Category: Theological Animation

Behind the Scenes

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

By Tommy Airey, re-posted from his Substack newsletter. Audio version available here.

Two weeks before Donald Trump bombed Iran under false pretenses to protect an apartheid state’s right to commit genocide on Palestinians and then (true to form) tweeted “now is the time for peace,” the Waymos were burning up in Los Angeles.

Watching that scene from 2,000 miles away brought me back to a Saturday in early Spring, when my friend Sheldon and I drove to downtown LA to march with staff and faculty from UCLA demanding the protection of their international students who have publicly demanded that the university divest from occupation and genocide.

We parked and walked a dozen blocks to the corner of Broadway and Temple. On our way, we were stunned to see our first Waymo, the uber that runs on a Silicon Valley algorithm, now operating in a handful of cities. We struggled to come up with adjectives as we watched this moving car, in the middle of downtown, with no one at the wheel. 

After we drove back to Orange County and had dinner, I was cleaning the kitchen when I heard a horrible crash in front of my mom’s house. Sheldon and I ran outside to find a car up in the bushes of the front yard right across the street.

There was a human driving this car. While we were trying to figure out how he got up there in the bushes, he was revving the engine to the limit, trying to get out. We could see that he hit a parked car next door and then demolished the electric box.

Continue reading “Behind the Scenes” →

Idols

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

The beginning and conclusion of Chris Hedges’ latest piece “The Last Days of Gaza.”

This is the end. The final blood-soaked chapter of the genocide. It will be over soon. Weeks. At most. Two million people are camped out amongst the rubble or in the open air. Dozens are killed and wounded daily from Israeli shells, missiles, drones, bombs and bullets. They lack clean water, medicine and food. They have reached a point of collapse. Sick. Injured. Terrified. Humiliated. Abandoned. Destitute. Starving. Hopeless.

In the last pages of this horror story, Israel is sadistically baiting starving Palestinians with promises of food, luring them to the narrow and congested nine-mile ribbon of land that borders Egypt. Israel and its cynically named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), allegedly funded by Israel’s Ministry of Defense and the Mossad, is weaponizing starvation. It is enticing Palestinians to southern Gaza the way the Nazis enticed starving Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to board trains to the death camps. The goal is not to feed the Palestinians. No one seriously argues there is enough food or aid hubs. The goal is to cram Palestinians into heavily guarded compounds and deport them…

…There are people I have known for years who I will never speak to again. They know what is happening. Who does not know? They will not risk alienating their colleagues, being smeared as an antisemite, jeopardizing their status, being reprimanded or losing their jobs. They do not risk death, the way Palestinians do. They risk tarnishing the pathetic monuments of status and wealth they spent their lives constructing. Idols. They bow down before these idols. They worship these idols. They are enslaved by them.

At the feet of these idols lie tens of thousands of murdered Palestinians.

The Radical Power of the Poetic Word

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Cloud of Witnesses, Subverting Empire, Theological Animation1 Comment

By Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellermann

Walter Brueggemann: A Remembrance (March 11, 1933 – June 5, 2025)

When I was a student at Union Seminary in New York, Abraham Heschel taught at Jewish Theological Seminary across the street. Though he died within my first year, the author of The Prophets, was notorious, it was said, for being the professor who actually believed in God. Something related might be said about Walter Brueggemann who crossed over to the ancestors and saints June 5.

He was an eminent scholar, among those like Norman Gottwald who altered the landscape of biblical studies by bringing sociological analysis to interpretation, and for such reason presided for years in the biblical guild. Yet, as a discipline, he was eminently readable and accessible to movement and church for whom the work was ultimately intended.

Once in a footnote to Israel’s Praise, he cited a 1985 order of the Pretoria regime prohibiting Blacks from singing Christmas carols in the townships because they generated such revolutionary energy. The newspaper report quoted a South African police agent: “Carols are too emotional to be sung in a time of unrest…Candles have become revolutionary symbols.” Which is to say, he could write an analysis of the world-shaking and world-making power of Israel’s liturgy and psalms, but then put out a book of prayers for our own moment. He prayed. He imagined a new world with all his heart. He invited us likewise.

Continue reading “The Radical Power of the Poetic Word” →

What is Radical Discipleship?

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

From Ched Myers, posted to social media last week in eager anticipation for the Second Festival of Radical Discipleship in Bangor, PA over this so-called “Memorial Day Weekend.”

