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Category: Theological Animation
No Matter What the Colonizers Say or Do
White Christians and Jewish Americans have been socialized to be scared of images like this. But isn’t this is pretty much what Mary the Palestinian Jewish teen mother of Jesus would have looked like?
In the Gospel of Luke, it says that Mary prayed to a God who brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly. A God who has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty!
Mary was part of the resistance.
As she called on a Power greater than empire, Mary summoned what Palestinians call sumud. Steadfastness. Standing firm in the face of occupation. Never surrendering their humanity and dignity. No matter what the colonizers say or do.
Here’s to all the courageous young people on college campuses in 2024 who pitched tents and got arrested as they demanded that their campuses divest from companies profiting off of land theft and genocide.
And Every Mountain Brought Low: The Voice in the Wilderness
By Jim Perkinson, a sermon on Luke 3:1-6 for St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Detroit, MI (December 8, 2024)
So, we’ll begin way out in left field. The indigenous teacher my wife and I have been frequenting for more than 12 years now—half white, half Native, growing up among the Pueblo folk of northern New Mexico, adopted into, trained by, and living among the Tzutujil Maya of Guatemala for more than 10 years before being sent back to the States to keep their traditions alive as the civil war there was destroying their culture and indigenous ways—wrote a book a few years ago called The Unlikely Peace of Cuchumaqiq: The Parallel Lives of People as Plants: Keeping the Seeds Alive. In it, he—Martín Prechtel— recounted his experience of the Feb. 4, 1976 earthquake in Guatemala whose 7.6 rumble on the Richter scale killed more than 22,000 people and displaced some 1.2 million.
Curiously, Prechtel begins that book with stories of Native kids running 15-kilometer races in area high school competitions, through the canyons near the Pueblo, which they almost always won, but refused to win as individuals. Rather they would wait for each other before crossing the finish line, so only the entire Native group of kids, not an individual, would be crowned winner. Or not. Running wasn’t about winning. It was about running. Being magnificent in your movement. Interesting, but why begin a book on a mega-earthquake experience by talking about running? We’ll get to that later.
Continue reading “And Every Mountain Brought Low: The Voice in the Wilderness”An Abiding and Rebirthing Darkness
From our friends and comrades at Mennonite Action.
This Advent, we are remembering the activist and theologian Barbara Holmes. Over her lifetime, Dr. Holmes dedicated her prophetic voice of contemplative wisdom to call us on The Way with the Incarnate Jesus. Jesus is the one who has come, is always coming, and is ever present, transforming us into the Creator’s image and likeness.
Over the years, we have attended to Dr. Holmes’ voice crying out in the wilderness against the unspeakable suffering of human and non-human creation — suffering inflicted by human hands, heads, and hearts of warring madness. Although Dr. Holmes died earlier this year, her prophetic voice and spiritual wisdom lives on, crying out to be heard and heeded.
She writes, “When there is a crisis, it takes a village to survive” because “it is the village that enters into crisis.” In her book, Crisis Contemplation: Healing the Wounded World, Dr. Holmes explains: “Crises open portals of deeper knowing. When the crisis occurs, the only way out is through, so we take a cue from nature and relax into the stillness, depending upon one another and the breath of life!”
Continue reading “An Abiding and Rebirthing Darkness”Advent for Palestine
Re-posting this beautiful children’s Advent calendar from the Rev. Stands for the Revolution, the Substack newsletter of Rev. Addie Domske, an ordained minister and trained movement chaplain who lifts up queer abundance and Jesus’ rebellious message.
One thing I want to be when I grow up is a cool, radical auntie.
I have been trying to be good at this role for about 15 years now, starting when the first of my four niblings1 was born. I will find out from them in their collective adulthood if I succeeded.
