Thanks to the WEB Dubois Center at UMass Amherst for posting this on Juneteenth.
Category: Uncategorized
I Want to Say
An offering from Lina AlSharif, a Palestinian poet living in Qatar. Penned in 2019. Even more relevant in this moment.
Join the Movement.
An Update from the leadership team of Christians for a Free Palestine.
We are excited to join together as Christians for a Free Palestine on May 28 at 8 pm ET, 5 pm PT. We will gather together again to inspire and conspire. We will worship together, learn how Christians for a Free Palestine has supported activism across the country, and share more plans for our future!
Our leadership recently spent time together in person to plan the future of this movement. We are excited to share what we discussed with you, and specifically share more about our plans for Washington DC in July. Join us to learn more.
As we gear up to take action together in Washington DC to challenge Christians United for Israel, the largest pro-Israel organization in the country, we need to grow this movement, to make our voices as loud as possible.
The Courageous Students
A message of solidarity with Gaza encampments on college campuses, from the National Council of Elders, a coalition of veteran Civil Rights and Peace Activists.
The National Council of Elders calls upon all people to embrace the courageous students demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, an end to the occupation of Palestine by the Israeli government, and the divestment of university funds that support weapons and War.
As veterans of the great liberation movements of the twentieth century, we understand that young people demanding justice and peace are critical to creating more compassionate, responsible societies. Their visions and values of the future are being practiced in encampments on campuses as they construct
communities to care for each other, to learn together, and to develop concrete processes for change.
The consciousness and sensibilities of today’s students has been shaped by actions stretching over the last decade. With Occupy Wall Street, climate justice actions, Me Too, and the Movement for Black lives, students have been demonstrating courage and tenacity in the face of ever escalating repression. Many are stepping forward for the first time and recognizing their power to create change.
Continue reading “The Courageous Students”History Belongs to the Intercessors
What does it really mean to pray in this season of resisting settler-colonial violence? This is how Walter Wink articulated it in Engaging the Powers.
When we pray, we are not sending a letter to a celestial White House where it is sorted among piles of others. We are engaged in an act of co-creation, in which one little sector of the universe rises up and becomes translucent, incandescent, a vibratory center of power that radiates the power of the universe. History belongs to the intercessors, who believe the future into being. If this is so, then intercession, far from being an escape from action, is a means of focusing for action and of creating action. By means of our intercessions we veritably cast fire upon the earth and trumpet the future into being.
Christians for a Free Palestine
Join Christians across the United States for a mass call this Thursday, February 15th, from 8-9:30pm EST (5-6:30pm PST) to learn about our plan for direct action against the US-funded genocide in Palestine, and the manipulation of Christianity by Christian Zionists.
Our goal is to get 1000 Christians on this call! Sign up today. Register HERE.
We will gather together for a time of lamentation, learning, prayer, and action. We’ll hear from powerful speakers including Palestinian and American Christians, a representative from the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinic Council, and leaders of Christians for a Free Palestine.
Together, they’ll speak to the crisis in Gaza and the West Bank, and call for Christians across the U.S. to join the worldwide interfaith movement that is taking public, nonviolent action to stop the genocide and speak out against Christian Zionism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia.
We’ll share specific and concrete ways that you and your community can take public action for a free Palestine, and we’ll announce future trainings and mass organizing calls.
The Exodus Story of Genocidal Resistance
By Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler (above), Director and Chief Visionary, Faith Strategies, originally posted on the Faith Strategies weekly newsletter email (Jan 27, 2024)
One of the problems with telling and understanding biblical stories is that we take what is allegorical, symbolic, and/or critiquing of the human condition and seek to make it literal, factual and fixed in time. We have lost the art of story-telling, and in that we have lost the ability to see and understand what sage story-tellers of old were trying to communicate both then and now.
In the Exodus (1:15–1:21) story, Pharaoh reacts to the proliferation of the children of the oppressed and enslaved with a policy to kill all new born male children. This implies that the oppressed and enslaved female babies of the women were to be spared and used to procreate Egyptian children. Puah and Shiphrah, who are midwives are given orders by Pharaoh that while attending to enslaved and oppressed woman in labor, if it is a male child to kill him, and if a female baby to let her live. But in classic story-telling that speaks to the art of resistance, when Pharaoh realizes that just as many male children were being born as before, he summoned the midwives to make account. They stated to Pharaoh “You don’t know these women or their strength. When we are summoned, by the time we get there, they have already given birth!” These midwives were in defiance to the genocidal orders given by the king.
Continue reading “The Exodus Story of Genocidal Resistance”
The Biggest Mouth in the World: A Riff on Genesis 4:8-16
By Jim Perkinson, a sermon for St. Peter’s Episcopal Church (October 1, 2023), a
So, land. A big topic. My wife was recently asked to open a Michigan Climate Summit Conference hosted at Oakland University where she teaches with a formal land acknowledgement and after giving greetings in her native tongue of Kapampangan from the Philippines, the traditional homeland of the Ayta, she offered the following:
I’ve been asked to do the Land Acknowledgment to set the tone for our gathering today and it is fitting that I do so because I, too, am a settler here on Turtle Island. As one Mohawk scholar once said to me once, “It doesn’t matter if your people were brought here through historic colonization, as far as Native peoples are concerned, you are still settlers.” Something I’ve had to sit with for a long time and ponder.
And as protocol goes, it is settlers like myself—not Native peoples—who must acknowledge whose land we’re on—that we are here on Native peoples’ stolen land. And we name this truth not just as pro forma, but as part of the discipline of facing into—and beginning to unlearn—our settler privilege—recognizing that our presence here on this land as non-indigenous peoples means we are beneficiaries not only of native genocide and dispossession, but of other kinds of historic oppressions such as African slavery, U.S. imperialism abroad, and the ecocidal clearing of forests and decimation of wildlife habitat in order to build our cities that’s part of what is driving climate change.
Continue reading “The Biggest Mouth in the World: A Riff on Genesis 4:8-16”An Unholy License
A timely message from Frederick Douglass (1852).
What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?
I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.
Radical Discipleship 