By Wes Howard-Brook and Sue Ferguson Johnson
“Some people are Marys, and some are Marthas.”
Uh, no.
The little story of Mary and Martha in Luke’s Gospel is one that we regularly hear interpreted as a choice between two lifestyles, the “active” and the “contemplative.” Read in context, though, Luke’s message is not that at all. Let’s try to listen to this familiar story with fresh ears. Continue reading “Embracing the Personalist Approach”
By Ric Hudgens
My eighty-year old neighbor,
a man of deep, abiding faith,
now frail and bent with age,
who marched
when marching made a difference,
once upon a time
late at night
heard a yell
from our alley. Continue reading “THIS IS WHAT IT WILL TAKE”
By Joyce Hollyday
I learned about the power of guns when I was nine years old. I had a red felt cowgirl hat that tightened with a white cord under my chin, a holster made of stamped fake leather, and two toy metal six-shooters. When I waved them around shouting “Bang, bang!” I imagined myself out in The Wild West among the saloon owners and cattle rustlers I saw on TV—someplace like Texas. Continue reading “Guns”
By Paul Laraque (right)
you say democracy
and we know that it’s tin from Bolivia,
copper from Chile,
petroleum from Venezuela,
sugar from Cuba,
raw material and profits.
you say democracy
and it’s the annexation of Texas
the hold-up of the Panama Canal
the occupation of Haiti
the colonization of Puerto Rico Continue reading “Reign of a Human Race”
A Facebook post from Rev. Nick Peterson (July 1):
some white people are concerned that black people hate them.
there are white people who never hated black people and did little to nothing to challenge the systems that oppress black people.
some people believe hate is a key ingredient to oppression.
if we focus on hate, we can keep the conversation to individual actions that convey hate and bias.
the driving force behind oppression is always material gain.
hate functions as the myth to justifying oppression. Continue reading “Thinking Out Loud: Supremacy”
“Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.” – Audre Lorde
By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann
An attempt to grasp for words when it feels like there aren’t any.
I’ve never seen
A gun.
never
up close
In my face.
Never seen one drawn
In threat
Or aim
Or play
Or hunt
Never heard the trigger
Or felt the fear.
It is my privilege upon privilege upon privilege. Continue reading “Silence”
By Ched Myers, the 8th Sunday after Pentecost (Luke 10:25-37; right: “The Good Samaritan” by Paula Modersohn-Becker)
Note: This is part of a series of weekly comments on the Lukan gospel readings from the Revised Common Lectionary during year C, 2016.
The famous Parable of the Good Samaritan is often sentimentalized, but its subversive character and genuine profundity can never be exhausted. It comes on the heels of Jesus’ sending out of the “seventy,” and his long “missionary discourse” (Lk 10:1-24). How different the history of Christianity would have been had disciples in every age followed these relatively simple but incisive instructions to travel with the gospel in a vulnerable and provisional mode, rather than a dominating one! But if the unholy joining of mission and empire has been the first pillar of Christendom’s apostasy, surely the second has been the church’s tendency to define faith through dogma. It is this religious bad habit that Luke addresses in this Sunday’s parable. Continue reading “To Do Is To Know”
By Tommy Airey
It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than to be a soldier on the battlefield.
Cornel West
45 years ago, Jim Douglass wrote a little book called Resistance and Contemplation (1972), urging radical disciples to take seriously both the personal and political–what he called “the yin and the yang of the Movement.” In the second chapter, he recounts the last talk that Thomas Merton (photo right) gave, just hours before his death from electrocution in that Bangkok bathtub in 1968. Merton told the story of Tibetan Buddhist monks being driven out of their homeland by Communist revolutionaries. The elder monk tells the fretting younger protege, “From now on, Brother, everybody stands on his own feet.” Continue reading “Standing on Our Own Feet”
