And Every Mountain Brought Low: The Voice in the Wilderness

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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 Unlikely Peace 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.

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Arise and Witness

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Cloud of Witnesses1 Comment

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).

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An Abiding and Rebirthing Darkness

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From our friends and comrades at Mennonite Action.

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!”

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Quite Literally in our DNA

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire2 Comments

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.

The Palestine Exception

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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 Guardian recently 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.

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Advent for Palestine

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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

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Festival of Radical Discipleship

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation1 Comment

A message from Lydia Wylie-Kellermann, the executive director of Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center.

Dear Radical Discipleship friends,

We are excited to invite you the Festival of Radical Discipleship May 23-26, 2025 at Kirkridge Retreat Center in Bangor, PA.

This gathering is a Collaboration between Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries (BCM) and Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center.

Grace Boggs, Detroit organizer and now ancestor, would ask over and over again, “What time is it on the clock of the world?” We cannot deny that we are standing at an urgent and catastrophic moment. We are witnessing an assault on humanity and all of creation from so many directions. From climate disaster to genocidal militarism, to racial and religious supremacy, and so much more.  

Our souls are hungering for time and community to be asking what it means to live humanly in this moment. We need to create space for listening and discernment, deep study and imaginative organizing, a diversity of voices and stories, and perhaps more than anything else hope and joy. So, dear friends, we are throwing a festival! 

We are hosting the Second Festival of Radical Discipleship- a gathering of kindred spirits rooted in the radical Christian tradition. It will be a time to remember past gospel experiments, discuss current calls to witness and work; and conspire about future collaborations! Come and join the feast. 

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The Truth of your own Sacred Contribution

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In May 2024, students of conscience at UC Irvine organized a non-violent direct action to demand that their university divest from companies profiting off the genocide in Gaza. Fifty protestors were arrested. Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, a tenured professor of global and international studies, was escorted away by riot police, her hands zip-tied behind her back. In a recent interview, she said: “You cannot war-machine your way out of massive social problems that actually require study and reflection.” This is a poem that Professor Willoughby-Herard posted in 2020.

Radical Possibilities

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This is an excerpt from Steven Salaita’s recent essay. Salaita is an Arab-American scholar who lost his job at University of Illinois after he tweeted out the truth about Palestine. He is the author of An Honest Living, a book about the ostracism and loneliness and alienation (and vitality and joy and regeneration) that comes from being loyal to the oppressed and downtrodden of this world.

The massive Democratic failure opens some radical possibilities that can only be developed outside the mythic parameters of U.S. democracy.  If we can’t pursue radical possibilities now, after this disaster of an election in which deeply vulnerable people were viciously renounced by purported allies and defenders, then there’s nothing left to do but wait out the decline of our planet.  These electoral spectacles aren’t the sign of a healthy political culture; they’re an ugly business that benefit nobody outside of a corrupt and hermetic ecosystem aggressively devoted to its own proliferation.  

Everyone else, the great majority of people throughout the United States, ends up with a whole lot of disaffection.  Republicans have proved somewhat capable of exploiting this disaffection—they’re certainly more capable than Democrats—but they have limited appeal to the ever-growing number of Americans on the periphery, whose impulse is to avoid the spectacle altogether.  (The viewpoints of this enormous demographic are scarcely represented among the pundit classes.) 

Ignoring professional activists, public intellectuals, sitting politicians, and would-be presidents isn’t simply a survival mechanism; it is an active statement that we deserve something better and are willing to create it ourselves.  Let the technocrats swap business cards and donor money.  Their main concern is and always will be the status quo.  Their occasional fit of conscience is marketing, nothing more. 

We can never lose sight of what brought us to this moment:  bipartisan support of the century’s most hideous atrocities, which would have ended months ago without the constant supply of American weapons.  There’s no coming back from what we’ve witnessed.  The system that allowed it to happen, that encouraged it, must become a target of opposition. 

We’ve known for a long time that electoralism is coercive, anesthetizing, and mendacious.  Now we know that it’s genocidal, as well.