Category: Theological Animation

Making The House Ready for the Lord

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation2 Comments

squirrelBy Mary Oliver

Dear Lord, I have swept and I have washed but
still nothing is as shining as it should be
for you.  Under the sink, for example, is an
uproar of mice—it is the season of their
many children.  What shall I do?  And under the eaves
and through the walls the squirrels
have gnawed their ragged entrances- but it is the season
when they need shelter, so what shall I do?  And
the raccoon limps into the kitchen and opens the cupboard
while the dog snores, the cat hugs the pillow;
what shall I do?  Beautiful is the new snow falling
in the yard and the fox who is staring boldly
up the path, to the door.  And still I believe you will
come, Lord: you will, when I speak to the fox,
the sparrow, the lost dog, the shivering sea goose, I know
that really I am speaking to you whenever I say,
as I do all morning and afternoon:  Come in, Come in.

The Baptist’s Radical Critique of Entitlement: Repentance as Radical Discontinuity

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation1 Comment

LentzJohntheBaptistBy Ched Myers, the 3rd Sunday in Advent (Luke 3:7-18)

Note: This is one of Ched’s occasional comments on the Lukan gospel readings from the Revised Common Lectionary during year C, 2015-16.

The third week in Advent lingers on Luke’s portrait of John the Baptist, in which we get our most substantive glimpse into this wilderness prophet’s message (right, icon by Robert Lentz, 1984). This reading cuts sharply against the grain of the holiday season, so often defined in corporate-sponsored Christmas culture by commercialization and commodification of all things religious. But the Lectionary’s wisdom seeks to restrain the manic rush into what a young Jewish friend calls “the days of craze,” insisting rather on a sober look at the travails of empire.
Continue reading “The Baptist’s Radical Critique of Entitlement: Repentance as Radical Discontinuity” →

Healing the Open Wound: Imagining Christian Border Ethics with Gloria Anzaldúa

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

Border at NightBy Justin Ashworth, first published in The Other Journal

Border encounters occur every day in our global and globalizing cities.[1] We consume food touched by people born outside the United States; we purchase things from non-citizens, brush shoulders with them as we go to work. Some of us kiss immigrants goodbye as we head out the door for the day, while others of us are non-citizens ourselves. Our daily lives are filled with border encounters like these, that is, with economic, political, cultural, and personal interactions between citizens and foreigners.[2] But what should be the marks of these encounters? In asking this question, I am not concerned primarily with how cosmopolitan bigwigs interact with each other but rather with how the images of the border that citizens carry around in their heads influence their interactions with border crossers. Are our border images accurate, and what type of ethic do they imply? Continue reading “Healing the Open Wound: Imagining Christian Border Ethics with Gloria Anzaldúa” →

Welcome to the Cult

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Cloud of Witnesses, Theological Animation2 Comments

WesBy Tommy Airey

Here’s an easy way to figure out if you’re in a cult: If you’re wondering whether you’re in a cult, the answer is yes.
Stephen Colbert

Not too long ago, in the years of early adulthood, I was attending a church in Southern California with weekend attendance in the tens of thousands. This was Respectable Religion. The pastor prayed at Obama’s inauguration. But something dreadful was percolating inside of me as I took inventory of what was happening all around me.
Continue reading “Welcome to the Cult” →

This Advent

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological AnimationLeave a comment

This Advent, as we light the candles in the dark and sing for Emmanuel, let’s be even more intentional than usual in clearing the commercial Christmas assault advent wreathfrom our minds and hearts. Whatever God is calling us to has little to do with shopping and driving ourselves into a frenzy creating the “perfect” holiday. We need to honor the silence and the dark, to remember our stories, to teach the youth in our lives what we believe matters. We need to recall, to intuit, to dream the life we’re called to and then make a plan that allows us to strip down enough to have it. In the course of that, of course, we need to give thanks for all that we are and for those traveling in our circles and beyond.    -Jeanie Wylie-Kellermann, THe Witness 1998

Bathing Our Inner World

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological AnimationLeave a comment

EverythingFrom Brian McLaren in Everything Must Change (2009)

Prayer will cease to be a technique for enlisting God to help us ‘make it’ in the dominant system; it will instead become a way of bathing our inner world in the transforming presence of God, a way we seek to be shaped by the new framing story, the new reality, the good news, so that we can be catalysts bringing transformation to the dominant system.

Gates of Hope

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological AnimationLeave a comment

stonesOur mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of hope — not the prudent gates of Optimism, which are somewhat narrower; nor the stalwart, boring gates of Common Sense; nor the strident gates of self-righteousness, which creak on shrill and angry hinges (our people cannot hear us there; they cannot pass through); nor the cheerful, flimsy garden gate of ‘Everything is gonna be all right,’ but a very different, sometimes very lonely place, the place of truth-telling, about your own soul first of all and its condition, the place of resistance and defiance, the piece of ground from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it might be, as it will be; the place from which you glimpse not only struggle, but joy in the struggle — and we stand there, beckoning and calling, telling people what we are seeing, asking people what they see.

  • Victoria Safford

Ratzlaff Review: Paul & The Roman Imperial Order

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological AnimationLeave a comment

VernThe legendary Vern Ratzlaff (right), Canadian Mennonite pastor and professor, was sporting his 5-inch beard long before practically every American white guy under 35 started growing theirs. Vern is spending free time at his outpost in Saskatoon reading dense anti-imperial theology and writing concise summaries for the rest of us.

A Ratzlaff Review of Paul and the Roman Imperial Order. (ed) Richard Horsley, Trinity Press, 2004.

Here is another wonderful treatment of Pauline struggles with the cultural and political and social and religious strands of the first century. Horsley states the task clearly in the introduction to the eight essays that make up this volume. We have ‘traditionally understood Paul in opposition to Judaism. Luther’s discovery of ‘justification by faith’ in Paul’s letter to the Romans became the formative religious experience through which Paul’s letters have been read’ (p 1). Continue reading “Ratzlaff Review: Paul & The Roman Imperial Order” →