Category: Theological Animation

Something Else

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By Tommy Airey

Thirty years ago this month, I packed up my car and left Loyola Marymount University. I was a freshman on a full-ride basketball scholarship. I drove home. Just fifty-five minutes south on the 405 freeway. Back to Orange County. I left LMU because I was miserable – and I was nineteen. I struggled to emotionally connect with our head coach who tried hard to be funny (but wasn’t) and whose favorite word was “horseshit” – always used as a descriptor for either our team or one of our players. Sometimes it was aimed at me. I did not have a clue how to metabolize what was going on inside of me. It’s just not what young men who change in locker rooms are equipped to do.

Our team – half-Black and half-white in the immediate aftermath of the L.A. uprising – bonded during preseason fitness conditioning. Coach made it clear that, before official practice started in October, everyone had to run a mile in under five minutes. Together. If anyone didn’t make it, everyone would have to wake up at 6am every morning and run it again. Together. Until everyone could do it. At the same time. We had guys who were 6’9” and weighed 240 lbs. We had other guys who never failed to miss the fraternity keg party. We all ran a sub-five-minute-mile on our first attempt. This is one of the reasons I believe in miracles.   

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Five Books: Johari Jabir

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In this Radical Discipleship exclusive series, we are asking radical Christian leaders one question.

What are the five books or authors that have seriously shaped your spiritual life?

This is how Johari Jabir answered.

Just Above My Head, James Baldwin

Beloved, Toni Morrison

Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communist During the Great Depression, Robin D.G. Kelley 

The Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty Exchange Value, Richard G. Opalsky 

The Sabbath, Abraham Joshua Heschel 

Johari Jabir is an artist, scholar, and contemplative. A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Johari is director of music at St. George & St. Matthias Episcopal Church in Chicago, IL, and he teaches in the department of Black Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. His first book, Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Gospel Army of the Civil War (Ohio State University Press, 2017), is a cultural history of the nation’s first Black regiment, the 1st South Carolina Volunteers.

Five Books: Sarah Nahar

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In a Radical Discipleship exclusive series, we are asking radical Christian leaders one question. What are the five books or authors that have seriously shaped your spiritual life? We asked Sarah Nahar, a recent recipient of the 2022 AMBS Alumni Ministry and Service Award. This is how she answered.

I actually read a lot of articles, short quotes, anthologies, and social media posts. That is where I get my spiritual digests from people I trust. But if I picked some books they would be:

1. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza  by Gloria Anzaldua

2. Justice and only Justice: A Palestinian Theology of Liberation by Naim Ateek

3. The Movement Makes Us Human: An Interview with Vincent Harding by Joanna Shenk

4. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone

5. anything and everything by bell hooks, start with Feminism is for Everybody. Yes! This was a book that had a profound spiritual impact on me when I read it before entering college as part of the mandatory reading list.

Sarah Nahar, M.Div (from Elkhart, Indiana Potawatomi traditional land) is a PhD student at Syracuse University. Her research focus is on the toilet, both the ritual and receptacle. Other interests include working on dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery, community organizing, and capoeira.

Peace on Earth and the Politics of Christmas

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A VIRTUAL PROGRAM

Saturday morning, December 3

10:30 am EST

Much of the Christian church in the United States has been co-opted by an American gospel of prosperity, racism, violence, and militant nationalism. The celebration of Christmas is a victim of that co-optation: It is wrapped in innocent, Hallmark-card imagery. But in fact the biblical texts describing the coming of Jesus are making powerful assertions about the politics of the Bible that speak very much to our contemporary global crises.

In this virtual class, we will reflect on the “nativity narratives” in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke to see how they express core biblical themes of justice and liberation. We will “un-domesticate” these tales of liberation and reflect on how they are truly challenging us to a revolutionary discipleship. This program will be broadcast via Zoom. It will be facilitated by Will O’Brien, coordinator of The Alternative Seminary. A perfect event for Advent.

