Cider Blessing

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, Uncategorized, Watershed Discipleship1 Comment

cider press.jpgWritten by Kate Foran as a wedding blessing this fall.

On this day you invite your beloveds to the feast,
provide meat and drink to do justice to the harvest.
As you attended to every detail of this celebration,
you had a vision of serving the season’s cider
pressed and unfiltered
in the old way–beginning to bubble,
hospitable to the wild yeasts–
the bouquets of microflora that are our ancestors and guests,
making life from decay, enacting everyday Cana miracles.
Generations of households have observed
the domestic mystery of cider, preserving the yield of the trees
in a draught more common and reliable than water. Continue reading “Cider Blessing” →

Praying for a Voice

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

our-walmartA Thanksgiving Prayer from OUR Walmart, courtesy of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice:

Spirit of Life/Most Divine/God/Beloved Community/Creator,

We give thanks. We give thanks for those of us gathered at table. We give thanks to those who bring us this day our food. We give thanks for the food farmers and workers collected. We give thanks for the hands who helped set this table: factory workers, construction workers, truck drivers, mechanics, stock people, cashiers, managers. Continue reading “Praying for a Voice” →

Momma’s God

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as ResistanceLeave a comment

debBy Deb Anderson-Pratt, October 15, 2012

As a little girl I cried “God”
as thoughts of how i could
end the pain of all abuse
verbal, mental, physical, sexual
Momma’s God held my hand saying
“I am here my child in everything”

As an adolescent I cried “God”
as thoughts of how i could
wipe away the words he told
me as he used my body “you’re
just a dirty Indian, nobody will care”
Momma’s God held my hand saying
“I am here my child in everything” Continue reading “Momma’s God” →

The Doctrine of Discovery and Watershed Conquest

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Identity, and History, Uncategorized, Watershed Discipleship1 Comment

doctrineOn November 3, 524 clergy went in solidarity to Standing Rock as part of a call for clergy to join the struggle. As part of the action, the clergy repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery (which coincidentally is 524 years old). They presented a copy of the doctrine to an elder who burned it.

Below is an excerpt from Kat Friesen’s chapter in Watershed Discipleship: Reinhabiting Bioregional Faith and Practice where she explores the Doctrine of Discovery.

The Doctrine of Discovery and its resulting “Watershed Conquest” provide an exceptionally relevant case study of the harmful outworking of Christendom theologies. Any work toward reconciliation as mission must take into account these exploitative theologies, and begin with repentance as metanoia. Metanoia, translated from Greek as repentance (e.g. Mark 1:4), carries a connotation of changing both mind and action. Thus, repenting of the theologies of placelessness that persist today means recognizing their error and actively changing direction. Continue reading “The Doctrine of Discovery and Watershed Conquest” →

Trumpeting More Whiteness

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race3 Comments

j-perkBy Dr. James Perkinson, Ecumenical Theological Seminary, Detroit, MI

So I am reading the left alt-press for insight on what just happened with the election of Donald Trump, and find myself yet one more time provoked at our white blindness. No less than Glenn Greenwald—whose typically razor-sharp analysis I have relied on so often in the past—quotes Nate Cohn to the effect that “Clinton suffered her biggest losses in the places where Obama was strongest among white voters. It’s not a simple racism story.” And offers further: “Matt Yglesias acknowledged that Obama’s high approval rating is inconsistent with depictions of the U.S. as a country ‘besotted with racism.’” How little we have learned for all of our supposed “learning.” Continue reading “Trumpeting More Whiteness” →

This is the time

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, UncategorizedLeave a comment

timwe have been preparing for this time,
we were called, told only to be ready,
and we have been practicing and connecting.

she said that this is not a time for self-doubt and trying to please everyone,
for withholding any gifts, for wasting any time delaying your life’s work.

this is no time for ego, drop into the place where your work becomes divine.
this is the time to unleash all our healer clarity, we are all needed.
-adrienne maree brown

Marcella Althaus-Reid

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

indecent-theologyBy Grace Aheron.

This piece was developed during the first Bartimaeus Institute Online Cohort (2015-2016), aka “The Feminary.”  These pieces will eventually be published in a Women’s Breviary collection.  For more information regarding the Feminary go here.

 “Only in the longing for a world of economic and sexual justice together, and not subordinated to one another, can the encounter with the divine take place. But this is an encounter to be found at the crossroads of desire, when one dares to leave the ideological order of the heterosexual pervasive normative. This is an encounter with indecency, and with the indecency of God and Christianity.”

– Indecent Theology, 2000

While the drum beat of the purity cult of Christianity rings through our bodies and bones, causing our feet and hands and desires to fall in step, there are voices— high and descant, low and elemental— that waken us from the single-file lines of decency. Marcella Althaus-Reid was one of those voices. Continue reading “Marcella Althaus-Reid” →

Confronting Empire with the Word

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation3 Comments

swordBy Wes Howard-Brook and Sue Ferguson Johnson

As I watched in the night visions, I saw one like a human being coming with the clouds of heaven. And he came to the Ancient One and was presented before him. To him was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed.” (Daniel 7.13-14)

The final Sunday of the church year celebrates the feast of Christ the King. It is at once a redundant and a confounding claim: Greek christos translates Hebrew meshiyah, meaning “anointed,” marking a person as a king (or priest, in some Jewish traditions). That is, the very label “Christ” for Jesus suggests royal authority. Yet many today reject the image and language of “kingdom” in relation to the nonviolent Jesus, preferring the wordplay, “kindom.” While we certainly embrace the image of the discipleship community as one, big family of faith, we believe that something crucial to who Jesus is—and who we are as radical disciples—is lost when we abandon the notion of God’s “kingdom.” Continue reading “Confronting Empire with the Word” →

Mourning & Memory

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Cloud of WitnessesLeave a comment

francis-wellerSome highlights from Francis Weller’s recent article in Utne Reader “To and From the Soul’s Hall:”

We need to create circles of welcome in our lives in order to keep leaning into the world; to keep moving grief through our psyches and bodies, so we can taste the sweetness of life. Modern psychological theory utilizes the terms attunement and attachment. The language has become somewhat abstract and clinical, but what it means is that we require touch in body and soul to help us respond to difficult times with kindness and compassion and also to celebrate the sheer joy of being alive. We need these experiences to feel that we matter—quite literally—that we have matter and substance, that we take up space in the world. When we sense this, we feel that we are worthy of deep and lingering attention and that we can, in turn, offer our caring hearts to others in times of sorrow and pain. No matter who we are, we need the heartening touch of another. Even those of us who are introverted will, at times, require the devoted attention of a friend or a partner who can offer a sensitive ear to our tender woes. Continue reading “Mourning & Memory” →