Spiritual Genius

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The opening paragraphs of “Communities of Care and Concern” by Rev. Dr. Nick Peterson, an assistant professor of Homiletics and Worship at Christian Theological Seminary in Indy. As a practical theologian, Nick interrogates how intentional and unintentional practices shape Christian identities and configure worldviews. Click on The Political Theology Network here to read it in its entirety.

Oppression overwhelms. Its incessant dehumanizing and dishonoring practices work together to undermine human dignity and quench the spark of hope that dreams of otherwise possibilities. Surviving and overcoming oppression require what Mother Ruby Sales has coined “spiritual genius.” This genius represents a determined refusal to surrender one’s value and worth to the deformed imagination of the oppressor.

Sales describes this genius as conscience-making work, where the fundamental narratives that make life meaningful affirm self-love without requiring hatred of others. For Sales, spiritual genius requires intimacy with the Creator and the ability to never let hate take root in the heart.

Similarly, Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday is on the 15th,  said in his final book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?,

“The worth of an individual does not lie in the measure of [their] intellect, [their] racial origin or [their] social position. Human worth lies in relatedness to God.”

The ultimate problem with oppression is its intention to profane – to render the oppressed beyond divine relationality – to violently desacralize the human subject.

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Manufacture Consent through Popular Support

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Some helpful analysis from the [Fred] Hampton Institute as we head into another Trump administration.

Trump worked out two deals to gain a ton of political capital before even taking office. The first (which was probably done months ago and contingent on him being reelected) with his close friend, Netenyahu [the temporary ceasefire deal], and the second with fellow Ivy League capitalist Shou Zi Chew [overturning the Tiktok ban]… 

We don’t know exactly what the long game is here but we do know that (1) Trump unconditionally supports the colonial apartheid state of Israel, has very close ties to Netenyahu, and wholeheartedly supported the genocide of the Palestinian people, and (2) Trump’s support of “free speech” is conditional on such speech being in line with the capitalist/imperialist narrative (although with a more controlled-ops orientation, ala Infowars, Rogan, etc). 

What we anticipate is that this political capital is being used to manufacture consent through popular support for some early power moves being planned by his administration (US/Israel expansion, destroying Iran, pressuring China, more fascistic domestic policies regarding immigrants, the homeless & the poor/disabled, strengthening the internal police/surveillance state, etc.). We should also know is that Trump has proven to be an asset to the American empire (including the “deep state” that supposedly hates him), has proven his loyalty to unrestrained capital, and has proven to be no friend of the struggling, working-class masses here in the US. 

The bottom line with all of this is that overt fascism is a *systemic* development rooted in capitalist decay. While Democrats/Biden have served an important role in pushing this systemic transition, they’ve also effectively set up Republicans/Trump to play an even more important role. With this pre-arranged political capital supercharging his facade as an “anti-establishment outsider,” Trump now has a clear path (with popular support) to guide this capitalist decay into a more organized and powerful form of fascistic corporatism. 

Running in Circles on Racial Justice

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Subverting Empire1 Comment

By Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler, Senior Advisor, The Fellowship of Reconciliation USA

We keep running in circles when it comes to addressing racial justice in the US. This means that with every advance we almost come back to the same place and must fight the battles all over again. It doesn’t mean that progress has not been made, but the progress retrogresses due to the immediate backlash that charges any advance to rectify past racial injustices as an affront to white people. At best there is an ebb and flow when it comes to rectifying the racial harms and damages of the past. Race history and the many initiatives to rectify past wrongs is more of a circle than a linear line. It may be an expanding circle considering advances, but for every victory won there is a vicious throw back. It is almost like the 1993 movie “Groundhog Day” where morning after morning we awaken to histories repeating itself, and where victories of racial justice are swept away by the courts or a change in the body politics. The struggle continues, and in many cases, we must begin again. 

Continue reading “Running in Circles on Racial Justice” →

Collapse of the Veneer

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An excerpt from Chris Hedges’ piece “How Fascism Came.”

President-elect Donald Trump does not herald the advent of fascism. He heralds the collapse of the veneer that masked the corruption within the ruling class and their pretense of democracy. He is the symptom, not the disease. The loss of basic democratic norms began long before Trump, which paved the road to an American totalitarianism. Deindustrialization, deregulation, austerity, unchecked predatory corporations, including the health-care industry, wholesale surveillance of every American, social inequality, an electoral system that is plagued by legalized bribery, endless and futile wars, the largest prison population in the world, but most of all feelings of betrayal, stagnation and despair, are a toxic brew that culminate in an inchoate hatred of the ruling class and the institutions they have deformed to exclusively serve the rich and the powerful. The Democrats are as guilty as the Republicans.

