Tonight, Christians for a Free Palestine will be hosting a virtual community call at 8pmEST. Register here.
Advent! A coming in the middle of endings! Join CFP witnesses and friends from across the country for a time of biblical reflection, action testimony, and ritual reinforcement to conclude the “season of actions” carried out by Solidarity Circle participants. CFP Solidarity Circles across the land have been organizing their voices and bodies enjoining Chevron to cease its support for the continuing Israel-U.S. genocide against Palestinians. The hour and a half will ramp up with sharp commentary provoked by apocalyptic visioning and counsel in the biblical text. It will feature 1st person reportage from the previous week of hands-on protest against fossil fuel complicity with the Gaza genocide, and conclude with worship honoring both grief and resistance. Come, watch, wait, prepare!
An offering from Red Candle, a new organization encouraging Christians to light a red candle during Advent in solidarity with Palestinian liberation. Click here to sign the pledge. Click here to order prints from Palestinian artists. Click here for resources, including a weekly Advent devotional.
American Palestinian Kendra Savusa reflects on her own experience as a peacemaker through this piece – a red candle burning against a black background. It speaks to the loneliness many Palestinians have felt while witnessing this ongoing genocide, and the isolation many advocates have faced within their own communities. Yet the light continues to shine. This candle symbolizes the hope we find in Christ, whose love drives out every darkness and calls us to keep shining, even when it feels lonely.
🍉 Mon, Dec 1 – Microsoft is perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal occupation, apartheid regime and ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza – which is why Microsoft is also now priority BDS target. Before the Christmas shopping season, take the pledge to boycott Xbox. Invite a person in your life (who plays Xbox!) to join you.
🍉 Tues, Dec 2 – Eat something you consider to be a treat today. Remind yourself that liberation work is sweet and the revolution ends with dancing.
🍉 Sun, Dec 7 – Find the nearest Chevron-linked target near your community on this map. (Note: they are not all gas stations!) Share the story of it with your network this week. Can you imagine a collective action you might participate in together?
🍉 Mon, Dec 8 – Plan a local Boycott Chevron caroling action with friends or family. Not prepared for that stage of action yet? Make a plan to play or share Boycott Chevron carols while hosting people at your house one day in Advent. Plan to discuss what you’ve learned about boycotts with them. (Shout out to our friends at CFP for these awesome caroling action materials!)
🍉 Tues, Dec 9 – Print or adapt these flyers and ask a local community or your favorite local business to pass them out over the Christmas shopping season.
🍉 Sun, Dec 14 – Request with your church’s worship team or leadership that Palestine (not simply “Gaza”) to be added to the prayers of the people on Sunday or Christmas Eve.
🍉 Sun, Dec 21 – Join the Freedom Church of the Poor’s Longest Night service tonight (6p ET / 5p CT / 3p PT; join here) or spend a moment in quiet lament for all who we have lost on the way to liberation.
🍉 Mon, Dec 22 – Eat another treat today. Remind yourself that liberation work is STILL sweet.
🍉 Tues, Dec 23 – Write your Congressperson a Christmas card! (Here’s an example to get you started.)
🍉 Wed, Dec 24 – Name Palestine in your local Christmas Eve service. (Get creative! Submit it in a prayer request form. Wear a keffiyeh to worship. Bring it up in conversation with your pastor, leadership board, or congregation.)
🍉 Thurs, Dec 25 – Begin to organize your community (church, town, business) to become Apartheid Free in 2026.
Today marks the 70th anniversary of forty-two-year-old Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on that Jim Crow bus in Alabama. It was not a spontaneous act. It was not a mid-life crisis either. It was the choreographed move of a community conspiring against a system built and maintained by racial segregation.
Rosa Parks was the spark that lit the 381-day movement wildfire called the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Rosa Parks was not new to the movement. Rosa Parks was true to the movement.
In her early twenties, Rosa Parks courageously stood up to a white man attempting to rape her while she was working as a nanny. “If he wanted to kill me and rape a dead body,” she wrote years later, “he was welcome, but he would have to kill me first.”
In her early thirties, despite blatant efforts to threaten and intimidate her, Rosa Parks launched “The Alabama Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor” to defend a 24-year-old Black mother and sharecropper who was gang-raped by six white boys.
In her early forties, a few months before she refused to give up her seat, Rosa Parks attended a two-week training facilitated by Septima Clark at the Highlander School in Tennessee, one of the only places in the South that dared to host integrated meetings.
Highlander was started during the Great Depression by a white man named Myles Horton, a Union Seminary graduate who sought to multiply democratic leadership through the training of what he called “non-charismatic people.”
Myles Horton used this jargon to challenge the wide-spread belief that a just society would only come about when a well-intentioned, good-looking, smooth-talking alpha male was in charge.
Myles Horton knew that mustard seed revolutions spread through well-organized communities of peers, where everyone has a role, especially soft-spoken seamstresses like Rosa Parks and public-school teachers like Septima Clark, whose father was born into slavery.
Myles Horton knew that transformative leadership does not drip down from on high. It percolates from below.
