What a Difference a Decade Can Make

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By Wes Howard-Brook, the author of several books, including Empire Baptized: How the Church Embraced What Jesus Rejected

A decade ago, I was teaching Bible and theology full-time at our local Jesuit school, Seattle University. Now I am retired.

A decade ago, my wife and ministry partner, Sue, were part of our local Mennonite congregation.
Now, we do not attend church.

A decade ago, I identified as a Christian.
Now, I have reclaimed my birth identity as a Jew who loves the Jewish Jesus.

A decade ago, Sue and I were in the midst of an eighteen year stretch of hosting and leading a Scripture group that met every Thursday for two hours in our living room.
Now, it is hosted elsewhere.

There are many reasons for these changes, some which we all share—the pandemic, for instance—and others that are personal to my own journey. But as a result of these choices, I now am experiencing life much differently than I was a decade ago.

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Non-Violence is Only Effective When We are Seen

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire2 Comments

By Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? This is an old philosophical question that most of us have heard in one form or another. For many the question seems to be a preposterous one for the immediate response is ‘certainly, because the tree will crash in a cacophony of sounds whether anyone is around or not.’ But this is not what the question asks. The question is raising the issue of perception. Sounds are a matter of perceiving and receiving vibrations and disturbances in the atmosphere. We receive and interpret the disturbance paying attention to the movement and commotion and assigning to the sounds definition and meaning. As sounds and disturbances are perceived and received it is then inputted into the brain so that the brain can make association and assignment. This in general is how we hear. This is how we perceive occurrences in our environment. So, if there are no ears to interpret the vibrations and transmit them to the brain for interpretation and assignment, and therefore no perception, does sound actually occur? The question is raising the issue that sound is a matter of perception, reception, and the ability to interpret disturbances that occur around us. The underlying question is whether sound requires a witness. If there are no witnesses to the tree falling and sending vibrations throughout the atmosphere, does it really make a sound, or is sound only a matter of perception, reception, and interpretation.

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Ten Years.

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Today is the ten-year anniversary of our first post on Radical Discipleship. It’s been a whole decade of platforming expressions of Christian faith committed to breaking rank with supremacy of every form.

When we started, folks were still marching in Ferguson, in the aftermath of the murder of Michael Brown.

Since then, we’ve become unstitched. Which is another way to say we are getting free.

The cover has come off.

We are staying awake.

We are bearing witness.

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Compensation

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

Last year, the California taskforce on reparations came out with this final report, including calculations for a variety of injustices done to Black Americans throughout the course of history. The taskforce made “an economically conservative initial assessment of what losses, at a minimum, the State of California caused or could have prevented, but did not.” Below is the taskforce’s assessment just for mass incarceration and over-policing. They also assessed for housing discrimination, unjust property takings and devaluation of African-American businesses. They also added that their list was not exhaustive and that the delay of reparations is in itself an injustice that causes more suffering.

The “War on Drugs” began in 1971. Established research shows that although people of all races use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates, the federal and state governments disproportionately target African Americans for drug-related arrests. To measure racial mass incarceration disparities in the 49 years of the War on Drugs from 1971 to 2020, the Task Force’s experts estimated the disproportionate years spent behind bars for African American compared to white non-Hispanic drug offenders, and multiplied them with what a California state employee would have earned in a year on aver age (since incarcerated persons were forced, unpaid “employees” of the state). The Task Force’s experts then added compensation for loss of freedom, comparable to Japanese American World War II prisoners, and arrive at $159,792 per year of disproportionate incarceration in 2020 dollars. 

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Love Reckons

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An excerpt from an article Kiese Laymon wrote in 2015, reflecting on a conversation he had with his grandma “12 hours after Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Cynthia Hurd, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Depyane Middleton Doctor, Daniel Simmons and Myra Thompson were murdered in a black Charleston church by a cowardly white American thug.”

What I do know is that love reckons with the past and evil reminds us to look to the future. Evil loves tomorrow because peddling in possibility is what abusers do. At my worst, I know that I’ve wanted the people that I’ve hurt to look forward, imagining all that I can be and forgetting the contours of who I have been to them.

Like good Americans, I told Grandma, we will remember to drink ourselves drunk on the antiquated poison of progress. We will long for “shall’s” and “will be’s” and “hopes” for tomorrow. We will heavy-handedly help in our own deception and moral obliteration. We will forget how much easier it is to talk about gun control, mental illness and riots than it is to talk about the moral and material consequences of manufactured white American innocence.

The Origins of Modern Zionism

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This is Zachary Foster’s response to a tweet from Emily Schrader that said, “I’m not sure why this needs to be said, but we don’t need non-Jews to be lecturing Jews about what Zionism is or isn’t.” Foster is a Jewish-American historian of Palestine who received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton in 2017.

Of course, Christians don’t need to be lecturing Jews about anything. We have our own intramural issues – and Christian Zionism is a big one that heavily influences conservative and liberal followers of Jesus.

Zionism was initially a Christian phenomenon before it was a Jewish phenomenon.

→ Anthony Cooper (Lord Shaftesbury) (1801-1885) published a tract in 1838 claiming that Jewish “restoration” in Palestine would benefit Great Britain’s geopolitical position and would hasten the second coming of Jesus.

→ Charles Henry Churchill (1807-1867) proposed a plan for establishing a Jewish state in Palestine in the 1840s as British Consul in Damascus.

→ James Finn (1806-1872), British Consul in Jerusalem, member of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, bought land in the 1850s in the Palestinian village of Artas for the purpose of employing destitute Jews there.

→ James Bicheno’s (1880) “The restoration of the Jews, the crisis of all nations”: purpose to “stir up public attention to the prophecies which relate to the restoration of this singular people in the latter days.”

→ William Hechler an Anglican clergyman in 1884 wrote “The Restoration of the Jews to Palestine” in which he argued that Jewish settlement in Palestine was a precondition for the return of Jesus.

Maybe the more sensible question is, why did Jews hijack the idea of Zionism from non-Jews?

Sources: Ilan Pappe, Lobbying for Zionism; Masalha, The Zionist Bible

Anti-Semitism and Hypocrisy at the Top: a Jewish response

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Re-posting this piece by Wes Howard-Brook from February 2019 because it is more relevant than ever. Gotta say that after five-and-a-half years, it has aged quite well.

Three, young, powerful, brash women of color have come down upon the Capitol and left the old while folks there sputtering in their wake. The most well-known—so much so that she already can be recognized by her initials, AOC—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY)—has blown the doors off Congress by daring to offer her “Green New Deal” vision. The other two are both Muslim women, Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar. Tlaib and Omar have strongly promoted the international “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction” campaign to pressure the Israeli government to withdraw from West Bank settlements.

AOC has been allowed to thrive as a social media star, despite being treated with despicable condescension by the “senior” congresspeople and their supporters. After all, even the Democratic Party knows that climate change is real and needs immediate action.

But when it comes to criticizing Israel, Dems collectively freak out in an orgy of blatant hypocrisy that might, but probably wouldn’t, make Trump blush. Most immediate, Rep. Omar was quoted in a tweet stating that “Jewish money,” more specifically, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, influences US policy on Israel. This claim led to instant and widespread condemnation from all sides, for promoting “anti-Jewish tropes.” Rep. Omar was forced to apologize publically.

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