Nikki Giovanni joined the Ancestors last week. She was eighty-one. This is one of her poems called “The Laws of Motion.”
The laws of science teach us a pound of gold weighs as much as a pound of flour though if dropped from any undetermined height in their natural state one would reach bottom and one would fly away
Laws of motion tell us an inert object is more difficult to propel than an object heading in the wrong direction is to turn around. Motion being energy—inertia—apathy. Apathy equals hostility. Hostility—violence. Violence being energy is its own virtue. Laws of motion teach us
Our friends and comrades at Mennonite Action are offering a great opportunity to learn in community tomorrow night.
Don’t miss Mennonite Action’s next opportunity to be in community together — and to advance our collective understanding of the connections between antisemitism and Christian nationalism.
We will be joined by authors, academics, and organizers to discuss how antisemitism is deeply interwoven with the far-right Christian nationalist politics of many of our country’s leaders.
We are excited to welcome the authors of Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism, Shane Burley and Ben Lorber, as well as University of Notre Dame Professor Atalia Omer. These speakers will help us think through how we can stand in solidarity with other members of our communities to push back against rising violence toward the Jewish people.
We hope to see you on our December 19 call to learn more about how we can organize against all manifestations of hate and oppression in our work for liberation in Palestine — and continue our work for the liberation of all of God’s children.
White Christians and Jewish Americans have been socialized to be scared of images like this. But isn’t this is pretty much what Mary the Palestinian Jewish teen mother of Jesus would have looked like?
In the Gospel of Luke, it says that Mary prayed to a God who brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly. A God who has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty!
Mary was part of the resistance.
As she called on a Power greater than empire, Mary summoned what Palestinians call sumud. Steadfastness. Standing firm in the face of occupation. Never surrendering their humanity and dignity. No matter what the colonizers say or do.
Here’s to all the courageous young people on college campuses in 2024 who pitched tents and got arrested as they demanded that their campuses divest from companies profiting off of land theft and genocide.
By Jim Perkinson, a sermon on Luke 3:1-6 for St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Detroit, MI (December 8, 2024)
So, we’ll begin way out in left field. The indigenous teacher my wife and I have been frequenting for more than 12 years now—half white, half Native, growing up among the Pueblo folk of northern New Mexico, adopted into, trained by, and living among the Tzutujil Maya of Guatemala for more than 10 years before being sent back to the States to keep their traditions alive as the civil war there was destroying their culture and indigenous ways—wrote a book a few years ago called The UnlikelyPeace of Cuchumaqiq: The Parallel Lives of People as Plants: Keeping the Seeds Alive. In it, he—Martín Prechtel— recounted his experience of the Feb. 4, 1976 earthquake in Guatemala whose 7.6 rumble on the Richter scale killed more than 22,000 people and displaced some 1.2 million.
Curiously, Prechtel begins that book with stories of Native kids running 15-kilometer races in area high school competitions, through the canyons near the Pueblo, which they almost always won, but refused to win as individuals. Rather they would wait for each other before crossing the finish line, so only the entire Native group of kids, not an individual, would be crowned winner. Or not. Running wasn’t about winning. It was about running. Being magnificent in your movement. Interesting, but why begin a book on a mega-earthquake experience by talking about running? We’ll get to that later.
This is Dean Hammer’s review of a new book edited by Arthur Laffin and Carole Sargent called Arise and Witness: Poems by Anne Montgomery, RSCJ.
Note: Sr. Anne Montgomery was a nonviolent witness in war zones in the Holy Land and Iraq, and endured years of imprisonment due to her involvement in Plowshares actions. Her poems are rooted in her love for accompanying the marginalized, borne out of her experience of religious life and community. Most of these poems, now published posthumously, provide unique and rich biblical insights into what it means to be human and a faithful follower of Jesus. This volume serves as both a powerful spiritual anchor and a source of inspiration for all who seek to be a radical witness of truth and hope. Drawing on her experience as a religious, teacher and peacemaker, Anne’s poetry offers powerful scriptural insights that can sustain people’s hope.
Thanks to the skillful and loving work by the editors of Arise and Witness, we are gifted witha posthumous memoir of Sr. Anne Montgomery: poet, mystic, and witness par excellence. While composing this review, I heard Anne’s voice from the heavenly realm protesting the lauding of her extraordinary life: “the story is not about me,” she insisted. Indeed, her story and poetry portray her hopefulness, undaunted by the chaos and violence of our world. Her theopoetic reflections invite us to share her connection with “the God who proclaims peace: the merciful, the advocate, the restorer” (71). Her narrative reveals a lived profession: “The light shone in the darkness and the darkness could not extinguish the light” (22).
In the prologue, Facing the Darkness, Anne cites Denise Levertov, a sage protest poet and mentor of peacemaking: “A voice from the dark called out, the poet must give us imagination of peace…peace, a presence, an energy field more intense than war.” Anne traveled to places of great suffering (Palestine, Iraq, Bosnia, Guantanamo, and various jails as prisoner of conscience) bearing witness to the Light, the mystical force peace and compassion. She “practiced resurrection” (Wendell Berry).
