Living into that Reality with Prayer & Action

On March 8, 2019March 8, 2019 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Just PeacemakingLeave a comment

A Lenten message from our friends at ReconciliAsian, a peace center in Los Angeles that equips leaders in Korean and Asian American churches and communities to serve in ways that promote unity, justice and peace towards reconciliation.

The forty days of Lent represents the time Jesus spent in the wilderness, enduring the temptation of Satan and preparing to begin his ministry. Lent is a time of repentance, fasting and preparation for the coming of Easter. Continue reading “Living into that Reality with Prayer & Action” →

Wild Lectionary: Roots and Stories

On March 7, 2019March 4, 2019 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, Uncategorized, Watershed DiscipleshipLeave a comment

7491435002_e9fed382f8_o — Wangari Maathai mural in the Lower Haight. Photo by Phil Dokas.

Lent 1

Deuteronomy 26:1-11
Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16
Romans 10:8b-13
Luke 4:1-13

By Rev. Dr. Victoria Marie

As I reflected on today’s readings, the theme they seemed to weave together is to begin Lent by reviewing our stories. With the First Reading, in which the writers of Deuteronomy are giving the reader a sort of Last Will and Testament of Moses, God’s people are reminded of their history and God’s presence in it. They are told to recount that history in ritual and celebration. We are also being reminded to reflect on our personal intergenerational stories. Who were our ancestors? How was God with them as they journeyed? How do their stories impact your story? How has God’s presence in all of our stories led us to where we are today: physically, socially, emotionally and spiritually? The First Reading reminds us to ponder these questions as we reflect on our stories. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Roots and Stories” →

Third Helpings

On March 6, 2019March 6, 2019 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Uncategorized1 Comment

talitha3 By Talitha Fraser

We live in times where the focus is on those things that divide rather than connect us but as Chappo (Peter Chapman) says “You should share communion together, it has a unique power to unite beyond words.”

Sometimes community is a few households sharing life together. This brownie recipe feels symbolic of that as the plate I regularly bring to share at special occasions – birthdays, Christmas, dedications… When I was interning with Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries (BCM) in 2012, my community back in Melbourne sent me their smiling, summer faces into my crisply cold California day so that I might feel ‘at the table’. I made brownies for the Institute that year and we started up an Institute cookbook and I like to think they’re still being made. Taking our recipes with us means we can feel at home wherever we are and share that hospitality with others. Rather than one community here and another there… there’s just one big community. Please join us. Make brownies. Continue reading “Third Helpings” →

Out of the Depths I Call

On March 5, 2019March 4, 2019 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance, UncategorizedLeave a comment

By Nancy Bowker

Kathy Eliot and I were fellow contemplatives at St. Luke’s Cathedral for 20 years. We got together a few months before her death. We agreed I would sing for her while she was alive, rather than waiting for her funeral.

In the dimming light of this vastly silent sacred space she leafed through sheaves of 50 year old hand written Psalms. She was a woman of humble, quiet and private faithfulness.

But one can sense the empowering Spirit behind every word. She would then hand the beloved penciled psalm to me. I sang the whole song in one take, but later edited an interspersed call and response.

This track was later played at her funeral, and given to her friends.

A Wild, Ragged Figure

On March 4, 2019February 28, 2019 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

By Ric Hudgens

*This is the tenth installation of a year-long series of posts from contributors all over North America each answering the question, “How would you define radical discipleship?” We will be posting responses regularly on Mondays during 2019.

What is radical discipleship?

