“But there’s a literary form I haven’t mentioned yet: the literature of witness. Offred records her story as best she can; then she hides it, trusting that it may be discovered later, by someone who is free to understand it and share it. This is an act of hope: every recorded story implies a future reader. Robinson Crusoe keeps a journal. So did Samuel Pepys, in which he chronicled the Great Fire of London. So did many who lived during the Black Death, although their accounts often stop abruptly. So did Romeo Dallaire, who chronicled both the Rwandan genocide and the world’s indifference to it. So did Anne Frank, hidden in her secret annex. Continue reading “Literature of Witness”
Category: Uncategorized
Do your own work: Leadership on the Frontlines
By Sarah Thompson, Christian Peacemakers Teams. Re-shared from her blog.
One of my favorite things about my dear friend MJ Sharp was how he did his work, especially in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). He gave his life for peace work there, but he was not simply a martyr. He was someone giving his all to investigative work. MJ was a complex character who pushed hard for justice, utilizing creative and courageous tactics that led to positive change in some key situations. Speaking at his memorial service, the representative from the United Nations remarked, “the international community has lost one of its best investigators.” Continue reading “Do your own work: Leadership on the Frontlines”
Sermon: It’s Like Burning Fire Shut Up in my Bones
By Rose Berger, preached at St. Stephen’s & The Incarnation Episcopal Church (Washington, D.C.)
June 25, 2017
Jeremiah 20:7-13, Psalm 69: 8-11, (12-17), 18-20, Romans 6:1b-11, Matthew 10:24-39
[Piscataway people on whose land this church stands. Bishop Budde, Pastor Sam, Rev. Linda. The Beloved Community that gathers at St. Stephen’s and the Incarnation.]
The prophet Jeremiah was asked to carry out one of the most difficult tasks ever assigned to any servant of God.[1]
During the last years of the kingdom of Judah, Jeremiah was to prophesy to King and Congress that because of their sin their fragile nation would be subsumed by the Babylonian Empire and they would all forcibly removed to the capital city of Babylon. Continue reading “Sermon: It’s Like Burning Fire Shut Up in my Bones”
New Online Class for Parents-to-be and Seekers
By 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 “New Online Class for Parents-to-be and Seekers”
Wild Lectionary: The Riff Raff, the Bedbugs, and the Signs
Proper 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.
Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: The Riff Raff, the Bedbugs, and the Signs”
Where is the theology that redefines to them what it means to be fully human?
From 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 “Where is the theology that redefines to them what it means to be fully human?”
Conversations On The Block: Celebrating Three Years
Lydia 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 “Conversations On The Block: Celebrating Three Years”
Harsh and Dreadful Thing
For 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
On Revolution and Equilibrium
Feature 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 “On Revolution and Equilibrium”
Radical Discipleship 