondrous Child Warriors of Mother Earth

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LylaBy Lyla June Johnston (right), a Diné singer, writer, and activist specializing in intergenerational and inter-ethnic healing, as well as Indigenous philosophy. This is a prayer she posted to social media on July 27, 2018.

Dear creator, may you help me and may you help the people of the world to release their fear and replace it with faith and compassion. May you help us to seek and find joy in this life. May we find bravery in the midst of so many shadows dancing in the mind. May you give us the strength to cry, and the courage to bear our hearts to the river and to the sky that we may bring all of those fears and worries we buried deep inside and lay them down on the bosom of the earth where they may heal. Let us not be afraid to feel and not be afraid of being afraid for a time. Let us come with our truth and come with our beauty. Help us to remember that we are beautiful sacred and wondrous child Warriors of Mother Earth. Give us the opportunities and the skills we need to give life and to protect life. And most of all give us peace when others present us with war. Give us love when others present us with hate. Give us smiles and laughter when others present us with petty lies. Give us the strength to pray for those that we respect the least. And give us the opportunity to plant seeds in the dirt that some day might grow into beautiful gifts for the next generation. Let us live our lives in such a way that our great-grandchildren look back and see that in the face of so much hardship we were brave and we were kind and we were loving.

The Erotic

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Feminist/Womanist/Queer Liberation and Theology, Subverting Empire1 Comment

AudreAn excerpt from Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of the Erotic.”

The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, and plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling. Continue reading “The Erotic” →

The Resistance We Want to See

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Sabbath Economics, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

Wrecking BallToday, we highlight the subversive, sacrificial decision made by Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters in San Francisco. They turned down a $40,000 contract for a large conference because the company contracts with U.S. Customs and Border Protection to help with the agency’s recruiting and “drive efficiencies around how U.S. border activities are managed.” Below are a few excerpts from a recent article in The San Francisco Chronicle.

Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters gets opportunities to brew thousands of cups of coffee at massive conferences only a few times a year. So when George P. Johnson Experience Marketing, which contracts with Salesforce to provide catering services for Dreamforce, reached out to Wrecking Ball owners Nick Cho and Trish Rothgeb, the two said they eagerly entered into discussion. Continue reading “The Resistance We Want to See” →

Theology in Pharoah’s Household

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation1 Comment

BindingWe continue our celebration of the 30th anniversary of Binding The Strong Man, Ched Myers’ political reading of Mark’s Gospel.  Today, as the lectionary pivots to the Gospel of John, we share an excerpt from the Intro of Binding.  

Those doing theological reflection from a vantage point on the peripheries have properly focused upon the themes of liberation in the story of exodus.  We at the center, however, have no choice but to learn to “do theology in pharoah’s household“–that is, to take the side of the Hebrews even though citizens of Egypt.  There is a significant minority of Christians in the U.S.A. and other First World countries who are struggling to find a lifestyle and politics that does just that.  This movement also constitutes the site from which I read Mark. Continue reading “Theology in Pharoah’s Household” →

The Antithesis of Activism

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

bellAn excerpt from Killing Rage: Ending Racism (1995) by bell hooks:

Confronting my rage, witnessing the way it moved me to grow and change, I understood intimately that it had the potential not only to destroy but also to construct.  Then and now I understand rage to be a necessary aspect of resistance struggle.  Rage can act as a catalyst inspiring courageous action.  By demanding that black people repress and annihilate our rage to assimilate, to reap the benefits of material privilege in white supremacist capitalist patriarchal culture, white folks urge us to remain complicit with their efforts to colonize, oppress and exploit.  Those of us black people who have the opportunity to further our economic status willingly surrender our rage.  Many of us have no rage.  As individual black people increase their class power, live in comfort, with money mediating the viciousness of racist assault, we can come to see both the society and white people differently.  We experience the world as infinitely less hostile to blackness than it actually is.  This shift happens particularly as we buy into liberal individualism and see our individual fate as black people in no way linked to collective fate.  it is that link that sustains full awareness of the daily impact of racism on black people, particularly its hostile and brutal assaults… Continue reading “The Antithesis of Activism” →

Sheep Without a Shepherd

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

BindingWe continue our celebration of the 30th anniversary of Binding The Strong Man, Ched Myers’ political reading of Mark’s Gospel.  Today’s passage is Mark 6:30-34.

