By Em Jacoby. Part of our series on food and discipleship
Nana is incomprehensible these days. We can laugh together, and occasionally a name will come from her lips that connects to a person in her long life, but most of the time we are laughing because she talks as much as ever and it is beyond recognition. Last time I visited her, I laughed until I wept. I pray for her to leave this earth, but Alzheimers has its cruel course and I must witness it. Continue reading “Nana’s Cabbage Soup”
An exclusive RadicalDiscipleship.Net interview with Ryan Newson, professor of religion, philosophy and ethics at Campbell University. He is the author of Radical Friendship: The Politics of Communal Discernment, coming out on April 1.
RD: Describe how this project started.
RN: This project began during my doctoral studies when I was immersed in Anabaptist theology and political theology, respectively. As I read Anabaptist theologians in depth, I was drawn to a communal form of reasoning about spiritual and moral questions that seemed to haunt that tradition—always lurking even if it was not always perfectly implemented. This picture of radical disciples drawing near one another in order to figure out what God would have them do, or who God would have them be, was magnetic. It reminded me of the form of Christianity that had always appealed to me, and that I had seen practiced by house churches in Camden, NJ, and New Monastic communities in Durham, NC, and Catholic Worker communities in Silk Hope, NC. In particular, I was attracted to the way in which this practice had the potential to guide communities into new waters without fear, acquiescence, or retreat. It certainly carried much more power, it seemed to me, than the way many of my fellow Christians approached questions of discernment: through a wooden, legalistic application of scripture. Continue reading “Radical Friendship”
By Katerina Friesen, February 5th, 2017, Fellowship of Hope Mennonite Church
Matthew 5:13-20
In recent sermons and reflections here at Fellowship of Hope, we’ve pondered how Jesus’ wisdom teachings and the way of the cross are foolishness to the world. Foolishness, to love our enemies. Foolishness, to be persecuted and blessed. Foolishness, that those who hunger and thirst are the highly favored ones. Yet this foolishness is the wisdom of God that we are given to chew on, the bread of life. Today, we draw our attention to a crucial ingredient in bread baking, the seasoning of our dough: salt. Continue reading “Sermon: Stories of Salt and Light”
By Tommy Airey, a letter to his nephews who call him “Uncle Coo-Coo”
Riley and Mason,
I want so badly for you to grow up with a deep awareness of what it means to be “a real man.” You have a big advantage because you have parents and a Nawny who are committed to recovery: fearless and thorough in their commitments to mutual and rigorous honesty, to establishing boundaries and assertiveness and to pursuing gentleness with themselves and others in the process. They have been important models in my own journey of re-claiming open-heartedness and emotional expressiveness.
Unfortunately, the man who gets the most attention, who you will see over and over on TV and the internet, whose name you will hear about more than any other man on the planet is a President who lives off a steady diet of name-calling and fear-mongering, who paints those from south of the border as “criminals” and “rapists” and says if refugees from Muslim-majority countries “are allowed in, it’s death and destruction!,” who magnifies deeply ingrained racial stereotypes of inner-cities as “in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested),” whose whole ethos is shaped by bullying and “locker room talk” and whose policies favor the securing of enormous profits for a few over relieving the suffering of everyday people. Continue reading “The Anti-Trump”
From Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ (1995):
Meditation is not a drug to make us oblivious to our real problems. It should produce awareness in us and also in our society. For us to achieve results, our enlightenment has to be collective. How else can we end the cycle of violence? We ourselves have to contribute, in small and large ways, toward ending our own violence. Looking deeply at our own mind and our own life, we will begin to see what to do and what not to do to bring about a real change.
By Rose Marie Berger. Reposted from Sojo.net
Even during a constitutional crisis and a white nationalist assault on the executive branch of federal government, the kids still need to get to school, bills must be paid, homework done, groceries bought, clothes washed, church attended.
In addition to your regular job, you are now a full-time grassroots organizer and obstructionist, showing up for protests and rallies. You’re also trying to implement a full-time legislative strategy, calling representatives, signing petitions, encouraging others to do the same. And for some, your full-time government job or journalism job or advocacy job now requires a renewed understanding of the ethics of public service, while also developing strategies to implement or refuse unclear and possibly illegal directives.
How do you keep from flaming out? Continue reading “Welcome to the Resistance. Here’s Your Survival Guide.”
By Bill Ramsey
Our hands eagerly drape
a shear cotton cloth,
a delicate canopy
over an unassisted rise,
warm tent of challah.
Underneath, tepid water
raw sugar and new yeast
compose an unheralded
first hint of challah. Continue reading “Challah’s Hands”
Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 58:1-12
By Valerie Luna Serrels
We enter this week’s story through a blind spot. The people who historically have awakened to and connected to God, find themselves unable to see, disconnected from God, one another, and the land. This blind spot invites us to reflect on the ways in which we too are unaware and disconnected. Unaware of which world’s code of conduct we abide. What religion we practice. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: An Unordinary Time”
From Martin Prechtel in The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise (2015):
That feeling of frustrated justice and hatred for the unpunished “perpetrator” is the hardest thing for people who cannot truly grieve. On the other hand, it is also not any good to become people who glide along on bliss and don’t care about anything, either. It’s needful for the peace of a people, peace of the human heart, peace of the earth, for grief to be there, not transcending on a bliss journey to avoid grief. Being zoned out, numb, unconnected, “above it all,” and not caring is just the lazier flip side of the coin of vengeance. They need one another. Continue reading “A Culture of Passionately Gradual People”
By Joyce Hollyday. January 29, 2017,
Circle of Mercy, Asheville, NC
Micah 6:8; Matthew 5:1-12
On the night of January 19th, the eve of the inauguration, several of us from Circle of Mercy’s immigration mission group gathered at the home that Bill and I share. We kept a vigil in the tradition of the Watch Night Service.
Watch Night is typically traced back to New Year’s Eve of 1862, when enslaved communities stayed up all night waiting for the Emancipation Proclamation to take effect on January 1st. When I was collecting oral histories among African-American UCC churches during my time as an associate conference minister, I was told that the custom is actually much older—that enslaved families stayed up every New Year’s Eve, because January 1st was when masters decided whom they would sell off. Families facing the imminent threat of separation spent all night singing and praying and hoping that they would be together for another year. Continue reading “Sermon: Grounded in the Bedrock of Faith”
