Our decolonial perspective is informed and inspired by Indigenous analyses and practices that affirm that our current global problems are not related to a lack of knowledge, but to an inherently violent modern-colonial habit of being.
Four denials structure this habit of being:
the denial of systemic violence and complicity in harm (the fact that our comforts, securities and enjoyments are subsidized by expropriation and exploitation somewhere else),
the denial of the limits of the planet (the fact that the planet cannot sustain exponential growth and consumption),
the denial of entanglement (our insistence in seeing ourselves as separate from each other and the land, rather than “entangled” within a living wider metabolism that is bio-intelligent), and
denial of the depth and magnitude of the problems that we face: the tendencies 1) to search for ”hope” in simplistic solutions that make us feel and look good; 2) to turn away from difficult and painful work (e.g. to focus on a “better future” as a way to escape a reality that is perceived as unbearable).
By Ched Myers, a few comments about the Gospel texts for the 2nd and 3rd Sundays of Lent, re-posted from Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries. If you are in Southern California in early April, register to attend the official launch of Ched’s new book here.
In a sequence that runs from Luke 12:35–13:9, Jesus names five examples of brutality endured by poor and working classes who labor and live in the world of wealthy “lords”:
household servants enduring sleeplessness (12:37) and beatings (12:47);
debtor’s prison (12:58–59);
Galileans suffering violence at the hands of Roman authorities (13:1–3);
pedestrians killed by dangerous urban construction (13:4–5); and
oppressive demands on peasants for agricultural production by absentee landlords (13:6–9).
Jesus’s warning to “settle out of court” (2) refers to a judicial system controlled by the landlord class that routinely imprisoned the poor for indebtedness.” Pilate’s massacre of Galileans (3)—perhaps during a Passover pilgrimage, hence the reference to “their sacrifices” (13:1)—could refer to any number of skirmishes between Roman authorities and Judean dissidents during the first century CE, many of which were documented by the Jewish historian Josephus. Urban construction accidents (4) were common, given the notorious working conditions and “code violations” that characterized ambitious and hasty Herodian building projects. Those two incidents might be connected if the Tower of Siloam was part of Roman aqueduct construction, since Josephus reports that Pilate killed a group of Jews who were protesting his seizure of Temple funds to pay for imperial waterworks projects in Jerusalem. . Jesus’s emphatic refrain—“I tell you, unless you repent, you will all perish as they did” (13:3, 5)—implies that unless his people defect from this system, they too would be killed by its oppressions (Luke uses apollumi far more frequently than any other N.T. writer). These are some of many reasons that Jesus repudiates the “peace” of an imperial system that routinely generates such violations (12:51).
A statement from Mahmoud Khalil, transcribed over the phone to family and friends.
My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.
Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.
Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities.
On March 8, I was taken by DHS agents who refused to provide a warrant, and accosted my wife and me as we returned from dinner. By now, the footage of that night has been made public. Before I knew what was happening, agents handcuffed and forced me into an unmarked car. At that moment, my only concern was for Noor’s safety. I had no idea if she would be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest her for not leaving my side. DHS would not tell me anything for hours — I did not know the cause of my arrest or if I was facing immediate deportation. At 26 Federal Plaza, I slept on the cold floor. In the early morning hours, agents transported me to another facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There, I slept on the ground and was refused a blanket despite my request.
A Call for signatories and affirmation from Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA). Click here to sign on individually or on behalf of your organization.
Over 3000 “Christian Zionist” leaders affiliated with American Christian Leaders for Israel (ACLI), a project of the extremist International Christian Embassy of Jerusalem (ICEJ), recently issued a deeply immoral statement calling on President Trump to declare Israeli sovereignty over the entirety of the Holy Land. That statement can be accessed here. Trump is expected to make an announcement on the topic of annexation within the coming weeks, if not days.
The ACLI statement is wholly inconsistent with the God witnessed to in the pages of scripture and with our moral and ethical obligations as followers of Jesus and the Biblical prophets. We must publicly renounce such efforts and make it clear that those affiliated with ACLI do not speak on behalf of Christians or Christianity. Moreover, we must categorically reject any thinly-disguised plan to annex Palestinian land and engage in continued violence against innocent civilians in the occupied West Bank, in Gaza, and beyond.
By Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler (above), Pastor Emeritus of Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ and Director and Chief Visionary of Faith Strategies, LLC
As a clergy person who has served congregations in the Black and of-color communities in Chicago, Boston and Washington, DC for over 45 years I am acutely aware of the traumas and anxieties that are encountered because of changing political administrations nationally, regionally, and locally, and how they impact families and lives. Politicians and even the media often speak in broad generalities of what a change means statistically, according to the latest poll, and its implications for government and how it may set a precedent or not. But those of us serving pastorally in local communities are called upon to allay fears, to bind the wounds, make meaning out of the meaninglessness, find silver linings amidst the dark clouds, and to identify hope in the despair and confusion. We have done this many times, but at no time has the impact been as stark, devastating, or as frightening as it is now.
With Trump/Musk/DOGE, and their radical approach to government there are many lives traumatized by the fears and are suffering from the emotional abuse inflicted on those who have worked for the federal government and their families. There are also many contractors and vendors associated with government work experiencing the same high anxieties that comes with the uncertainty and worries associated with the political battering of uncertainty and threats inflicted on families and their sense of stability and security.
