Denasia Lawrence kneels while singing the national anthem before the Heat-76ers preseason game on Friday night, revealing a shirt with the phrase “Black Lives Matter.” (Photo credit: Jasen Vinlove/USA TODAY Sports)
Remembering the Cloud of Witnesses
This All Saints Day, we pause to remember those saints who have crossed over this year especially mindful of those who have filled these pages and gifted our movements. Here are those we have covered this year. We invite you to add names and stories. We give thanks for their lives and rejoice that they are among us still. Presente!
Joe Morton Continue reading “Remembering the Cloud of Witnesses”
Standing Rock: A Clergy Call to Action
A message from the United Church of Christ:
To the broader church:
As Christians, we, the undersigned clergy, are conditioned by the gospel to stand on the side of the persecuted and the jailed. As such, we are compelled by our faith to stand with the water protectors of Standing Rock, who have pricked the conscience of a nation and the world. In opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline that would carry oil from North Dakota to Illinois, they have resolutely declared that they are not protestors but protectors and defenders acting out of a sacred obligation which affirms “water is life.” Continue reading “Standing Rock: A Clergy Call to Action”
Faith in the Life of César Chávez: Part I, “Abuelita Theology”
By Robert Chao Romero, originally posted on the Jesus 4 Revolutionaries website
César Chávez was the preeminent leader, voice, and public face of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s. Chávez is to Latinas/os what Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is to the African American community. Moreover, as the posthumous recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Aztec Eagle,[1] and a U.S. postage stamp in his honor, Chávez has been called the world’s most famous Latino.[2] Together with Dolores Huerta and Filipino organizers Larry Itliong and Phillip VeraCruz, Chávez founded the United Farmworkers of America (UFW). The UFW fought for increased wages and better working conditions for exploited California farmworkers and rose to national attention through the famous Delano grape strike and international boycotts of 1965-1970. Continue reading “Faith in the Life of César Chávez: Part I, “Abuelita Theology””
Tradition
Tradition! We scarcely know the word anymore. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We scorn nobility in name and in fact. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington. – Dorothy Day
Digging
By Andrea Ferich. An excerpt from Bury the Dead: Stories of Death and Dying, Resistance and Discipleship
Our bodies and the land are one. Move the earth with your body, dance on it, farm in it, play with it; our final return to it is sacred. The soil is made of clay, like you and me– hydrocarbon molecules, layers of geological and muscular formations, alive. The soil, mountains, and valleys are layered with time like our layered muscle tissue. We dance on the earth in the face of death, for the healing of ourselves and the healing of the land, connected as farmers, dancers, painters, musicians, and lovers of the goodness of the good green earth moving through lament. Our bodies and the earth are one and their healing and grieving are interconnected. Continue reading “Digging”
Worship & Power
The legendary Vern Ratzlaff (right), Canadian Mennonite pastor and professor, was sporting his 5-inch beard long before practically every American white guy under 35 started growing theirs. Vern is spending free time at his outpost in Saskatoon reading dense anti-imperial theology and preparing sermons for Sundays at the rural church he’s been the interim pastor for the past decade. This is an excerpt from a paper entitled “Worship and Power” that he wrote for the Baptist Peace Fellowship a few years ago: Continue reading “Worship & Power”
New Book- Watershed Discipleship: Reinhabiting Bioregional Faith and Practice
Radical Discipleship is excited to announce a book hot off the press that is an anthology exploring watershed discipleship. Many of the contributors are regular writers for radicaldiscipleship.net. We hope to have a review coming, but for now check out the book. And let us know if you want to review it!
Edited by Ched Myers
Foreword by Denise M. Nadeau
Contributors: Katerina Friesen, David Pritchett, Jonathan McRay, Lydia Wylie-Kellermann, Erinn Fahey, Sarah Thompson, Matthew Humphrey, Sarah Nolan, Erynn Smith, Reyna Ortega, Sasha Adkins, Vickie Machado, Tevyn East, Jay Beck, and Rose Berger.
This collection introduces and explores “watershed discipleship” as a critical, contextual, and constructive approach to ecological theology and practice, and features emerging voices from a generation that has grown up under the shadow of climate catastrophe. Continue reading “New Book- Watershed Discipleship: Reinhabiting Bioregional Faith and Practice”
Happy Day
By Ric Hudgens
Chicago thirty years ago
Hot August night
Apartments stacked close
No air conditioning
Everyone’s windows up
Taverns close at 3 am
Patrons weave their way home
Sound slides through night air
“O happy day, O happy day”
One voice ascends in a boozy baritone
“When Jesus washed . . . “
A one man marching choir
“ . . . My sins away.”
Heat, sweat, volume keep everyone awake
“O happy day, O happy day.” Continue reading “Happy Day”
Deodorized Discourse
From Dr. Cornel West in Black Prophetic Fire (in conversation with and edited by Christa Buschendorf, 2014):
The central role of mass media, especially a corporate media beholden to the US neoliberal regime, is to keep public discourse narrow and deodorized. By “narrow” I mean confining the conversation to conservative Republican and neoliberal Democrats who shut out prophetic voices or radical visions. This fundamental power to define the political terrain and categories attempts to render prophetic voices invisible. The discourse is deodorized because the issues that prophetic voices highlight, such as mass incarceration, wealth inequality, and war crimes such as imperial drones murdering innocent people, are ignored. Continue reading “Deodorized Discourse”
Radical Discipleship 