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New Online Class for Parents-to-be and Seekers

f60ead_73c06bda70bd49c3947f23dc638eaacf~mv2.jpgBy Chelsea Page

Childfree Not Carefree

Years before I created my new online class about the virgin Mary’s motherhood journey and the reproductive justice ethics led by women of color, I wrote to a friend:

My decision not to birth a child and, later, not to adopt a child, has been so lengthy, messy, and labor-intensive that I feel astonished that I have literally nothing to show for it. I hoped that at least I have cleared space for a different kind of family or community in my life. I await it with some of the eager impatience that I imagine my infertile sisters feel when they long for a child. Continue reading →

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Wild Lectionary: The Riff Raff, the Bedbugs, and the Signs

23-PovertyMascotsProper 18(23)

Exodus 7-12

By Laurel Dykstra

Now you know and I know, that lice, mice, roaches, bed-bugs, and rats are no respecters of persons. They invade the house of Pharaoh, the houses of his officials, and of all his people (Exod 8:21, 10:6); they infest the luxury hotels and the welfare hotels. But when the special shampoo costs eight dollars a bottle, and a visit from the exterminator $125, those that can—pay, and those that can’t, or whose landlord won’t—scratch.

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Where is the theology that redefines to them what it means to be fully human?

indexFrom Ruby Sales, excerpt from interview on On Being.

Let me just say something before we have a question. I really think that one of the things that we’ve got to deal with is that how is it that we develop a theology or theologies in a 21st-century capitalist technocracy where only a few lives matter? How do we raise people up from disposability to essentiality? And this goes beyond the question of race. What is it that public theology can say to the white person in Massachusetts who’s heroin-addicted because they feel that their lives have no meaning, because of the trickle-down impact of whiteness in the world today? What do you say to someone who has been told that their whole essence is whiteness and power and domination? And when that no longer exists, then they feel as if they are dying or they get caught up in the throes of death, whether it’s heroin addiction. Continue reading →

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Conversations On The Block: Celebrating Three Years

RDnetlogo7Lydia Wylie-Kellermann and Tommy Airey are co-editors of RadicalDiscipleship.Net and are both solid INFJs on the Myers-Briggs personality test. When it comes to the Enneagram, Lydia is a 2 with a 3 wing. Tommy is a 3 with a 2 wing. But the similarities may end there. Lydia grew up in Detroit, is in a traditional same-sex marriage (with partner, Erinn), the mother of two sons, a disciple of the Harry Potter series, an avid gardener and knitter. Tommy grew up in suburban Southern California, is scandalously married to a former student (Lindsay), an avid distance runner and starts every morning sipping on home-roasted coffee, journaling and reading the sports page and academic theology. Below is the transcript of a conversation we recently had eagerly anticipating the three-year anniversary of RadicalDiscipleship.Net. Logo above by Sarah Holst.  

LWK: Happy Anniversary, Tommy!

For three years we have been vocationally tangled in this interwebs experiment of radicaldiscipleship.net. We have successfully shared over a thousand posts that come out of circles of communities across North America. We’ve done it without a dollar. We’ve been paid nothing and we have relied on the generosity of writers’ time and work.

I have to say that it has been one of the joys of my life. I have loved working with you, loved creating and visioning the space, and have been so grateful for the ways it has strengthened and made space for my own written voice. Thank you, Tommy, for birthing the idea and inviting me into it. What gave you the idea for the blog? What were your hopes? And how are you feeling three years in? Continue reading →

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Harsh and Dreadful Thing

8117HB7WbvLFor love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science. But I predict that just when you see with horror that in spite of all your efforts you are getting further from your goal instead of nearer to it – at that very moment I predict that you will reach it and behold clearly the miraculous power of the Lord who has been all the time loving and mysteriously guiding you.

– The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

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On Revolution and Equilibrium

indexFeature by Barbara Deming, originally published in Liberation, February 1968

Do you want to remain pure? Is that it?” a black man asked me, during an argument about nonviolence. It is not possible to act at all and to remain pure; and that is not what I want, when I commit myself to the nonviolent discipline. I stand with all who say of present conditions that they do not allow men and women to be fully human and so they must be changed – all who not only say this but are ready to act.

When one is confronted with what Russell Johnson calls accurately “The violence of the status quo” – conditions which are damaging, even murderous, to very many who must live within them – it is degrading for all to allow such conditions to persist. And if the individuals who can find the courage to bring about change see no way in which it can be done without employing violence on their part – a very much lesser violence, they feel, than the violence to which they will put an end – I do not feel that I can judge them. Continue reading →

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Wild Lectionary: “Fire in the Earth: Burning but Flourishing”

imagesThirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 17 (22)

Exodus 3:1-15

By Rev. Matthew Syrdal

“There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it was not consumed… “Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your shoes, for the place you are standing is holy ground.”

And we know, when Moses was told,
in the way he was told,
“Take off your shoes!” He grew pale from that simple

reminder of fire in the dusty earth.
He never recovered
his complicated way of loving again

and was free to love in the same way
he felt the fire licking at his heels loved him.
As if the lion earth could roar
and take him in one movement…
-all poetry excerpts from David Whyte, Fire in the Earth

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