I’m in bed recovering from a stroke. I have dramatic weakness on the right side of my body. I can only walk with assistance. I talk slowly and softly. It is difficult for me to write. I am poor in physical strength, but rich in friends and strong in faith. Maybe I’ll be back to normal some day; or maybe it’s time for me to find a new normal. Continue reading “A Wild, Ragged Figure” →

This is Why I Speak of “Postactivism”

On March 3, 2019March 4, 2019 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire9 Comments

From Bayo Akomolafe, originally posted to social media on February 26, 2019:

A sticky myth of modern activism is that we are human observers looking out upon a world of troubling events from a distance that allows us to think up solutions to, or ask poignant questions about, those critical occurrences. Our popular equations of social change seemingly take for granted the constancy of human subjectivity and agency. We are pillars in the sandy storm: the world outside our skins may roar and thrash and turn, but we are the calm interruptions in the wind – and it is our impenetrable inner world and free-willed consciousness that will bring order to the chaos around us – if only we get our act together. What we do not see, however, is how fluid, incoherent and unstable we really are. For instance, with the problem of environmental degradation, we do not usually notice how we are co-produced in the leaching of dangerous toxins from aquatic bodies in plastic oceans, how these secretions not only penetrate our own bodies but modify them, and how these modifications imply that we are not pure referees of the situation. We are “in deep”, and we must account for the fact that how we even see the problem is part of the problem. Continue reading “This is Why I Speak of “Postactivism”” →

A Logical Outgrowth

On March 2, 2019March 2, 2019 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire1 Comment

Another throw down from the front porch of Ruby Sales (originally https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fruby.sales.1%2Fposts%2F2390576024310162&width=500“>posted February 23, 2019):

What does it say about White Americans that they see Donald Trump as a viable candidate despite all of the spiritual decay and social rot gut that surround him. He degrades the office of the presidency with degrading, threatening and dehumanizing speech, conspires with Putin against his country to erode the pillars of democracy, upholds sexual and racial crimes and policies, film flams ordinary people and sells America to the highest bidders.

For White Americans to see Trump as a viable President and candidate is a problem in White culture that speaks volumes about the social death and spiritual nihilism that grip them. Moreover Trump is a logical outgrowth of hundreds of years of a culture of Whiteness where its guardians and beneficiaries have feasted and waxed fat not on only these malformations but on the lives, labor and bodies of Black and Brown peoples always and women sometimes.

We Talk, You Listen

On March 1, 2019March 1, 2019 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire1 Comment

By Tommy Airey, co-editor of RadicalDiscipleship.Net

“Our arms are tired of troubling the waters for you. Do us a favor and trouble your own waters and receive healing.”–Jim Bear Jacobs, Thursday morning at the Bartimaeus Kinsler Institute

Yesterday, on my flight back to Detroit, I had a front row seat for a rather disturbing dialogue. A young man whose family owns a limo company in the suburbs was aghast at Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) who called out the director of Green Book for publicly praising the watch-and-bicycle-company Shinola for their role in “saving Detroit.” Then the young man proclaimed, “In my opinion, gentrification is really helping.” His passionate conversation partner, a white woman about my age, gasped, “Why can’t people just be happy?” Continue reading “We Talk, You Listen” →

Wild Lectionary: Fully Human, Fully Divine, Fully Trans 

On February 28, 2019February 27, 2019 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Feminist/Womanist/Queer Liberation and Theology, Theological Animation, Uncategorized, Watershed Discipleship2 Comments

frog By Mary Ann Saunders

Exodus 34:29-35
Luke 9:28-43a

For me, as a trans woman, the Transfiguration feels deeply personal.

It’s not just that the word transfiguration simply means “a change of form”—which is something I know quite a bit about—nor is it simply that my experience and Jesus’ experience are consistent with the natural world. Creation, after all, is full of transfigurations: tadpoles become frogs, seeds become plants, some fish species change sex, caterpillars become butterflies (this last itself being a popular metaphor for gender transitions). We now even know that genetic information—supposedly immutable—can change over the course of our lives.

Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Fully Human, Fully Divine, Fully Trans ” →

Winter as Play and Delight

On February 27, 2019January 31, 2019 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance, Uncategorized, Watershed Discipleship1 Comment

In January, over twenty women gathered for a Word and World weekend of rest and writing using winter as their guide and teacher. This is the last reflection offered which also gives some writing prompts. May it be company in these longer winter days.

By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann

As we begin this final morning together, I am holding all that we have carried and shared with one another. I am so grateful.

These words come to mind from Arundhati Roy who is an Indian author and activist.

“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

Continue reading “Winter as Play and Delight” →