The Christian season of Lent will kick-off on the exact same day as Islam’s holy month of Ramadan.
This is not just a coincidence. This is a divine conspiracy.
It all starts on Ash Wednesday, February 18.
I am wondering what it might look like for a network of Christians and Jesus-adjacent folks in North America to cross over and fast from food and drink during daylight hours for the entire month of Ramadan.
I see this as a small act of solidarity with Muslims all over the planet – and specifically with Palestinians who are enduring ethnic cleansing and genocide abroad, and constant demonization here in the US.
I also see this as a tangible way for Christians to repent from all the anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia built into the body of Christ.
From our friends and comrades at Christians for a Free Palestine.
We’re excited to share that Christians for a Free Palestine is being featured on an upcoming webinar, “Faith in the Crosshairs,” on Monday, February 16, at 6 pm ET / 3pm PT. You’ll see some familiar faces as we share contemporary analysis with our friends at Adalah Justice Project (AJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and talk about our work organizing against Christian Zionism. The webinar is , and a recording will be sent to all registrants.
The webinar, co-sponsored by CFP, AJP, and JVP, will feature Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart, a member of CFP’s Theo-Politics committee, as well as Rev. Dr. Crystal Silva McCormick and Jonathan Brenneman from CFP’s national leadership team. The three will be discussing the often overlooked role Christian Zionism plays in U.S. politics. This would be a great webinar to share with people in your life who are new to these issues! Consider inviting a friend or family member who would be excited to learn more about CFP’s work.
We’ll also look at the shifting context we see unfolding across the U.S. as Christian Zionism receives renewed political and financial backing through Israeli and U.S. state partnerships with churches, media campaigns, and targeted outreach efforts. Churches are increasingly the focus of surveillance, tracking, and digital targeting, and select pastors are being recruited and trained as ambassadors for Israel. At the same time, significant cracks are widening within Christian communities — generational divides, theological debates, and growing numbers of people challenging the ways faith is being co-opted by empires to perpetuate state violence. Please join us!
A message from Will O’Brien of the Alternative Seminary in Philly.
AN ONLINE COURSE Thursday evenings, 7:00 – 9:00 pm February 26 – March 26, 2026
We are witnessing a daily barrage of oppressive violence, virulent racism, and increasing authoritarianism in the United States. Tragically, much of it is supported by a perverse Christian nationalism.
We cry out for healing – but what is the healing we need? How does this moment of societal crisis and vulnerability force us to ask deeper questions about who we are and what kind of world we need? And how do we engage in self-healing practices?
For five weeks, we will explore together several Gospel accounts of Jesus’ healings, reflecting on how these stories speak to the moment we live in. We will consider how they are challenging us to be faithful and build the Beloved Community in these harsh times.
This course will be co-facilitated by Will O’Brien. Will is coordinator of The Alternative Seminary and a member of the Vine & Fig Tree community in Philadelphia.
The cost for this course will be $100 (or whatever you can afford).
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.
In 1965, as excessive state violence was being unleashed against the Black citizens in Selma, Alabama, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sent out a nationwide call to faith leaders: “The people of Selma will struggle on for the soul of the nation, but it is fitting that all America help to bear the burden.”
Dr. King’s call for others to join him in leading a march to Montgomery was answered by clergy from across the country, marking a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement.
Sixty-six years later, in the same spirit and with the same clarity as King’s 1965 call, clergy in Minneapolis asked faith activists from across the country to join them in praying with their feet against the atrocities being committed by Immigration Customs and Enforcement against the good people of their state.
Upon hearing that my presence might be helpful, I immediately packed my tallit (Jewish prayer shawl), and on behalf of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, I jumped on an airplane. Arriving in Minneapolis on Thursday, here’s what I witnessed:
Images of Luis Ramos, a terrified and bewildered five-year-old in a tiny plaid coat and blue knit bunny hat, were dominating local media coverage. Coming home from school, just steps away from his front door, ICE agents took Luis from his father’s car, using him as bait to lure his pregnant mother out of their home.
By the time I arrived in Minneapolis, only two days later, Luis and his father had already been whisked away to a detention facility in Texas.
