Category: Subverting Empire

Another Word is in the Wind: A Psalm of Complaint and Avowal

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance, Subverting Empire1 Comment

prayer and politiksBy Ken Sehested, the curator of Prayer & Politiks

Have mercy upon us, O Lord.
Our soul has had more than its fill
of the scorn of those who are at ease,
of the contempt of the proud.
—Psalm 123:3-4

In the end, if we are left to our own devices—to our
own amalgam of brains and brawn, of ingenuity and
charisma, sleight of hand and strength of arm, in
mobilizing sufficient force to bend the will of others
to our own, in accordance to self-ordained vision
masquerading as fate’s foreordained history—then
nothing is forbidden. All authority is subsumed in
the will to power. Continue reading “Another Word is in the Wind: A Psalm of Complaint and Avowal” →

Adventures on the Elliptical, Part I: Where’s the Beef?

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Just Peacemaking, Sabbath Economics, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment
Abundant Table
Walking the Stations of the Cross at the Abundant Table Food Project in Oxnard, CA.

By Tommy Airey, co-editor of RadicalDiscipleship.net

*This post kicks-off a new series on Wednesdays exploring the movement of Spirit during mealtime.  

Give us meat for our food.
Numbers 11:13

Sometimes I sneak inside the local gym here in Ypsilanti and spend thirty minutes on the elliptical. The AC is on and a half dozen TVs are right in front of me.  A few weeks ago, I was sweating to a sports talk show host lamenting his wife’s newfound veganism. It is the oldest, most tiring go-to in the counterfeit masculinity playbook. I knew exactly what he was going to say next: “I just want to go out and have a steak with my guy friends.” And then he droned on about the whole pathetic ordeal for the entire segment.

Seven years ago, Lindsay and I became vegetarians after watching the Academy Award winning documentary Food, Inc. and then reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals.  I attribute this conversion mostly to Michael Smith, a former traveling salesmen now living in Iceland snapping photos of the Northern Lights with his girlfriend Inga.  I was Michael’s freshman basketball coach.  I taught him how to ball fake and skip pass.  Now he feeds me the latest on the state of the heavily corporatized meat and dairy industries.  I got the better end of the bargain.   Continue reading “Adventures on the Elliptical, Part I: Where’s the Beef?” →

“Unity” That Is Predicated Upon My Exclusion

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Feminist/Womanist/Queer Liberation and Theology, Race, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

sarahBy Sarah Matsui, a re-post from The Mennonite

People pray to each other. The way I say “you” to someone else, / respectfully, intimately, desperately. The way someone says / “you” to me, hopefully, expectantly, intensely…
Huub Oosterhuis

Zach (not his real name) and I are still friends.

When I was living and working as a teacher in Philly, Zach remembered the challenges he had experienced during his one year teaching.

Without my asking, he cooked delicious dinners and invited me to a break from my usual peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and instant ramen. In retrospect, his were among the only nutritionally sound meals I ate during my first year of teaching. He also made a point to ask me how I was doing and how my students were doing, and he prayed for us. Continue reading ““Unity” That Is Predicated Upon My Exclusion” →

Charlottesville: A Reading List

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Subverting Empire, Theological Animation2 Comments

AlexanderA great list of resources from The New York Public Library’s Gwen Glazer, Librarian, Readers Services (see original post here): 

Events of the past week have left many of us struggling for understanding. In such times, it can help to turn to books and authors to help us see the world through a broader lens.

The Library always seeks to provide information, so we’ve assembled a list of books—on bigotry, white supremacy, racism, anti-Semitism, social justice, freedom of speech, and more—that can lend context to the events in Charlottesville and beyond.

Racism and Anti-Semitism in America

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi

Jackson, 1964: And Other Dispatches from Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America by Calvin Trillin

The Blood of Emmett Till by Timothy Tyson

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law by James Q. Whitman

The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan by Laurence Leamer

The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men by Eric Lichtblau Continue reading “Charlottesville: A Reading List” →

My “Nonviolent” Stance Was Met With Heavily Armed Men

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Just Peacemaking, Race, Subverting Empire115 Comments

AntifaA post from Logan Rimel, parish administrator at University Lutheran Chapel of Berkeley (CA). Logan traveled to Charlottesville during the weekend of August 5 to bear witness with his friends at Charis Community Cville.

