Category: Uncategorized

Imagination Battle

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, UncategorizedLeave a comment

index“We are in an imagination battle.

Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown and Renisha McBride and so many others are dead because, in some white imagination, they were dangerous. And that imagination is so respected that those who kill, based on an imagined, radicalized fear of Black people, are rarely held accountable.

Imagination has people thinking they can go from being poor to a millionaire as part of a shared American dream. Imagination turns Brown bombers into terrorists and white bombers into mentally ill victims. Imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of ability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s capability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone’ else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

Lent Bootcamp: Love in the Time of COVID-19

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, Uncategorized5 Comments

By Dee Dee Risher

Like each of you, I am spinning and dancing in the flux that is COVID-19.

My city, Philadelphia, is on lockdown, people asked to go out only for necessities or to the doctor. Every day I have gotten news of loved older ones exposed or friends who have COVID-19, schools and colleges closed, information overload. I’ve cancelled retreats and trips I have looked forward to for months, reeled home one college student from across the globe. I’ve been anxious about what the virus will do in Project HOME’s 900-resident community of formally homeless and vulnerable people, concerned and sad about life experiences cancelled, uncertain about how long it may go and how bad everything may get. You probably have a similar list of things falling, failing, the world shifting a bit under fear and responsibility.

Continue reading “Lent Bootcamp: Love in the Time of COVID-19” →

Another Story

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Uncategorized1 Comment
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Pictures of Money, flickr, cc

By Ken Sehested

We have a lot of competition for our attention these days. I urge you to give a little space for this matter, which is unfolding right now in Congress.

“Any time there is a crisis and Washington is in the middle of it is an opportunity for guys like me.” —industry lobbyist on Capitol Hill

“Take Boeing. The aerospace giant of course wants a $60bn bailout. Financial problems for this corporation predated the crisis, with the mismanagement that led to the 737 Max as well as defense and space products that don’t work (I noted last July a bailout was coming). The corporation paid out $65bn in stock buybacks and dividends over the last 10 years. . . . Continue reading “Another Story” →

The Cognitive Dissonance of Southern Hospitality

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Identity, and History, UncategorizedLeave a comment
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Old Age Security Credit: Jeff M for Short

By Britney Winn Lee. Originally in Geez 56: Entertaining Angels.

Joe Marlon Lee had the same philosophy for his kitchen table as he did for his onion patch, as he did for his pond and pocketbook – what is it all for if not to be shared?

He passed that worldview down to my mother, and together with my father, she has maintained an open-backdoor, open-pantry policy for all of my life. My friends, throughout college and young adulthood and now parenthood, found a sense of place just as I found a sense of place on that piece of Louisiana acreage. An insult it almost was for someone not to make our home their home throughout my upbringing. This sentiment echoed throughout my childhood town’s pharmacy, and football stadium, and the sanctuary in which I was pruned for a world much different than the one responsible for my raising. Continue reading “The Cognitive Dissonance of Southern Hospitality” →

Let Us End Our Complicity in War

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Just Peacemaking, Uncategorized1 Comment

indexBy Bishop Tom Gumbleton. Shared from Common Dreams.

Once again, information has surfaced regarding United States governmental efforts to mislead and misinform people about disgraceful, cruel destruction caused by a United States war of choice against people who meant the U.S. no harm. In the Afghanistan Papers, the United States government officials acknowledged, privately, their own uncertainty about why they were going to war against Afghanistan in 2001. The trove of newly released documents about the 18-year war unmasked years of high-level deceit and deliberate efforts to obfuscate realities on the ground in Afghanistan. Continue reading “Let Us End Our Complicity in War” →

Bread and Blessings

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Just Peacemaking, Uncategorized6 Comments
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cc

By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann, reflection on the Beautitudes at Day House in February.

I’ve taken to making bread lately. I have a bread machine that makes great bread, but I found myself craving the act of kneading bread.

It feels like everyone around me these days are going through really painful times in their lives. While I am trying to walk beside them with love for them, I find that internally I am carrying a lot of the grief and anger inside of me—and I have turned to breadmaking. Continue reading “Bread and Blessings” →

TRACKED BUT NOT SEEN: THE FIGHT AGAINST RACIST SURVEILLANCE

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, Uncategorized1 Comment
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Photo credit: Craine’sDetroit

In Detroit, the constant flash of green lights says: You are being watched.