Sanctuary Medicine

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Check out this compelling offering from March 31 to April 4, 2025 from our comrades at Dreaming Stone.

The Sanctuary Medicine training offers skills and strategies for mitigating harm and building a more healthy and just future, fortifying our relationships, growing our capacity, and building our readiness to care for one another.

Sanctuary Medicine flows from a spiritual, emotional, physical vision of care for individuals and communities in crisis resulting from increased vulnerability. In a world shattered by climate change, racial capitalism and failing democracy, devastating storms and fires, growing unhoused populations, and growing numbers of people targeted by dehumanizing state policies, such as migrants and trans people, Sanctuary Medicine recognizes that church buildings and other community spaces of refuge are still places of first response, and creates a framework of care that includes preparedness, emergency medicine, spiritual and emotional support, and liturgical community care and mutual aid in the face of trauma.

Sanctuary medicine imagines communities of care and refuge, prepared for and able to respond to disasters and community trauma, increasing resilience, relationship and solidarity. Participants will receive training in:

  • Field medicine focusing on specific rising needs of vulnerable community members including chronic wound care, weather exposure, stop-the-bleed instruction and chronic conditions faced by those who do not have access to medical support. Trainers include certified EMT’s and WFR’s with extensive street medic experience.
  • Emotional and spiritual support for crisis care by disaster first responders, street chaplains and mental health professionals.
  • Preparedness practices, including creating community specific plans and supplies as well as organizing community medicine gardens and mutual aid that centers the most vulnerable.
  • Liturgical and ritual response and care to allow for long term processes of grief, justice building and cultural transformation.
Continue reading “Sanctuary Medicine” →

Altadena

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Re-posted from Word in Black, a ground-breaking collaboration of ten legendary Black news publishers.

As the rapidly-spreading Eaton wildfire in Los Angeles crept closer to the home he’d lived in for nearly six decades, Rodney Nickerson, 83, wasn’t going to panic. Despite the pleas of his worried daughter and anxious neighbors, he was staying put. 

It apparently made sense for him to hold on: he bought the house in 1968, back when it wasn’t easy for Black people to own property in L.A., much less in a great neighborhood like Altadena. To Nickerson, a retired engineer who clocked in at Lockheed-Martin for almost half a century, there was no reason to panic. He would ride it out. 

“He said, ‘I’ll be fine,’” his daughter, Kimko Nickerson, told a reporter for KCAL, a local TV news station. “He said, ‘I’ll be here when you come back and the house will be here.’” 

Tragically, he miscalculated: when she returned to the house, Kimko Nickerson found her father’s body in the charred, smoldering ruins. 

Continue reading “Altadena” →

The Spilled Guts of What My Language Has Become

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The opening of a recently published essay called “Notes to Gaza’s Beloved Dead” by Palestinian-American poet George Abraham. Click here to read the entire essay at Atmos.

A promise to our dead and (briefly, necessarily, though not consensually) resurrected: I am searching for a form through which my words might be capable of, one day, holding you. I will not make you object or spectacle. This world is already super-saturated with your viscera, and so, the only way I know to write to you is not with words but with the spilled guts of what my language has become. I cannot focus on anything but you these days. The world is spiraling onwards, intent on burying you, unmourned. The ruling class are reaching for an unmournable world through your bodies. But even in my inability to turn away, my looking itself becomes a violence. As you become content, become news and feed, my looking becomes a unit of capital from which corporations profit. I am hoping, instead, to wander with, and not from, you. To you, and to the living who commit themselves to you, I am responsible. To you, I owe what little life I have left to give. 

With These Commitments

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From the conclusion of Olly Costello’s opening note to their 2025 calendar. Every month is breath-taking. Order it here.

What must we do to build the power to finally topple these capitalist imperialist systems and end the cycles of violence we keep inheriting? To be honest, I don’t really know but I am determined to be a part of figuring it out. When I really think about where to go next, I know that the answers emerge out of our relationships. What we learn together, what we fight together, working through hard things together, what we are willing to build together…

So I’m gonna start here with these commitments: to rise up against mass death and refuse despair and abandonment, to educate myself and others about the critical connections between imperialism and capitalism, to practice love through resistance, to bring people into this work, to shape this rage inside of me into the fire that forges new bonds, and to ground in the knowing that “what we do in connection makes the world.”

ADVICE TO MYSELF #2: RESISTANCE

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance4 Comments

LouiseBy Louise Erdrich (above), published in Orion Magazine’s beautiful 2017 compilation of essays “Women and Standing Rock”

Resist the thought that you may need a savior,
or another special being to walk beside you.
Resist the thought that you are alone.
Resist turning your back on the knife
of the world’s sorrow,
resist turning that knife upon yourself.
Resist your disappearance Continue reading “ADVICE TO MYSELF #2: RESISTANCE” →