The following Op-Ed, originally published by Mondoweiss, was written by a group of international graduate student organizers studying at universities in the United States. They have requested anonymity due to the current targeting of Palestine activists on student visas (and now, it seems, green cards) for deportation.
We are international students who have organized in solidarity with the Palestine liberation struggle over the past 16 months. We write anonymously because the moment demands, strategically, that we do so. However, we will not be silenced. You may censure and suspend us, you may send ICE to knock down our doors, you may deport us back to our home countries, but we are only one drop in a vast ocean, and the tide of support for Palestine is rising everywhere.
Israel’s ongoing genocide has shaken the outrage of the free people of the world. While the so-called international community appears largely content to censure the zionist state and continue with business as usual, we cannot unsee images of nineteen year old student Shaban Ahmed Al-Dalou burning to death in his tent attached to an IV drip after Israeli forces bombed families sheltering in Deir al-Balah. We cannot unsee Wael Dahdouh’s tears as he looked upon the body of his martyred son. We cannot forget Dr. Refaat Alareer’s voice breaking as he sat in the semi-darkness of his apartment, flinching as bombs exploded around him ‘It is very bleak, it’s very dark…there’s no way out…what should we do, drown? We are not going to do that’. We cannot forget Medo Halimy’s daily updates, bringing humor and laughter to ‘tent life.’ We will never forget how they murdered him in his tent.
An timely excerpt from the last chapter of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States of America (1980).
History which keeps alive the memory of people’s resistance suggests new definitions of power. By traditional definitions, whoever possesses military strength, wealth, command of official ideology, cultural control, has power. Measured by these standards, popular rebellion never looks strong enough to survive.
However, the unexpected victories – even temporary ones – of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people – the employed, the somewhat privileged – are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.
That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attica – expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us.
Certain new facts may, in our time, emerge so clearly as to lead to general withdrawal of loyalty from the system. The new conditions of technology, economics, and war, in the atomic age, make it less and less possible for the guards of the system – the intellectuals, the home owners, the taxpayers, the skilled workers, the professionals, the servants of government – to remain immune from the violence (physical and psychic) inflicted on the black, the poor, the criminal, the enemy overseas. The internationalization of the economy, the movement of refugees and illegal immigrants [sic] across borders, both make it more difficult for the people of the industrial countries to be oblivious to hunger and disease in the poor countries of the world.
All of us have become hostages in the new conditions of doomsday technology, runaway economics, global poisoning, uncontainable war. The atomic weapons, the invisible radiations, the economic anarchy, do not distinguish prisoners from guards, and those in charge will not be scrupulous in making distinctions. There is the unforgettable response of the U.S. high command to the news that American prisoners of war might be near Nagasaki: “Targets previously assigned for Centerboard remain unchanged.”
There is evidence of growing dissatisfaction among the guards. We have known for some time that the poor and ignored were the nonvoters, alienated from a political system they felt didn’t care about them, and about which they could do little. Now alienation has spread upward into families above the poverty line. These are white workers, neither rich nor poor, but angry over economic insecurity, unhappy with their work, worried about their neighborhoods, hostile to government – combining elements of racism with elements of class consciousness, contempt for the lower classes along with distrust for the elite, and thus open to solutions from any direction, right or left…
…With the Establishment’s inability either to solve severe economic problems at home or to manufacture abroad a safety valve for domestic discontent, Americans might be ready to demand not just more tinkering, more reform laws, another reshuffling of the same deck, another New Deal, but radical change. Let us be Utopian for a moment so that when we get realistic again it is not that “realism” so useful to the Establishment in its discouragement of action, that “realism” anchored to a certain kind of history empty of surprise. Let us imagine what radical change would require of us all.
By Ellen Grady, re-posted from social media (3/1/2025)
On Wednesday, I went to trial at the Syracuse Federal Building on two violation charges stemming from an action November 15, 2024 calling for the US to stop funding genocide in Gaza. After a six-and-a-half-hour trial with a couple of short breaks, the judge found me guilty. I will be sentenced on Wednesday, March 12th. Below is my opening statement. The story at the end of my statement was the most important thing I wanted on the Federal record.
(This statement was modified slightly when presented at trial.)
Good morning, Judge Dancks. I am grateful to be here today with you. I am grateful that I have the right to be heard in a court of law, and that you have dedicated your life to that service. I’d also like to thank all the people serving in court today for your work in ensuring the right to a fair, public trial, a key tenant of democracy. And I am grateful to everyone who has come to bear witness today.
I want to acknowledge that we are on un-ceded Onondaga territory. And that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy founded in 1142 by the Great Peace Maker is often described as the oldest participatory democracy and that their Constitution is believed to be a model for the US Constitution.
I would also like to thank my parents and my elders for their example of trying to faithfully live the Gospel call to Love one another as God loves us.
I want to make one thing clear. I left BBC News last year after covering Gaza for months because I could see evidence accumulating into the robust conclusion that Israel has been committing war crimes & crimes against humanity.
I watched my org fail to shape coverage around this, as it does with other evidence-based findings (e.g. that climate change is real). We are long past the point at which Israel’s culpability is up for debate, just as we’re past debating that climate change is happening.
Too many mistake constant debate for good journalistic practice. Journalists need to be coming to evidence-based conclusions. Reaching conclusions after thorough investigation doesn’t make me “biased”, it makes me good at my job.
As the old saying goes, the journalist’s job isn’t to report that it may or may not be raining – it’s to look outside and tell the public if it is. And let me tell you: there’s a storm.
Radical Discipleship 