Gratitude is certainly a great thing—a spiritual practice, a discipline of noticing the gifts we receive. Festivals of gratitude honor the generosity and abundance of the earth and reinforce human interdependence with the more-than-human world. They have the power to restore relationship.
In this country, at this time, what we have as a festival of gratitude is Thanksgiving. How does that land for you? How is this holiday for you?
I know that so many of those reading this email are spiritual deep-divers. I’m wondering if Thanksgiving rings hollow for some of you, if you find yourself longing for something with more authenticity and depth.
After digging into the history of this holiday, I’ve come to think that Thanksgiving is “under occupation.”
Another compelling offering from The Alternative Seminary.
Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart is a minister, professor, and movement strategist. Naomi has worked as a faith organizer and director for POWER Interfaith, the National LGBTQ Task Force, and the Mayor’s Office of Public Engagement in the city of Philadelphia. She teaches emerging scholars of religion and theology at Villanova University, Arcadia University, and Harvard School of Divinity. Registration is required. You can register here.
The deadline for registration is November 25.
If you have any questions, please contact Will O’Brien at willobrien59@gmail.com or 267-339-8989. The Alternative Seminary is a program of biblical and theological study and reflection designed to foster an authentic biblical witness in the modern world.
“It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield.” – William Butler Yeats
When I was twenty-one, I tried to take all of Bill Tuttle’s history courses. He was a middle-aged white guy with bushy eyebrows and out-of-control curls who wore tie-dye t-shirts to class. He was warm, welcoming and had a passion for justice. I was enthralled by all his lectures on the Black Freedom Struggle.
What’s weird is that, at the time, I was a white Christian nationalist.
I was an undergrad at the University of Kansas and I was mastering the art of compartmentalizing. I read Dr. King’s speeches and studied the history of housing segregation. I was learning so much, and yet, I kept all that important information in books, in classrooms, in papers, and in the safe, secure corners of my head and heart.
On June 4, 2025, Leqaa Kordia wrote this statement in Arabic from her cell at Prairieland Detention Center in Texas. Her loved ones translated it into English. #FreeLeqaaKordia
Peace be upon you, and the mercy and blessings of God. Peace be upon you, O Palestine. Peace be upon Gaza, the steadfast and proud.
Peace be upon a people who taught the world the meaning of patience, dignity, and resilience.
Peace be upon the mothers who buried the remains of their children on street corners—and still chose to keep living.
Peace be upon the fathers whose eyes wept for the first time—and oh, what a brutal first time it was.
Peace be upon the wounded, tending to their own wounds with the soothing remembrance of Allah, the Almighty.
Peace be upon our noble martyrs, precious and beloved.
Peace be upon our free, glorious prisoners who are charting the path to freedom.
Peace be upon the sleepless, exhausted doctors—the architects of miracles.
Peace be upon those who pull the living from beneath the ruins, from the darkness of rubble to the light of afar where relief is within reach.
Peace be upon the teacher who truly understands the command of god to “Read.”
Peace be upon you, a people purified through your patience.
To you, the free people across the world, the rebels, the defiant, the unwavering—peace be upon you and my deepest respect.
I write to you from a cold place, hoping my words may carry a little warmth amid the tragedies, the suffering and the unimaginable stories I witness here.
Still, I write with full certainty that we will all be freed from this cruel injustice.
And I believe, with all my heart that I will meet you soon as a free woman—God willing.
From me—a granddaughter of the Nakba—to you, the generation of return and the makers of freedom. Accept my greetings and reverence.
Leqaa Korda Daughter of Gaza, Granddaughter of Nakba survivors from Yafa June 4, 2025 Prairieland Detention Center
Shanah Tovah to all our Jewish comrades out there doing the holy work of tikkun olam. This is from our friends at Jewish Voice for Peace.
This year, may the shofar be a wake-up call for all. As we enter 5786, our commitment to justice is greater than ever.
This sacred time of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur demands that we recommit to the work of tikkun olam, repairing the world. That means doing everything in our power to end the Israeli government’s genocide of Palestinians and build a future of freedom and safety for Palestinians and all people. And as we work collectively to build Judaism beyond Zionism, we know that the high holidays offer potent rituals to fortify us for the long haul.
This is a moment of collective atonement. As you read this, the Israeli military is starving over two million Palestinians in Gaza to death. We call on the US government to end its support for the Israeli government’s genocide, and we call on all people of conscience to divest from death and speak out in defense of life.
An excerpt from Rev. Dr. Howard-John Wesley’s sermon last Sunday. Listen to whole thing here.
Charlie Kirk did not deserve to be assassinated. But I’m overwhelmed seeing the flags of the United States of America at half-staff calling this nation to honor and venerate a man who was an unapologetic racist and spent all of his life sowing seeds of division and hate into this land. And hearing people with selective rage who are mad about Charlie Kirk, but didn’t give a damn about Melissa Hortman and her husband when they were shot down in their home, tell me I ought to have compassion for the death of a man who had no respect for my own life. I am sorry, but there’s nowhere in bible where we are taught to honor evil. How you die does not redeem how you lived. You do not become a hero in your death when you are a weapon of the enemy in your life.
Radical Discipleship 