…Mark is decidedly presenting Jesus as an “organizer,” but with the intention of feeding the needy, not plotting a military campaign on Jerusalem.  This however, hardly makes the narrative ideology less subversive!  Indeed, there is an implied political criticism here, which we see if we do not limit the intertextuality to the Joshua tradition.  The “sheep without a shepherd” motif is seized upon by the prophets to criticize the leadership of Israel.  Ezekiel 34 spins a parable around it that specifically condemns class stratification: “I will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep” (Ez 34:20).  The ruling class protects its privilege rather than the collective prosperity of the people, becoming predator instead of the shepherd: Continue reading “Sheep Without a Shepherd” →

The Decolonization of the Cherished Figure of Man

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BorderFrom Bayo Akomolafe of The Emergence Network, social media post June 18, 2018.

Reading about the heart-breaking stories of immigrant children at American borders who are snatched from their parents (literally from their mothers’ breasts), tagged, categorized, renamed, hushed, and assigned spots in surveilled warehouses, reinforces several points for me:

1. We often become what we strenuously resist: In its effort to keep the exteriorized ‘outside’ at bay, the American nation-state is exhibiting the same gestures of biopolitical subjectivization that characterized gruesome dictatorial regimes it once claimed to be morally superior to. Already, grainy images of old Nazi concentration camps and the haunting language of finality (Stephen Miller’s “simple decision” sounds eerily similar to Nazi Germany’s “final solution”) are sweeping through the Internet, drawing startling connections between the US and the Third Reich. The lesson here? Exceptionalism is pricey. The reward for hard-line protectionist policies might be safety, but their real cost is the loss of the freedom to be otherwise. The same move that freezes the outside is the very same gesture that damns the inside to its own prison. Continue reading “The Decolonization of the Cherished Figure of Man” →

Parody Exposing Power

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

BindingWe continue our celebration of the 30th anniversary of Binding The Strong Man, Ched Myers’ political reading of Mark’s Gospel.  Today’s passage is Mark 6:14-29.

The portrayal of the Herodian court intrigue gives an even sharper edge to the episode; the dinner party (6:21-28) becomes the occasion for the murderous whims of the ruling class of Galilee to be revealed.  The guest list of his birthday banquet (6:21) reflects, in the words of Sherwin-White, “the court and establishment of a petty Jewish prince under strong Roman influence:”

  1.  his court nobles (tois megistasin)
  2.  his army officers (tois chiliarchois)
  3.  leading Galileans (tois protois tes Galilaias).

Mark accurately describes the inner circle of power as an incestuous relationship involving governmental, military, and commercial interests. Continue reading “Parody Exposing Power” →

We Begin to Flow

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Feminist/Womanist/Queer Liberation and Theology, Race, Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

Alice WalkerBy Alice Walker, from a talk she gave at Auburn Theological Seminary (NYC, April 1995) in Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism (1997):

It is fatal to love a God who does not love you. A God specifically created to comfort, lead, advise, strengthen and enlarge the tribal borders of someone else. We have been beggars at the table of a religion that sanctioned our destruction. Our own religions denied, forgotten; our own ancestral connection to All Creation something of which we are ashamed. I maintain that we are empty, lonely, without our pagan-heathen ancestors; that we must lively them up within ourselves, and begin to see them as whole and necessary and correct: their Earth-centered, female-reverencing religions, like their architecture, agriculture, and music, suited perfectly to the lives they led. And lead, those who are left, today. Continue reading “We Begin to Flow” →