I want to offer the edited and abbreviated version below of a “rant” I gave at the 2015 BKI Festival for Radical Discipleship here in Oak View, as a paean to this work and to the vision of radical discipleship that animates our mission at BCM, which will be celebrated this weekend at the Second Festival at Kirkridge Retreat Center. May this tradition carry on!

What is Radical Discipleship?

The etymology of the term radical (from the Latin radix, “root”) is the best reason not to concede it to nostalgia. To get to the root of anything we must be radical. No wonder the word has been demonized by the elite and co-opted by marketing hucksters, and that no one in conventional politics dares use the word favorably–much less track any problem to its root. It is also curious and revealing that the notion of discipleship is so marginal in our churches. Curious, because discipleship is unarguably the central theme of the gospels. Revealing, because it shows how wide the gulf between seminary, sanctuary and streets has become in North America.

The prevailing expressions of faith among Protestant churches—evangelical decisionism, mainline denominationalism and fundamentalist dogmatism—are each problematic in a society that is mired in dysfunctional politics, delusional economics and a distractive culture. Faith as discipleship remains the “road rarely taken” here at the heart of empire. We have yet truly to reckon with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous warning, delivered under the shadow of fascism, that “cheap grace is grace without discipleship.” Radical Discipleship thus calls us to a double commitment: to reveal the roots of personal and political pathologies that continue to shape our imperial society, and to recover the roots of our biblical tradition: the messianic movement of rebellion and restoration, of repentance and renewal, and of a “Way out of no way” that has been going on since the dawn of resistance to the dusk of empire…

Read the entire post here.

We are in the Spirit

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

An excerpt from Jim Perkinson’s sermon on John 6 during the Summer of 2018 called “I Am Wind.”

“God” in Hebrew writ, as we have it from Genesis to Malachi, is double-named, a hyphen-Deity, Elohim of the cool, wet coastal mountains, YHWH of the hot sands south and east. And this is likely because Israel was a hyphen-people, a mixed lot, a creole crowd, partly composed of pastoral nomads following Moses and Joshua, coming into Canaan from the forty years of desert wandering, once crossing the Jordan from the east, joining with rebelling Canaanite peasants, going feral up in the central highlands from seaboard cities on the Mediterranean to the west. A motley crew, each group bringing their God into the stewpot, a Midianite-Canaanite mix, worshipping a YHWH-Elohim amalgam of deities. YHWH is a dust-storm deity encountered by a renegade herder horde on a Sinai desert mountain in lightning and thunder. Elohim is a rain-storm deity encountered by an outlaw peasant crowd on a Canaanite coastal mountain in lightning and thunder. One flashes over the vastness of sand; the other over the expanse of sea. And though the name YHWH comes to predominate, Elohim remains in use more than 2500 times in the Hebrew text.

We could go on if there were time. The word for Wind in Hebrew is “ruach,” which also means “Air,” “Breath,” “Spirit.” Gendered female.   These are not fully separable ideas. For many indigenous and antique peoples, the Spirit-World is the Natural World, especially in its fluidity as Air, Wind, Breath. It is not so much the case that the Spirit is in us, as it is we are in the Spirit. It moves through and among us all the time.

Everything is breathing Spirit, in and out, every second. And the bodies that navigate the realm of air, the bodies exquisitely attuned to sense every nuance of wind wafting, whispering, upwelling, down-blowing, scudding or sheering—birds—are quintessentially Spirit-Messengers in culture after culture. We, in the biblical tradition, just freeze-frame them and call them “angels”—winged creatures that sing, and bring messages from heaven!

It is the Wind-Spirit that hovers, Dove-like, over the Great Waters of Chaos in Creation in Genesis 1. It is that same hovering Spirit-Wind-Dove that blows back the Red Sea waters for the escaping slaves. It is the Wind-Cruising-Dove that Noah sends forth from the water-bound ark to find land. It is that Dove-Bodied-One who falls on Jesus coming up from Jordan waters, as the Holy Spirit incarnate, says Luke. God as Dove-Animal, shaped by Wind-Air-Breath, tutoring the Messiah in his wilderness vision-quest and then accompanying him at every step along the way as that Spirit-Bird-Familiar by which he confronts demons and exposes Principalities. Spirit-Wind, if you want, as the Third Person of the Trinity, moving in and out of us and of every other living thing on the planet, at every millisecond!

Normalize

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation1 Comment

By Tommy Airey, re-posted from his Substack newsletter

Last week, I wrote about how the social construction project of empire hammers away at our humanity with all sorts of destructive norms. This week, I woke up on Monday morning to the jack-hammering of a construction project two blocks north of us on Rosa Parks Blvd, right across the street from Greater Faith Missionary Baptist Church.