I have lived far, far away from all four of them for their entire lives, so most of my interactions come from mailing them things, (I had the cutest pen pal relationship with my oldest nibling when he was a wee lad.) A few years ago, I started the tradition of sending them all advent calendars each year based on their interests at the time. This year I’m proclaiming that they are all interested in Palestine, because my spouse and I decided to spend all of our Christmas gift funds for our external families on products from Palestinian artisans.2
Continue reading “Advent for Palestine”Festival of Radical Discipleship
A message from Lydia Wylie-Kellermann, the executive director of Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center.
Dear Radical Discipleship friends,
We are excited to invite you the Festival of Radical Discipleship May 23-26, 2025 at Kirkridge Retreat Center in Bangor, PA.
This gathering is a Collaboration between Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries (BCM) and Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center.
Grace Boggs, Detroit organizer and now ancestor, would ask over and over again, “What time is it on the clock of the world?” We cannot deny that we are standing at an urgent and catastrophic moment. We are witnessing an assault on humanity and all of creation from so many directions. From climate disaster to genocidal militarism, to racial and religious supremacy, and so much more.
Our souls are hungering for time and community to be asking what it means to live humanly in this moment. We need to create space for listening and discernment, deep study and imaginative organizing, a diversity of voices and stories, and perhaps more than anything else hope and joy. So, dear friends, we are throwing a festival!
We are hosting the Second Festival of Radical Discipleship- a gathering of kindred spirits rooted in the radical Christian tradition. It will be a time to remember past gospel experiments, discuss current calls to witness and work; and conspire about future collaborations! Come and join the feast.
Continue reading “Festival of Radical Discipleship”A Revolution of Value
An excerpt from Eddie Glaude, Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for our Own (2020).
In our after times, our task, then, is not to save Trump voters—it isn’t to convince them to give up their views that white people ought to matter more than others. Our task is to build a world where such a view has no place or quarter to breathe. I am aware that this is a radical, some may even say, dangerous claim. It amounts to “throwing away” a large portion of the country, many of whom are willing to defend their positions with violence. But we cannot give in to these people. We know what the result will be, and I cannot watch another generation of black children bear the burden of that choice…
Our task, then, is not to save Trump voters nor is it to demonize them. Our task is to work, with every ounce of passion and every drop of love we have, to make the kingdom new! The first step involves what I called…a “revolution of value.” This involves telling ourselves the truth about what we have done. It entails implementing policies that remedy generations of inequities based on the lie. It requires centering a set of values that holds every human being sacred. All of this will be made possible by grassroots movements that shift the center of gravity of our politics…Our task involves shaking loose the warm “swaddling clothes” that secure us in our prejudices and prevents us from confronting our fears. Our task means speaking truth to power and looking the darkness of our times squarely in the face without the security of legend or myth, and without the comforting idea that black people will save you.
Redemptive Solidarity
An excerpt from an unpublished sermon of Rev. Dr. Edgar Rivera Colon at Faith + Work Firist Unitarian Church of Orange, NJ
When we attend to the tears of a grief-stricken activist, we enact the collective mourning work which transfigures into what Robert Sember names “redemptive solidarity.” The wrenching pain of mourning is the affective antechamber to the possibility of joy and collective forward motion. Our tears are the salt of history that leaven more human futures. Thus, what we at first cognize as interruptions to liberating works are the intervening enabling conditions for the materialization of our deepest desires for social and spiritual transformations. Sember alerts us to the alignment of the “poetry of feeling” and “immanent freedom”: they share a homeplace in the soul work that our times require.
A Disposition of Collective Refusal
An excerpt from a Biko Mandela Gray tweet yesterday. Gray is an associate professor and director of undergraduate studies at Syracuse University and the author of Black Like Matter (2022).
This is a moment to reflect. It is also a moment to unlearn American theology—by which I mean, it is a moment to absolve ourselves of the idea that presidents are salvific figures. They aren’t. To think this way is to embrace white supremacy.
Anarchy is the move now. And yes, that might include a certain kind of direct action. But more than this, anarchy is a disposition of collective refusal. It is a praxis of collective engagement that is indifferent to institutions and institutionality.
A Different Kind of Exhausted
From Cole Arthur Riley at Black Liturgies (who else?).
Radical Discipleship 