Category: Uncategorized

When it Rains

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Identity, and History, UncategorizedLeave a comment

rainBy Jordan Leahy

When I was a kid, I was terrified of thunderstorms. Celestial rumblings and quaking ground elicited great anxiety until much later in life than I care to admit. When I saw the clouds approaching, I’d prepare a makeshift nest in the closest beneath the staircase. I’d take books or a card game and hide out until the storm passed.

In adulthood, I find such storms soothing, a relief from summer heat and time to be close with my family. Storms create a time for various activities of stillness and rest. When the clouds come into view, anticipation builds at the coming refreshment. Continue reading “When it Rains” →

Wild Lectionary: Parting the Water or Crossing Over, The Trouble Remains

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, Uncategorized, Watershed DiscipleshipLeave a comment

IMG_2162.JPGBy Edward Sloane
Proper 26 (31)
Joshua 3: 7-17

The movement of crossing-over offers a theologically rich metaphor, but one that is not without troubles. The Israelites crossed-over the Red Sea and the Jordan River to establish a Promised Land; Jesus crossed over from death in the resurrection; the colonization of indigenous communities and the exploitation of more-than-human communities are the result of crossing oceans and bioregions; enslaved black bodies in the United States travelled the Underground Railroad to cross over into free territories; migrants cross borders seeking refuge from political, economic, and climate instability. Crossing over suggests a happy ending—we have arrived. Leaving behind a troubling, or unsatisfying, past, we are on our way to something better, perhaps even salvation. Depending on who tells the story and how, it is easy to read such crossings in multiple ways.   Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Parting the Water or Crossing Over, The Trouble Remains” →

My spouse was one of the clergy standing before the white nationalists in Charlottesville

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Identity, and History, UncategorizedLeave a comment

PASTORS+By Liza Neal

My spouse was one of the clergy standing in a line before the white nationalists in Charlottesville.  We both knew God is calling us to stand up to white supremacy.  We understood the risk.  Only one of us was going because we didn’t want our child to lose both parents.

That weekend I thought a lot about Peter’s wife.  She is barely mentioned.  In the synoptic gospels Peter’s mother-in-law has a fever, Jesus heals her, and she offers hospitality.  You can’t have a mother-in-law without a wife… Continue reading “My spouse was one of the clergy standing before the white nationalists in Charlottesville” →

All of Us is Still Tired

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Feminist/Womanist/Queer Liberation and Theology, Subverting Empire, UncategorizedLeave a comment

ImaniHighlights from Imani Perry’s response in a forum entitled “The Logic of Misogyny.” Perry is currently the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her comments were originally posted on the Boston Review website on July 11, 2016:

…dismantling patriarchy seems a virtually impossible task. Its current form is rooted in the Age of Exploration and the Enlightenment and supported the conquests, geopolitics, and philosophies of those eras. It was formative to the Western legal concepts of both personhood and property, as well as to the rise of the sovereign European state, the Atlantic slave trade, the practice of settler-colonialism, the mass murder of black and brown peoples, and the exploitation of those denied legal and political recognition. The patriarch—the conceptual ideal man and citizen—was and is defined and protected by his power over intimate associations, and that power remains supported by politics, law, capital, militarism, and police power… Continue reading “All of Us is Still Tired” →

Our Lady comes

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Feminist/Womanist/Queer Liberation and Theology, UncategorizedLeave a comment
09e961d888df6fcd72b2fb3b9e9def59--blessed-virgin-mary-window-ideas
Taize

This piece was developed during the second Bartimaeus Institute Online (BIO) Study Cohort 2016-2017.  These pieces will eventually be published in a Women’s Breviary collection.  For more information regarding the BIO Study Cohort go here.

By Katherine Parent

In the cave of a great sanctuary, a granite womb full of light and bones, I sat among songs of the annunciation next to a new friend. Listening next to me, she didn’t know that I was having a holy moment of uncertainty. Each apex was an almond reminder of sacred arches, gateways of birth and body: seen, sacred, secret and silenced. I was considering, fiercely and privately, a surgery that would open my thick sealed hymen, a birth defect known as “Virgin Mary.” Continue reading “Our Lady comes” →

Wild Lectionary: Who Is My Neighbor?

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, Uncategorized, Watershed DiscipleshipLeave a comment
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Sacred Earth Camp youth catalogue species at Coleman Creek Credit: Devin Gillan

Proper 25 (30)
Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost

Matthew 22:34-46

By Laurel Dykstra

In today’s Gospel when asked about the greatest of all the commandments, Jesus’ reply is simple, “love God, love your neighbor.” In Luke, this same exchange is followed by the question, “who is my neighbor?” which Jesus answers with the parable of the Good Samaritan. The story of upstanding citizens who fail to respond to suffering after an assault has obvious parallels for first world Christians confronted by climate crisis, species extinctions, and environmental racism. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Who Is My Neighbor?” →

Sermon: She was not: The Bible’s most vividly brutal story, and why we must read and remember it

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Uncategorized1 Comment

 

concubine in Judges 19Ken Sehested, Circle of Mercy, 9.19.05
Judges 19:1-30

There have been two special occasions in my life when I have become agonizingly aware of the special fear women feel over the threat of sexual assault.

The first happened when Nancy and I were counting the days before our wedding in 1973. Every couple weeks she came in from where she went to school in New Jersey to meet me in a chaplain’s office in New York City. We were doing a series of premarital counseling sessions. Continue reading “Sermon: She was not: The Bible’s most vividly brutal story, and why we must read and remember it” →

They were once men

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Ringwraith(s)Frodo: What are they?

Strider: They were once men. Great kings of men. Then Sauron the deceiver gave to them nine rings of power. Blinded by their greed, they took them without question. One by one, they fell into darkness and now they’re slaves to His will. They are the Nazgûls, Ringwraiths. Neither living nor dead. At all times, they feel the presence of the Ring. Drawn to the power of the One, they will never stop hunting you.

  • The Lord of the Rings.

Truth Warriors and the Renewal of Vocation

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, Uncategorized1 Comment

IMG_0971By Bill Wylie-Kellermann, an excerpt from the newly released Principalities in Particular: a Practical Theology of the Powers .

The New York Times has begun to sell “truth.” Advertisements come to my email. You can read them in print. You can see them on TV: “The truth is hard. The truth is hard to find. The truth is hard to know. The truth is more important than ever.” (Even “The truth is: alternative facts are lies.”) Though I myself have railed against the paper and know it needs to be read critically as liberal or neo-liberal corporate media, I’m actually thinking of getting a real world paper subscription. The truth is, as a paper of record, I’ve relied on it in this writing.

Will the attacks on journalistic integrity, on mainstream news as fake news, on the media as the “enemy of the people,” actually prompt a yearning within the fourth estate for the renewal of the journalistic vocation? Continue reading “Truth Warriors and the Renewal of Vocation” →