Category: Subverting Empire

Shareholder Activists Take On Exxon-Mobil

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Sabbath Economics, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment
Sister Pat
Dominican Sr. Patricia Daly. (Courtesy of Tri-State Coalition for Responsible Investment)

An important report from National Catholic Reporter’s Brian Roewe on shareholder activism:

When ExxonMobil shareholders overwhelmingly voted in late May in favor of a resolution aimed at shedding light on the impacts of addressing climate change on the oil company’s long-term assets, Dominican Sr. Patricia Daly was among those beaming brightest.

“This was very sweet,” said the director emeritus of the Tri-State Coalition for Responsible Investment, which spans Connecticut, New Jersey and New York.

Through investment groups like the coalition, which comprises 40 Catholic institutions, and the larger Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, she and other faith-based investors have been working for two decades to bring about change at Exxon in how it recognizes and responds to climate change.

At the annual ExxonMobil meeting in Dallas May 31, the shareholder resolution, co-filed by the New York Common Retirement Fund and the Church of England and joined by the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility and 50 other institutions representing $5 trillion in managed assets, received 62.3 percent of the shareholders’ vote — the highest ever at Exxon for a climate-related measure.

The resolution, which Exxon opposed, seeks for the world’s largest energy company to produce an annual report of the long-term impacts on its oil and gas reserves from global climate policies aimed at restricting average temperature rise well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and as low as 1.5 degrees C — the primary goal of the Paris Agreement on climate change, which calls for drastic cuts in carbon emissions and a global shift toward a zero-carbon economy in order to meet the 2 C target and avert the worst climate impacts.

Read the rest of the article HERE.

The Fierce Urgency of Now

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FierceBy Ched Myers, originally posted in the June 2017 BCM eNews

Note: Below are edited and excerpted comments from Ched’s keynote to the annual dinner of the Cal-Pac Chapter of the Methodist Federation for Social Action and Reconciling Ministries Network, at the University of Redlands, CA on June 17, 2017.

It’s a formidable task to come up with 15 minutes of inspiration and exhortation to a group like this, given that your vocations have long been forged around the work of inspiring and exhorting. So I’ll leave that task to one who inspired and exhorted all of us, and does so still: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the author of tonight’s thematic meme: “The fierce urgency of now.”

It is both relevant and poignant that this very phrase anchored two of Dr. King’s most famous public addresses, speeches that bracketed the second half of his public career as a civil rights leader. It first appeared in his most well-known exhortation to the nation–you know, that one in front of the Lincoln memorial on Aug 27, 1963. “We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now,” intoned our greatest prophet. “Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.”
Continue reading “The Fierce Urgency of Now” →

Intricately Commingled

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Wild EdgeFrom Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow (2015):

…our lives are intricately commingled with one another, with animals, plants, watersheds, and soil.  For the last several centuries, we have envisioned a split between our inner lives and the surrounding world.  Psyche, however, is not confided to the deep interior of our lives; it overlaps with the wider world and perhaps, in these times, is most evident in the sorrows and suffering of the earth itself.

Happiness?

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SolnitFrom Rebecca Solnit, excerpted from her essay “The Mother of All Questions” (Harper’s Magazine, October 2015): 

Questions about happiness generally assume that we know what a happy life looks like. Happiness is understood to be a matter of having a great many ducks lined up in a row — spouse, offspring, private property, erotic experiences — even though a millisecond of reflection will bring to mind countless people who have all those things and are still miserable.
Continue reading “Happiness?” →

A Value Worth Working For

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

bellAn excerpt from an i-D.vice.com interview with author bell hooks:

What does the word ‘justice’ mean to you?

What we see in many cases is a white supremacy and what defines that as a political system is grave injustice. So justice has a value worth working for, worth sacrificing for. Dr Martin Luther King did talk a lot about justice, but I also think of a modern day activist like Bryan Stevenson, who is committed to trying to create justice for black children and black people who are unjustly imprisoned; he’s just amazing. Conversation is very connected to this, one of the books that we are looking at, at the institute, is called The Soul Making Room by Dee Dee Risher, who used to write for a Christian magazine called The Other Side. Her whole thesis is around the degree to which hospitality and willingness to engage the stranger aids us in efforts to end domination. I can’t think of a more appropriate moment to discuss this, as we going through such a rise in xenophobia and white supremacy at the moment. We need to talk about what it means to embrace people who are not like ourselves. Continue reading “A Value Worth Working For” →

The Jesus Story is What I’m Living Out Of

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Bill WKBy Tommy Airey, co-editor of RadicalDiscipleship.Net

The first half of a two-post interview with Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellermann.

Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellermann is a man who has reclaimed civil disobedience as a spiritual practice and a vital component of Christian ministry for the past four decades in Detroit.  An ordained United Methodist minister, he only accepted part-time positions at churches in the city so that he could lavish time and energy into community organizing and direct action.  Back in the early 80’s, while serving a short stint in federal prison for an action at the Pentagon, the pastor-parish committee at his church inquired if it would be counted as “vacation time.”  His district supervisor countered, “Oh no.  Bill’s doing ministry.”  Continue reading “The Jesus Story is What I’m Living Out Of” →

Sabotaging Christian Supremacy

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Soul ForceFrom Soulforce.Org, an organization seeking to turn this world upside down and inside out in the name of justice and equity for folks across all marginalized racial, sexual, and gender identities:

Christian Supremacy is not new; the project of empire has snatched Christianity and put it into service for hundreds of years, especially in the United States and its business partners.

Calling out Christian Supremacy is new; recognizing that the struggles against white supremacy, capitalism, and (neo)colonization – to name a few – are intricately tied to how certain sectors and expressions of Christianity are driven by power over, not justice. Continue reading “Sabotaging Christian Supremacy” →

Awakening Moments

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GethAn excerpt from an interview with Dr. James Finley, who left home at the age of 18 for the Abbey of Gethsemane (photo right) in Trappist, Kentucky, where Thomas Merton lived as a contemplative. Finley stayed at the monastery for six years, living the traditional Trappist life of prayer, silence, and solitude:

Question: We hear about “spontaneous experiences of awakening, ” but for some of us this concept doesn’t seem real. How common are these “awakenings, ” and what does it mean to be “faithful” to them?

James Finely: There are moments in life when there’s a visceral certitude that the “awakening” experience is real, and precious. By their very nature these moments are self-authenticating: that whatever the greater meaning of life is about, that I am now glimpsing something of that essence. There is an intuition that in this instant you are glimpsing the true nature of the one unending moment in which our lives unfold.  Continue reading “Awakening Moments” →

Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed

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Vern RAnother short and sweet book review-summary from legendary pastor Vern Ratzlaff, posting up on the Canadian prairies, pouring his heart and mind into anti-imperial theology and soul-tending.  Vern turns 80 this week.  As Ched Myers noted a few days ago: “in his long ministry he has opened so many new ways of being Anabaptist in a pluralistic world, ways that many of us try to walk with him.” We honor this elder for his service and way-of-Being in the world–a model of radical discipleship.

Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed. William Herzog, Westminster, 1994.

Herzog focuses on the parables from the social/cultural analysis of Freire, Brazilian educator, whose work with the poor brought new attention to what could help people accept a perspective that would move beyond the immediate poverty and loss of hope. Herzog traces carefully the shifting interpretation systems of Jesus ‘the Parabaler’ and presents an interpretational approach that compares it with Freire’s methodology. Continue reading “Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed” →