Category: Theological Animation

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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” →

Towards a Spirituality of Activism

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Just JesusBy Tommy Airey

God, help me to refuse ever to accept evil; by your Spirit empower me to work for change precisely where and how you call me; and free me from thinking I have to do everything.
Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers (1992)

On the day we met Bill Wylie-Kellermann back in the summer of ’13, we naively asked him how many times he’d been arrested for acts of civil disobedience: “I stopped counting at 50,” he muttered matter-of-factly. Between sermons and sacraments, Pastor Bill is committed to hitting the streets, participating in what he calls “liturgical direct action.”
Continue reading “Towards a Spirituality of Activism” →

The Losers & the Down and Out

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ConeFrom James Cone in The Cross & The Lynching Tree (2011)

The real scandal of the gospel is this: humanity’s salvation is revealed in the cross of the condemned criminal Jesus, and humanity’s salvation is available only through our solidarity with the crucified people in our midst. Faith that emerged out of the scandal of the cross is not a faith of intellectuals or elites of any sort. This is the faith of abused and scandalized people—the losers and the down and out.

*Click here for a free PDF of the Introduction and Chapter 1 of The Cross & The Lynching Tree.