Category: Theological Animation

Learning from Laughter and the Trees: Sometimes I Feel like it’s the End of the World

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation2 Comments

By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann

Sometimes the most miraculous moments of parenting happen in those late night hours when you wish your kids were asleep, but you are snuggled up beside them and they begin to speak.

A few months ago, as the leaves were just beginning to fall, I was lying with Isaac rubbing his back. The lights were off, but the moonlight was streaming through his window. Isaac is now ten years old. I don’t know if you remember fifth grade social studies, but this is the year when the curriculum teaches about “the founding of America.” And Isaac has been struggling. He is learning it in a very different context from our beloved Detroit to our new home in the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania.

We had been quiet for quite some time and I wondered if he had fallen asleep, when suddenly he said, “I miss Detroit.”

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Having Nothing and Yet Possessing Everything

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It’s Ash Wednesday. A day for personal recommitment to collective liberation. A day marked by scrutiny, accountability, confession. A day to rediscover our identity and worth in the well-being of others. A day to remind ourselves of our baptism into the struggle for Something Else, from the ghetto to the Gaza Strip. A day to double-down on rebuilding what supremacy has burned down. A day to start giving up what weighs us down and holds us back. A day to embrace the beautiful, ancient tension of what the sacred text says in 2 Corinthians 6:4-10:

…but as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.

Hope is a Deeper Current

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From Ken Sehested’s newsletter Prayer & Politiks (Jan 30, 2024).

My friend Richard sent me strong words of encouragement regarding something I’d written, particularly this line: “”Despair is often a disguised form of narcissism. Get over yourself.” He then recounted a recent conversation, saying “I told a friend the other day: “When I think about 2024, I am not as hopeful as you are. But I wish I were. Does that count?”

It is a pertinent question requiring a thoughtful response. I responded:

Thanks for your words of encouragement. I certainly resonate with the sentiment you spoke to your friend; though I would use the word “optimistic” instead of hopeful. When it comes to public policy, I am as pessimistic as I’ve ever been.

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Three Dominating, Antidemocratic Dogmas

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An excerpt from Cornel West’s Democracy Matters (2013).

The problems plaguing our democracy are not only ones of disaffection and disillusionment. The greatest threats come in the form of the rise of three dominating, antidemocratic dogmas. These three dogmas, promoted by the most powerful forces in our world, are rendering American democracy vacuous. The first dogma of free-market fundamentalism posits the unregulated and unfettered market as idol and fetish. This glorification of the market has led to a callous corporate-dominated political economy in which business leaders (their wealth and power) are to be worshipped—even despite the recent scandals—and the most powerful corporations are delegated magical powers of salvation rather than relegated to democratic scrutiny concerning both the ethics of their business practices and their treatment of workers. This largely unexamined and unquestioned dogma that supports the policies of both Democrats and Republicans in the United States—and those of most political parties in other parts of the world—is a major threat to the quality of democratic life and the well-being of most peoples across the globe. It yields an obscene level of wealth inequality, along with its corollary of intensified class hostility and hatred. It also redefines the terms of what we should be striving for in life, glamorizing materialistic gain, narcissistic pleasure, and the pursuit of narrow individualistic preoccupations—especially for young people here and abroad.

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Where are God’s People?

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation2 Comments

By Jonathan Kuttab, executive director of Friends of SABEEL North America (FOSNA), a theological reflection of 100 days of genocide

As we have now passed 100 days of ongoing genocide and the number of named victims exceeds 25,000 (not counting those still buried under the rubble), the scale human suffering has long reached unbearable dimensions. Over ten thousand children have been killed and continue to be killed at the rate of about 100 per day; over 1,000 children suffered  amputations, many without anesthesia. 50,000 pregnant women struggle to survive and give birth, sometimes by cesarean section, without enough milk, food, or water, much less sanitary conditions. An entire population is being starved, 90% of them are homeless, within just a few miles of a full convoy of trucks filled with supplies not being allowed in to provide food and water. Entire neighborhoods are razed to the ground. The continuous bombardment has exceeded within three months the entire tonnage of bombs used by the US in Iraq over six years. Meanwhile, the people of Gaza have no air defenses, bomb shelters, or escape. For people of faith, this agonizing reality forces  us to confront serious theological challenges. 