It’s Spring in Detroit. These days, the jack-hammering goes into overdrive.

My Celtic ancestors called this season Beltane, a whirling dervish of planting, budding, birds and bees, a time to celebrate abundance, fertility and fresh ideas. Beltane, which begins on May 1, literally means “bright fire.” My deep ancestors on the Emerald Isle cleansed their souls and sparked the land back to life by jumping over bonfires. They did this every year before they drove their cattle out to pasture.

Speaking of pasture, Psalm 23 comes up in the Western Christian lectionary this weekend. This ancient Hebrew text, famously read at funerals, describes the divine as a shepherd who restores our souls by leading us out of imperial construction projects, into a wilderness of green pastures and still waters. This feral Force, overflowing with goodness and steadfast love, is greater than empire itself.

Continue reading “Normalize” →

The Revolutionary Jesus: Living the Reign of God in a Time of Fascism

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

Another compelling offering from our friends at the Alternative Seminary. 

A SIX-WEEK ONLINE COURSE

Thursday evenings, May 29 – July 3, 2024

7:00 – 9:00 pm EST

These are perilous times.  In the United States today, we are witnessing the emergence of fascist authoritarianism.  Undergirding this movement is a militant White Christian Nationalism – a dangerous heresy in which “American Jesus” is a gun-toting, law-and-order, pro-military, pro-capitalist, and racist Messiah of the Domination System.

We urgently need to recover the authentic Jesus of the Gospels.  Together we will explore the radical and revolutionary vision of Jesus in the midst of this emerging fascism.  What does Jesus mean in proclaiming “the reign of God”? How can we both prophetically challenge the idolatrous theology in U.S. society and seek to embody a faithful alternative? We will reflect on how the Gospel addresses issues of politics, economics, power, healing, community, and suffering, and how they can empower us to action. We will seek to draw from faith-based resistance movements, including the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany.  We will struggle with how Jesus challenges us to be a Beloved Community in these insane and vicious times. 

Continue reading “The Revolutionary Jesus: Living the Reign of God in a Time of Fascism” →

Confronting Christian Supremacy: Part 2 Anti-Muslim and Anti-Palestinian Racism

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

Another compelling offer from Christians for a Free Palestine on May 15 at 8pmEDT. Register HERE.

As Christians who recognize the troubling legacy of Christian supremacy and are committed to the safety and liberation of all people, we have a responsibility for the Christian roots of anti-Muslim hatred, its impact on U.S. foreign policy, and its implications for Palestine. More details to come.

This is the second in a series on Confronting Christian Supremacy. In April we discussed Christian supremacy, antisemitism, and Project Esther.

In Defense of People’s Dignity

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

From organizer and theologian Claudia de la Cruz, re-posted from X (04.21.2025).

In November 2016, I participated in the 3rd Gathering of Social Movements in Rome. A process initiated by the @MST_Oficial

Pope Francis shared a powerful message that day which was anti capitalist and centered humanity and the planet as sacred. His message was one in defense of people’s dignity and the right to housing, land and work. He also shared a very humble request – “if you pray, pray for me. If you don’t, send me good vibes!” I couldn’t help but do both, after all, he was speaking these words from The Vatican- a place of power and contradictions.

As it is with many, his life wasn’t a straight line, but it was filled with moments of great courage and love for the people. He stood against blockades, sanctions, capitalism, militarism and genocide. He spoke up for Cuba, Palestine and all who’ve suffered as a result of oppressive and exploitative systems. His faith and convictions moved him in the direction of the people- as it should be.

Words from his speech to the movements who were present in Rome in 2016.

“Who is really in charge, then? Money. How does it govern? With the whip of fear, of inequality, and of economic, social, cultural, and military violence—a violence that breeds more and more violence in a downward spiral that seems never-ending. So much pain, so much fear!

As I’ve said before, there is a foundational terrorism that arises from the global control of money over the earth and threatens all of humanity. Terrorism truly begins when “you have cast aside the wonder of creation—man and woman—and replaced it with money.” That system is terrorist.

This warped system may offer certain cosmetic implants that are not true development: economic growth, technological advances, greater “efficiency” in producing things that are bought, used, and thrown away—dragging us all into a frenzied cycle of waste…

But this world does not allow for the full development of the human being —development that cannot be reduced to consumption, that is not limited to the well-being of a few, but that includes all peoples and individuals in the fullness of their dignity, allowing them to share as brothers and sisters in the wonder of Creation. That is the kind of development we need: human, integral, respectful of Creation, of this common home.”