BY BILL WYLIE-KELLERMANN

Reposted from Sojourners, MARCH 2020

WE GATHERED THIS fall on the steps of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church. Summoned by the Detroit chapter of Black Youth Project 100, we were preparing to march a mile-long stretch of gentrified Michigan Avenue, which intersects there. I had served the church for 11 years as pastor, and in the last dozen or so this Catholic Worker neighborhood had been invaded by $400,000 condos, plus destination bars and restaurants. Among others, guests at our Manna Meal soup kitchen and Kelly’s Mission, largely black, are stigmatized and made unwelcome. Continue reading “TRACKED BUT NOT SEEN: THE FIGHT AGAINST RACIST SURVEILLANCE” →

Prepping for Ash Wednesday A supplication

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, UncategorizedLeave a comment

ash-wednesday-4823377_960_720By Ken Sehested, borrowing from St. Augustine and Isaiah 55:12

Return to your heart, O you transgressors,
and hold fast to the One who made you.
Stand with the Beloved and your footing
shall be firm. Rest in the Merciful One
and you shalt be buoyed.

Where do you go along these rugged
paths, pilgrim, so far from home yet so
winsomely loved? Be clear about what
you seek, and where you seek, for the
beatific life cannot be found in the land
of illusion. Continue reading “Prepping for Ash Wednesday A supplication” →

They Cannot Take the Sky

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Uncategorized1 Comment

By Joyce Hollyday

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Many years ago, when South Africa was in the stranglehold grip of the system of racial hatred and separation known as apartheid, I visited that country to learn about and report on the freedom struggle there. On one of my last evenings, a young man named Jabulani was showing me around the black township of Khayelitsha outside Cape Town, just as the sun was beginning to set. Domestics and laborers, weary from a long day’s work in the city, were making their way home in the last glimmers of daylight. A stream of women, water jugs balanced on their heads, some with swaddled babies on their backs, moved slowly out from the central spigot of the township’s rutted roads in the encroaching cool of the evening. Paraffin lamps came to life, one by one, up and down the rows of small and fragile homes constructed of plywood, cardboard, and corrugated metal. Continue reading “They Cannot Take the Sky” →

Howard Thurman: A Contemplative Guide for Our Times

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

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Howard Thurman is one of the most important religious figures of the 20th century who had an enormous impact in both spirituality and social activism.  A grandson of slaves, he was a spiritual guide and visionary for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and many of the leaders of the civil rights movement. A visit with Gandhi in India led to the conviction that nonviolence as a way of life could be a vital tool in the struggle for justice in the United States. A gifted preacher and prolific writer, his landmark book, Jesus and the Disinherited, was a ground-breaking exploration of the gospel as speaking directly to the oppression of Black Americans. But more than anything else, Thurman was a contemplative and mystic.

Sadly, Thurman’s powerful theological, spiritual, and social contributions have been greatly marginalized. He is only superficially known in much of the progressive White Christian world (a symptom of racism, one must assume). But he may be a spiritual guide for us precisely in these times, when many of us recognize that our struggle for justice, shalom – even for mere sanity – requires deeper spiritual mooring.

Thurman’s early critique of the commandeering of Christianity rings painfully true today: “It cannot be denied that too often the weight of the Christian movement has been on the side of the strong and the powerful and against the weak and oppressed-this, despite the gospel.” He called us to grasp the reality of Jesus of Nazareth, who stood with “the disinherited.” He also called us to a contemplative spirit, in which we both come to know ourselves in our fullness and our vocation in the world: “The movement of the Spirit of God in the hearts of men and women often calls them to act against the spirit of their times or causes them to anticipate a spirit which is yet in the making. In a moment of dedication they are given wisdom and courage to dare a deed that challenges and to kindle a hope that inspires.”

 The Alternative Seminary and Mystic Soul Philadelphia are hosting a special event to explore the life and work of Howard Thurman and to tap this wisdom and courage. “Howard Thurman: A Contemplative Guide for Our Times” will take place on Saturday, February 22, 9:30  – 11:30 am, at Project HOME, 1515 Fairmount Avenue in Philadelphia. We will view the one-hour film Backs Against The Wall: The Howard Thurman Story that documents Thurman’s life and legacy, and we will explore together his vision of contemplative spirituality as the foundation for engagement in movements for social change. A light breakfast will be served. A donation of $10 (or whatever you can afford) is requested to cover costs. To register or for more information, contact Will O’Brien at 215-842-1790 or willobrien59@gmail.com.

 Mystic Soul Philly is a community of individuals committed to creating local spaces that center the voices and experiences of queer people of color at the intersections of faith, mysticism, activism and healing.

The Alternative Seminary is a program of biblical and theological study and reflection designed to foster an authentic biblical witness in the modern world.  For more information, see www.alternativeseminary.net.