Christianity is a tradition of oil, gift of trees of olives, first used to anoint a slab of stone by Jacob (Gen 28:18), and then by Moses, explicitly directed by YHWH, to anoint a tent, a chest, a table, a lamp, a laver, two altars, multiple utensils, and select humans (Exod 30:22-31). And then in name—but without any written memory of actual pouring on the head in ceremony—of the Nazareth prophet, described as the “living stone,” head of the corner (I Pet 2:4-8). An anointed one, smeared with Life from the fruits of trees quite particular to that local ecology. Trees anchoring human dwelling in such a domain that today, are being ripped up by the thousands—just like State of Michigan settlers cut down birch forests central to Anishinaabe life or US cavalry killed buffalo of plains Indian peoples in the 19th century. All of it designed to break the umbilical between indigenous cultures and local lands, genocidally disappear the human communities thereby “orphaned,” and re-tool the environments for capital.
I start thus, because the question of extraction is at the heart of the question of invasion, occupation, and colonization. Or perhaps more cogently named: the question of technology, of human uptake of other creatures, as armatures and prosthesis and shuttles and fuel for human bodies, claiming supremacies over other species and over other disparaged human communities. Technology is the re-shaping of the entire planetary surface and immediate underground into an enslaved apparatus for a “hungry-ghost” humanity, rampaging insanely, refusing any concern for limit or future.
But it has not always been so. More-than-human creatures can be taken up in modalities of respect and honoring as “tools” and yes, as food for human flourishing—as many indigenous communities know how to do. Indeed, as early Israel in its mix of escaped slaves from Egypt and revolting peasants from Canaanite cite-states knew how to do, re-initiated in such a lifeway in Levantine highlands for generations, before reverting back to abusive, extractive relations as a monarchy in expanding settlements serving hierarchy and seeking surplus.
Another compelling offering from Rev. Dr. Edgar Rivera Colón.
Beloved Comrades:
Starting next Monday January 26th, I will be teaching a three session mini-course on Latin American Liberation Theology at the University of Orange Free People’s University for Urban Restoration. All who are interested in this topic are welcome to attend. As we say at the U of O, everyone has something to teach and to learn. Hope to see you there. Registration link here and class information below:
“Latin American Liberation Theology is one of the signal developments in spirituality and transformative politics in the post-WWII era. This three session mini-course will introduce the historical contexts, community practices, and basic concepts of Liberation Theology to all those interested in the liberatory and spiritual aspects of community-building. Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian theologian, captured the essence of the spirit of Liberation Theology when he wrote: “The process of liberation brings with it a profound conflict. Having the project be clear is not enough. What is necessary is a spirituality of resistance and of renewed hope to turn ever back to the struggle in the face of the defeats of the oppressed.” In a time of increasing conflict and struggle in our society, join us to renew your sense of hope by learning from our Latin American friends and fellow sojourners in the struggle for a better world.”
Edgar Rivera Colón, PhD, is a medical anthropologist and ordained minister in The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries (TFAM) who provides pastoral accompaniment to tenant rights organizing groups, labor unions, and immigrant justice movements in Los Angeles. He offers spiritual direction for faith-based activists. He is a U of O board member and minister at Faith + Works Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Orange, NJ. He first encountered the practice and theory of Liberation Theology when he lived and worked in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the mid-1980s as a young Jesuit. He lives in East LA in a queer Latina multigenerational household with his nieces, their moms, and fury canine nephews Biscuit and Hans Solo.
It’s been a month since I returned home from Palestine. Earlier this week I started sharing pictures and videos from my time there on social media, including a short clip of Israeli soldiers in full combat gear, training their guns on me and other unarmed civilians. Multiple friends have commented that their initial assumption upon seeing the footage was that it was of ICE agents here in the U.S.. Indeed, both are functioning as U.S.-funded, government sponsored militias, acting with impunity to advance the violent agenda of white supremacy and religious nationalism.