The Holocaust in Germany generated a crisis of faith for many Jewish individuals and theologians. Recurring questions include:

  • Where was God during the holocaust?
  • Why did God allow these atrocities to occur? 
  • How could a just God allow such evil to persist? 
  • How can God abandon innocents facing genocide? 

Many individuals lost their faith in God altogether. Similar questions are being raised by people of faith these days in response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

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A Compelling Line-Up for the 1st Half of 2024

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Do you know about Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center?

With a long, storied activist history (Dan and Phillip Berrigan had a favorite room and frequently led retreats and organized actions there) and an 80-year history of supporting LGBTQI Christians, it’s the kind of place radical disciples should know about. We have a number of retreats coming up that your communities might be interested in attending:

Birthing and Earthing Love: A Lenten Journey with the Gospel of John with Sue Ferguson Johnson & Wes Howard-Brook
Tuesday, February 20 – Thursday, February 22
In this Lenten retreat rooted in the gospel of John, we’ll hear the gospel call to be born anew as “inspired earth” with our identities rooted in God rather than…something else. Join us as we remember what it means when “Love becomes flesh.”

Òrìshà: The Gift of Failure, the Promise of the Monstrous with Báyò Akómoláfé

Friday, March 8 – Sunday, March 10

Drawing on Yoruba indigenous insights, Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé imagines emancipation through the topography of failure. By treating failure, disability, and the destabilizing syncopations visited upon white stability as a form of generative incapacitation, Dr. Akómoláfé invites us to convene at the sites of our greatest vulnerabilities – for it is there that we might take on new shapes. 

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A Healthy Relationship With Anger

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By Lindsay Lamont-Airey, LMFT (above), some initial musings on how people malformed by white culture can start to get free from our repressive relationship with anger (reflecting on a series of slides below, posted by Rev. Dante Stewart on IG)

Whiteness trains us to be emotionally controlled and repressed. Not whole and free. Do not let the spiritual bypassers shame you for anger at injustice. They are legion, and they dominate the spiritual/cultural/therapeutic waters. It is a reflection of a white western therapeutic culture that has focused far more on what to do with anxiety (the response one has to violation and threats to safety) than on what to do with abuse of power (what causes violation and threat to safety in the first place).

As a trained therapist, I can tell you: anger is a primary adaptable response to active violation – of the self, and also when witnessing violation being actively committed against others. If you struggle to feel, express and metabolize it freely, and in a way that assists you in acting meaningfully in response to violation (I.e.. holding violators accountable vs. shrinking, collapsing, staying silent), then please know you are not alone. It takes a lot of healing and liberating work to get free from the forces of domination that have shaped us, early and often, in the belly of this beast of U.S. empire.

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More Than Just a Holiday

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Cloud of Witnesses, Subverting Empire, Theological Animation2 Comments

On this site, we are committed to celebrating the life and teaching of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 366 days a year. King represents what a radical, biblical Christian witness looks like in the context of empire. Dr. King broke rank with bogus Christianity. But he did not cast off the bible. He composted it. Dr. King knew secrets because he was inextricably tied to the long tradition of a biblical Black folk religion rooted in the spirit of the land, in the liberation struggle and in a love supreme. King was bound to a faith in Jesus that, in the words of Howard Thurman, redeemed a religion that white Christians profaned in their midst.

From the time they arrived on Turtle Island, enslaved Africans creatively counter-quoted the scriptures to call out white male preachers quoting the bible to support their destructive hierarchy of value. They transformed the sacred text into a liberation manifesto scripting hope in the midst of political, economic and social struggle. The bible proclaimed that Black people were beloved and that they belong – no matter what white folks said or did. They subverted supremacy and scripted Something Else.

