Mask Off Maersk

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

For people of faith and conscience wondering what they can tangibly do right now, the Palestinian Youth Movement is organizing this compelling campaign.

The Palestinian Youth Movement’s campaign to Cut Ties with Genocide is a fight against Maersk, one of the world’s largest shipping and logistics companies that directly facilitates the weapons trade. Without Maersk, Israel would not have the weapons to commit its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
We call on Maersk to Cut Ties with Genocide!

Maersk is one of the most profitable companies on earth, with money soaked in the blood of over 40,000 Palestinian martyrs. We demand Maersk cut ties with Israel and end its complicity in the genocide of Palestinians.

Since October, Maersk has transported over $300 million of weapons components for the top 5 weapons manufacturers to the US for assembly. For example, Maersk transports the wings of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jets to the US where these weapons are manufactured. After assembly, these weapons are sent to Israel from the US. In fact, 68% of Israel’s weapons come from the US. The majority of these weapons are sent by the US Department of Defense which Maersk also has links to. Specifically, Maersk is part of the the Voluntary Intermodal Sealift Agreement (VISA) and the Maritime Security Program (MSP) which transport weapons on behalf of the US Department of Defense. Maersk is both complicit in the transport of weapons components to the US, and the transport of weapons from the US to Israel, making it a critical link in the weapons supply chain.

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Still Open to Beauty, Goodness and Joy

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RD contributor Cindy Wallace has a new book out about Simone Weil, who was raised as an agnostic by Jewish parents, had mystical encounters with Christ in her late 20s and died in England at 34, after contracting tuberculosis and refusing to eat more than those who were resisting Hitler’s regime in France. This is an excerpt from a little interview Cindy did with Canadian Mennonite. Check out Cindy’s book here.

Over and over again, in moments where there’s no room to talk about religion in public life or what it looks like to choose self-sacrifice over comfort, to choose to take up our crosses and follow Jesus in a literal way—different generations of writers find a conversation partner in Weil.

She doesn’t give all the answers, but she is provocative and countercultural enough to makes us think, ‘Oh maybe business as usual isn’t the best way to live a full and fruitful life.’ She’s a conversation partner for questions about what it looks like to live a countercultural life that’s still open to beauty, goodness and joy.

Abandoned

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

By Tommy Airey, a re-posted and slightly abridged version of his weekly newsletter

Bernadette Atuahene is a Black woman who grew up fifty miles north of me in Southern California. She is my age and has multiple degrees from places like UCLA, Harvard and Yale. A couple years after Lindsay and I moved to Southwest Detroit, she moved to the Eastside to study the city’s housing crisis. Her research unveiled something truly apocalyptic.

In the decade spanning Barack Obama’s inauguration to George Floyd’s murder, one-third of the entire city of Detroit lost their homes to illegal tax foreclosures. The city overcharged its poorest residents, almost all of them Black. Residents were evicted. Homes were seized and auctioned off. At the same time, the city spent more than a half billion dollars to demolish many of these homes and wealthy white investors were given hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies to redevelop the land in their own image.

The only reason that we know about this epidemic of illegal tax foreclosures in Detroit is because Bernadette Atuahene devoted three years of her life to doing the research. The only reason that we know about the poisoning of faucets in Flint is because Black women testified and tested the city’s water on a mass scale. The only reason that we know about the police murder of George Floyd is because a Black woman filmed it on her phone and posted it to her socials. The more I see this trend, the more I wonder what else is happening, hidden behind the curtain called American exceptionalism.

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It is a Fact

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From Chris Hedges, re-posted from social media.

The Israel lobby’s buying off of nearly every senior politician in the United States, facilitated by our system of legalized bribery, is not an antisemitic trope. It is a fact.

The lobby’s campaign of vicious character assassination, smearing and blacklisting those who defend Palestinian rights—including the Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein and university students, many of them Jewish, in organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine—is not an antisemitic trope. It is a fact.

Thirty-eight state governments’ passage of Israel lobby-backed legislation requiring their workers and contractors, under threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is not an antisemitic trope. It is a fact.

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She is on Her Way

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An excerpt from Arundhati Roy’s speech at the closing rally of the World Social Forum in 2003. The Indian author will now be prosecuted for remarks she made about Kashmir back in 2010. Fascism is escalating everywhere.

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

Happy and Sad

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire2 Comments

An update from Chava Redonnet, the pastor of Oscar Romero Inclusive Catholic Church which meets in the dining room of the Rochester Catholic Worker (June 16, 2024).

Dear friends,

When my daughters were growing up, at suppertime around the table I would ask them each to share something that made them happy that day, and something that made them sad. (They hated it).  (But I learned a lot I otherwise might not have!)

So here’s my own “happy thing” and “sad thing” from the past few days. First the happy thing.

I love it when we have a bunch of people at community supper and Mass. Last night our board met out at the house before supper (some on zoom and some in person), and Librada and Maria hung out with us for a while afterwards. Maria brought some great potato salad. For me personally, things are so much better with Nina and Betty doing the cooking. So grateful. And Bill brought ice cream. At Mass, it was hot enough to need a fan, but the stand-up fan proved to be an irresistible draw for two-year-old Lucas, who wanted to lick it. I told the story about the raccoon and the cookies from way back at the beginning… this Sunday is the 13th anniversary of the first Migrant Mass in 2011.  It was just a good and happy evening, and I am full of gratitude.

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Faith and the Search for Justice

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The Alternative Seminary invites you to Faith and the Search for Justice: Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine

A Four-Session Online Course

Thursday evenings, June 27 – July 25 (no class July 4)

7:00 – 8:30 p.m. EST

“In wrestling with the problem of how to present the teachings of nonviolence in an age of mass violence, it seems to me that the writings of Ignazio Silone are of immense importance.”  – Dorothy Day

Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day often cited the novel Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone as one of the most influential works of fiction in her life.   A deeply humane and compassionate novel, it was written in 1936 while Silone was in exile from his native Italy for his resistance work against the fascist government of Benito Mussolini.  He recounts the story of an idealistic revolutionary who tries to organize Italian peasants against a repressive regime. 

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A True Radical Christian

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Cloud of WitnessesLeave a comment

Rev. James Lawson died yesterday. He was 95. Here are some compelling things about his life that we can meditate on and emulate today (curated from a few biographies and obituaries).

Lawson became a “conscientious objector” during the Korean War.  In April 1951, he was found guilty of violating the draft laws of the United States, and sentenced to three years in a federal prison. Upon his release from prison, Lawson returned to Baldwin-Wallace and earned his bachelor’s degree. 

In 1956, Lawson entered Oberlin College’s Graduate School of Theology. In 1957, one of Lawson’s professors introduced him to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who urged him to move south and aid in the Civil Rights Movement.

“Don’t wait! Come now! We don’t have anyone like you down there,” MLK pleaded, according to author David Halberstam’s history of the civil rights movement, The Children. Rev. Lawson was outwardly “mild and gentle,” wrote Halberstam, “but he was a true radical Christian who feared neither prison nor death.”

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