Some thoughts on nonviolence post-Charlottesville:

TLDR: White Christians, if you aren’t willing to personally take a bat to the head, shut up about antifa.

My FB feed, podcast feed, workplace conversations, and church chit chat are circling around Charlottesville, antifa, violence/nonviolence, white folks quoting Dr. King, white supremacy, neo-Nazis…It’s hard to get away from it. There’s part of me that doesn’t want to, that wants to keep refreshing the feed, taking in more, trying to read the next thing and the next thing. Maybe if I keep myself submerged here, what I saw will make sense. Continue reading “My “Nonviolent” Stance Was Met With Heavily Armed Men” →

Imagination

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation1 Comment

BrownFrom adrienne maree brown‘s brilliant new book Emergent Strategy (2017):

It is so important that we fight for the future, get into the game, get dirty, get experimental.  How do we create and proliferate a compelling vision of economies and ecologies that center humans and the natural world over the accumulation of material?

We embody.  We learn.  We release the idea of failure, because it’s all data.

But first we imagine.

We are in an imagination battle. Continue reading “Imagination” →

To Step Back & Let New People Direct the Conversation

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance, Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

AidenAn announcement from our comrade up north Aiden Enns (right) of Geez Magazine:

After much reflection and in close conversation with the board of directors, I’ve decided that now is a good time for me to retire from my
post as editor of Geez magazine. I plan to make the Winter 2017 edition my 48th and final issue.

Geez magazine started 12 years ago under the tagline, “holy mischief in
an age of fast faith” in order to poke and prod at the pitfalls of
mainstream religion. Continue reading “To Step Back & Let New People Direct the Conversation” →

Whose Violence? Which Insurgence?: White Supremacy in the Mirror of Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Subverting Empire, Theological Animation1 Comment

Nat TurnerBy Dr. James Perkinson, Ecumenical Theological Seminary (Detroit, MI), prepared comments presented at Hartford Memorial Baptist Church’s “Social Justice Forum,” October 21, 2016 in response to the film

It was a Jewish man, Walter Benjamin, during WWII, who once said, “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if [it] wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious” (Benjamin, 255)

Nat Turner’s spirit is buried beneath the shouts and cries (Cone, 61)

It is a deep honor to be asked to offer a few words in memory of so courageous and clear a spirit of resolve as Nat Turner. It is an honor doubly difficult to measure up to in that my skin is white and my life circumstance therefore privileged with respect to Turner’s color and condition and the people whose struggle for justice he represented with such determination and daring that it presaged the only resolution of the institution of slavery white people would accept. War. And it is a war that has never yet ceased. And so my standing here today is not innocent. Continue reading “Whose Violence? Which Insurgence?: White Supremacy in the Mirror of Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation” →

A Rolling Plowshares

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

DAPLIf you haven’t already, meet Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya, Catholic Workers from Des Moines, Iowa, who secretly carried out multiple acts of sabotage and arson in recent months in order to stop construction of the controversial $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline. These are excerpts from a longer interview with Amy Goodman on DemocracyNow.Org:

Ruby Montoya on what they did:

So, on election night, we went to a DAPL easement site in Buena Vista County, and we saw over six or seven pieces of heavy machinery there. And we went with our supplies, and we filled these coffee canisters up with gasoline and oil. We placed those coffee canisters on the inside of the cabs of these heavy machinery, on the seats, and we pierced those coffee canisters so that the flammable liquids would spread. We then lit matches and—in efforts to make those machines obsolete.

We acted after having exhausted all other avenues of political process and resistance to this petroleum pipeline that, to my knowledge, is the largest in the United States as far as the capacity that it is able to carry the oil.

Continue reading “A Rolling Plowshares” →