In his book Conjuring Freedom, Johari Jabir, a cherished contributor to this site, wrote that enslaved Africans used the bible “to turn the toxic into the tonic.” In the same way that they salvaged remnants of cloth from garbage dumps and transformed them into quilts that kept their families warm – and in the same way that they kept hunger at bay by taking the intestines of pigs that plantation owners refused to eat and turning them into cooked chitlins. They made a way out of no way – and that way was abundant and beautiful.

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Three Wise Dreamers as the Year Turns

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation2 Comments

By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann, editor of Geez Magazine, director of Kirkridge Retreat Center and author of The Sandbox Revolution: Raising Kids for a Just World

I was a bit undone by the story of the three wise astrologers this year.

“He sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.” (Matthew 2:8)

How easy it is to be tricked. How easy it is to believe fully that we are doing good while the powers are using us in horrible ways. How easy it is to become distracted by something else while the rulers make plans for power grabs and murder.

As the world is witnessing the slaughter of children in Gaza, a slaughter of innocence, I fear for the ways I am unknowingly being tricked. I know, without fully understanding, that I am constantly being manipulated by the empire that is sending the bombs and blessing the genocide.

Yet, it is in a dream that these three find the truth and figure out a different way. They awake with knowledge in their bellies and truth on the tips of their tongues quickly disappearing as dreams tend to do. They share their dreams with one another, trust the deeper knowing, and move together.

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Christmas in the Shadow of Genocide in Gaza

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By Rev. Dr. Edgar Rivera Colon

“The Israeli hasbara apparatus — roughly translated as the explanatory structure for the State of Israel — works to perpetuate images of Palestinians as terrorists whose rockets deliberately kill civilians while Israeli airstrikes are conducted with “surgical precision” even if fifty or more Palestinian children are bombed “by mistake.” All of these activities are based on a biblical discourse that gives the settlers the requisite theological rationale. This Israeli settler colonial endeavor has to be seen as the last chapter of the Western settler colonial project, taking place today in the twenty-first century in Palestine. It continues to be serviced and powered by the motherland: the Anglo-Saxon world.” – Mitri Raheb, Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, The People, the Bible.

This is a bitter and grief-stricken Christmastide. It is bathed in the blood of Palestinian children, women, men, elders, and people with disabilities. An even more revanchist form of the 1948 Nakba is being executed — and that is the proper word for it — on Palestinians by the Israeli regime and its military apparatus. Despite the faux hand-wringing noises coming from the Biden administration and the Pentagon, all sensible observers know that this is malign shadow puppet theatrics just in case a miracle happens and the International Criminal Court, going against all its previous history to date, decides to prosecute Israeli and US officials for genocide and war crimes. Let’s hope that miracle emerges. But I would not bet on it.

I find it almost impossible to convey Christmas greetings this year. I write as a minister ordained in a Black LGBTQ led fellowship of believers in a radically open and inclusive Gospel. Not the Gospel of bigotry, hatred, exclusion, and genocide which is at the core of the neo-confederate and ethnonationalist fascist movements in the ascendancy in these lands. We know these people to be the purveyors of unfreedom and political violence which grows daily in the US and throughout the world. They are our enemies. But what of Biden and his ilk? They are not much better since the economic policies that the Clinton Democrats, enacting friendly amendments to 1980s Reaganite policies, elatedly rushed to impose on this country’s working people created the material conditions for Trumpism. Of course, no one in the Democratic elites would confess to their complicity in this turn of events. That would require moral clarity and political courage. Thus, the people who actually own and run this country will stand by and watch Israel commit genocide and see it largely as a public relations problem to be managed in light of the run up to the 2024 national elections. How to manage the optics and messaging around the mass killings and expulsion of thousands of Palestinians are their only concern.

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