This Advent, we are remembering the activist and theologian Barbara Holmes. Over her lifetime, Dr. Holmes dedicated her prophetic voice of contemplative wisdom to call us on The Way with the Incarnate Jesus. Jesus is the one who has come, is always coming, and is ever present, transforming us into the Creator’s image and likeness.
Over the years, we have attended to Dr. Holmes’ voice crying out in the wilderness against the unspeakable suffering of human and non-human creation — suffering inflicted by human hands, heads, and hearts of warring madness. Although Dr. Holmes died earlier this year, her prophetic voice and spiritual wisdom lives on, crying out to be heard and heeded.
She writes, “When there is a crisis, it takes a village to survive” because “it is the village that enters into crisis.” In her book, Crisis Contemplation: Healing the Wounded World, Dr. Holmes explains: “Crises open portals of deeper knowing. When the crisis occurs, the only way out is through, so we take a cue from nature and relax into the stillness, depending upon one another and the breath of life!”
The conclusion of Susan Abulhawa’s epic debate performance at the Oxford Union last week. Please take time to study it in its fullness. Abulhawa is one of Palestine’s most compelling and accomplished novelists.
You will not erase us, no matter how many of us you kill and kill and kill, all day every day. We are not the rocks Chaim Weizmann thought you could clear from the land. We are its very soil. We are her rivers and her trees and her stories, because all of that was nurtured by our bodies and our lives over millennia of continuous, uninterrupted habitation of that patch of earth between the Jordan and Mediterranean waters, from our Canaanite, our Hebrew, our Philistine, and our Phoenician ancestors, to every conqueror or pilgrim who came and went, who married or raped, loved, enslaved, converted between religions, settled or prayed in our land, leaving pieces of themselves in our bodies and our heritage. The fabled, tumultuous stories of that land are quite literally in our DNA. You cannot kill or propagandize that away, no matter what death technology you use or what Hollywood and corporate media arsenals you deploy.
Someday, your impunity and arrogance will end. Palestine will be free; she will be restored to her multi-religious, multi-ethnic pluralistic glory; we will restore and expand the trains that run from Cairo to Gaza to Jerusalem, Haifa, Tripoli, Beirut, Damascus, Amman, Kuwait, Sanaa, and so on; we will put an end to the zionist American war machine of domination, expansion, extraction, pollution, and looting.
…and you will either leave, or you will finally learn to live with others as equals.
This is a letter signed by hundreds of students and community members in Southeast Michigan demanding that Attorney General Dana Nessel drop the charges she slapped on members of the University of Michigan Gaza Solidarity Encampment. Nessel’s criminalization of protest shamefully seeks to protect U-M’s investments in the genocide of Palestinians—and also reflects Nessel’s personal and financial ties to the Regents themselves, as The Guardianrecently reported.
Attorney General Nessel,
We write to demand the immediate dropping of the felony and misdemeanor charges against eleven pro-Palestine protestors associated with the University of Michigan Gaza Solidarity Encampment. These charges are legally absurd, racist, and motivated by political self-interest. As such, they are an unjustified and unprecedented escalation against a movement advocating for divestment from genocide and for Palestinian life and liberation.
Your press release suggests these cases were pursued due to their supposed multijurisdictional nature; however, the charges only involve a single jurisdiction. Your justification is a lie. Further, these charges appear to be motivated by your relationships to the Regents at the University of Michigan, six of whom have donated to your election campaign prior to requesting these horrifying charges against protestors – a clear conflict of interest. If that weren’t enough, your history of anti-Palestinian bias raises serious concerns about your ability to act as a fair arbiter in this situation. You have previously condemned Representative Rashida Tlaib for her pro-Palestinian advocacy, distorting her words to fit your racist narrative. Furthermore, your actions have been praised by sites like Canary Mission, which target and harass pro-Palestinian activists. These facts indicate that the charges are politically motivated rather than grounded in any legitimate legal rationale.
Re-posting this beautiful children’s Advent calendar from the Rev. Stands for the Revolution, the Substack newsletter of Rev. Addie Domske, an ordained minister and trained movement chaplain who lifts up queer abundance and Jesus’ rebellious message.
One thing I want to be when I grow up is a cool, radical auntie.
I have been trying to be good at this role for about 15 years now, starting when the first of my four niblings1 was born. I will find out from them in their collective adulthood if I succeeded.
I have lived far, far away from all four of them for their entire lives, so most of my interactions come from mailing them things, (I had the cutest pen pal relationship with my oldest nibling when he was a wee lad.) A few years ago, I started the tradition of sending them all advent calendars each year based on their interests at the time. This year I’m proclaiming that they are all interested in Palestine, because my spouse and I decided to spend all of our Christmas gift funds for our external families on products from Palestinian artisans.2
Radical Discipleship 