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The Holy Fool

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A new zoom offering from Maki Ashe Van Steenwyk who writes:

It is a 4-week elective for folks in our spiritual direction training program, but I’m opening it up to folks who aren’t a part of the program. Registration is sliding scale, but the sliding scale is a guideline. Folks who can’t afford it should feel free to apply and folks who can more-than-afford it should feel free to be generous. Register here.

Bearing Witness at the End of the World

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By Ched Myers, a commentary on last Sunday’s Gospel

Today’s gospel text for the 23rd Sunday after Pentecost culminates Year C’s journey through Luke (next week’s “Reign of Christ Sunday” is a special feast day to close the liturgical year). It narrates the first half of the third gospel’s version of the “Synoptic Apocalypse” (Lk 21), which begins by portraying Jesus’ disciples, many of whom were up-country Galileans, as dazzled pilgrims encountering the grandeur of the “Holy” metropolis of Jerusalem for the first time (21:5).

Like rural folk visiting Washington DC for the first time, they were impressed (or perhaps just overwhelmed) by the imposing monuments and edifices of their nation, which conjured a visceral patriotism they assumed Jesus shared. We, too, inevitably experience moments of existential awe by our civilization, especially as powerfully represented by its built environment—whether civic, religious, industrial or military. We all dwell under the shadow cast by the self-congratulatory narrative of empire; it is so heroic and compelling that we become enamored with (or paralyzed by) the systems that rule over us, despite ourselves. “Wow!” they/we intone, “God bless America!”—then turn to Jesus to add plaintively, “right??”

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Expecting Emmanuel

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Advent is coming up in two weeks. If you are looking for a devotional brimming with hope and meaning in these darkening days, check out Expecting Emmanuel from Joanna Harader, a progressive pastor in Lawrence, Kansas. She animates eight women from the family tree of Jesus. Their stories are far from perfect. Good news for us! Lindsay and I got know Joanna a dozen years ago during a summer internship with her. I am thrilled that she is putting stuff like this into the world. I am going to post some reflections here and on social media during the Season, as I spend some time reading this book and summoning up some of the women in my own family tree. If you are interested in joining this journey during this Season, send me an email. – Tommy Airey (tommyairey@gmail.com)

Mitakuyapi

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By Lenore Three Stars, excerpted from her essay “Mitakuyapi (My Relatives), What is Your Worldview?”

When I call you mitakuyapi, “my relatives,” I am representing a Lakota worldview of kinship. Everything in creation is connected. 

[Euro-]Western Christianity has a history of imposing a euro-cultural template for civilizing and Christianizing Indigenous peoples. I trusted that Jesus is Creator, Son, and Healer, but I was not an authentic fit in white church culture. I prayed for a way to follow Jesus from a faith of wholeness, rather than one of assimilation. The door opened for me to attend a seminary that included theology from an Indigenous perspective, taught by Indigenous instructors. It was liberating for me to understand that I was not having a faith crisis—I was experiencing a clash of worldviews.

I found differences between an Indigenous worldview and a euro-western culture worldview. For instance, western Christianity is shaped by a western European worldview with Hellenistic influences. One’s mind and beliefs became more important than physical experience or what one does. It confirmed my experience that theology is generally what you think or believe, not necessarily how you live every day. 

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Resurrection: The Hope That Vindicates God’s Justice

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romeroBy Wes Howard-Brook & Sue Ferguson Johnson, a commentary on this weekend’s Gospel text, re-posted from November 2016

There is nothing more radical than resurrection.

From the time Daniel 12 apocalyptically announced that God raises the dead, the intellectual elite in Judea rejected it. Sophisticated skeptics have always scoffed at the notion that life extends beyond the bounds of death, because such a belief threatens to undermine the status quo from which they benefit. Consider, for example, this from Ecclesiastes, a text likely written before Daniel:

The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no more reward, and even the memory of them is lost. Their love and their hate and their envy have already perished; never again will they have any share in all that happens under the sun. (Eccles 9.5-6)

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