It’s difficult to know how to talk about any of this, but the mandate from everyone I met in Palestine was, “Come and see; go and tell!” So I want to invite you to CFP’s upcoming community call on Thursday, January 22, at 8pm ET. I and others from CFP’s national leadership team will share about our recent trip to Palestine and how CFP plans on responding to Palestinian calls for “costly solidarity” — as well as how we’re connecting the dots between the influence of white Christian Nationalism and U.S. empire in Palestine, in Venezuela, and on the streets of Minneapolis.
I hope that you’ll join us, but more than anything, I want you to listen to Palestinians. Listen to their stories, listen to their dreams, listen to their anger and rage, listen to their laughter, listen to their questions, listen to their ideas — and know that ultimately, Palestinians will be the brilliant authors of their own liberation. (And thank god, because what I also know is that a free Palestine frees us all!)
My hope is that sharing our experiences, learnings, and observations will only serve to amplify theirs. So please come to CFP’s community call, where I’ll be sharing more reflections along with CFP’s leadership team, and we’ll talk about how we, collectively, can respond with solidarity to the calls of our Palestinian siblings.
By Dean Hammer, on the Feast of the Massacre of the Holy Innocents (on the 135th anniversary of the Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890)
This year’s Prayer Service and Nonviolent Witness at the Pentagon on Dec. 29th commemorates the Feast of the Massacre of the Holy Innocents—past and present. This day is also the anniversary of the “Wounded Knee Massacre,” where nearly 300 Lakota were killed by U.S. Army soldiers on that day in 1890. The Feast of the Holy Innocents recalls Herod’s retribution against the Jewish population–seeking to destroy Jesus and all male Jewish children in Bethlehem (two years old and younger), who represent a threat to his imperial power. Jesus’ earliest years as a refugee link the biblical story (Matthew 2:16–18) to the current state sanctioned atrocities by the U.S government against people seeking sanctuary and their advocates. The witness is sponsored by the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker, carrying forward the Atlantic Life Community’s ongoing witness at the Pentagon on the Feast of the Innocents since 1975.
The prayer service at the Pentagon is offered in the context of our dire times and the piercing question: Can the juggernaut of untethered corruption and mass violence be interrupted and subverted? Alligator Alcatraz, United States support for mass killing atrocities in Gaza, thousands of people in the US arrested and deported (many to unknown destinations and torture prisons) without due process, and millions of US citizens threatened with the loss of food, housing, and medical care: a dystopian time with incomprehensible suffering. The core beliefs, attitudes, values, and actions of Make America Great Again leaders and followers have fueled a degeneration of democracy in the U.S. at breakneck speed.
Paul Hawken reflects in Blessed Unrest (2007) how the largest movement to save the planet is restoring grace, justice, and beauty to the world. In this way, the Pentagon witness on Dec. 29th joins with the spirit of the Sumud Flotilla (bringing lifesaving aid and civilian protection to Gaza), and the Palestine Action (a UK pro-Palestinian direct action group, currently involved in a significant hunger strike by imprisoned members, protesting detention conditions and demanding release). Sumud is an Arabic word meaning steadfastness or perseverance, deeply rooted in Palestinian culture as a powerful form of nonviolent resistance and resilience against oppression and violence. Embracing an unwavering commitment to living with integrity and dignity amidst hegemonic power, the community of blessed unrest dares to dream and acts as a nemesis to illegitimate authority. In celebration of steadfast nonviolent witnesses, may we all find ways to honor the Holy Innocents, past and present.
From Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac, a Palestinian pastor from Bethlehem. Reposted from social media (Dec 19, 2025).
Today I had the chance to visit Christmas Lutheran Church, where I served for more than ten years—eight of them as the main pastor. Returning to a place that shaped so much of my life and ministry is never an easy experience. It carries memory, prayer and appreciation.
Under the faithful and courageous leadership of my dear friend Rev. Ashraf Tannous, the church made a deliberate and meaningful decision: to keep Christ in the Rubble—but to place it under the Christmas tree. This old-new crib spoke to me again.
The rubble remains. The broken stones are still there. The Christ child still lies among the rubble, reminding us that God chose not safety, not power, not palaces—but vulnerability and solidarity with the crushed of the earth. And yet now, rising from that rubble, stands a tree – a living tree.
For me, this is a profoundly Palestinian image—and a profoundly Christian one.
Radical Discipleship 