By Reverend Sekou & The Holy Ghost
Bodies in the Street
From Rev.Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou in an interview with sankofa.org:
The question I ask myself is ‘what does social justice as a spiritual discipline look like?’ Part of it looks like the way in which we do not become our oppressors. We do not take on their attributes. That we ‘envy not their ways.’ So I don’t want to tear gas children. I don’t want to lock up a generation. I don’t want to be part of an institution that has close to a thousand bases around the world, extracting natural resources, disciplining and punishing bodies and policing knowledge. I don’t want to do that. So for me, non-violence is part of that practice. It is not becoming them. Then we can sustain this movement… Continue reading “Bodies in the Street”
I Have Nothing to Lose
From Muhammad Ali (1942-2016), at a fair housing rally in his hometown Louisville, KY:
Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality…. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.
Love ethic
The greatest movement for social justice our country has ever known is the civil rights movement and it was totally rooted in a love ethic.
– bell hooks
The Catholicism That Made Pope Francis Possible
By Rose Marie Berger Re-posted from sojo.net.
“Violence only exists with the help of the lie!”
With these words Fr. Daniel Berrigan and I sealed our fate. It was the summer 1995. August sixth. We’d been invited read at the Washington National Cathedral’s service commemorating the 50th year since the U.S. used atomic weapons on civilians in Japan.
The Cathedral was full. Western light filled the rose window. I was supposed to read an adaptation from Thomas Merton’s scathing indictment of U.S. militarism, the poem “Original Child Bomb,” and the Scriptures for the Feast of the Transfiguration (“Master, it is good that we are here”), also recognized on that day. Dan was slated to read from Soviet-resister Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize lecture and from Maximillian Kolbe, the Polish priest who exchanged his life for a fellow prisoner in Auschwitz. Continue reading “The Catholicism That Made Pope Francis Possible”
The Scandal of the Compassionate Way
By Wes Howard-Brook and Sue Ferguson Johnson
Luke pairs last week’s shocking Gospel passage (7.1-10)about loving enemies with an equally shocking one this week about the resurrection of a widow’s son (7.11-17). Part of the shock this week is in how matter-of-factly Luke narrates Jesus doing the seemingly impossible.
Consider how different this brief passage is from the elaborate Johannine story of the raising of Lazarus. There, the narrator and Jesus together walk us through the various characters’ attitudes toward death. The dead man’s two sisters are portrayed as caught between anger and frustration over Jesus’ failure to show up in time to save Lazarus from death on the one hand, and a seemingly impossible hope that “even now” Jesus can do something for their dead brother (John 11.21-22). Luke, however, presents the restoration of life to a widow’s only son as an almost routine element of his messianic ministry, echoing a similar action by the prophet Elijah (1 Kg 17.8-24). Continue reading “The Scandal of the Compassionate Way”
To Will The Story Into Existence
From Jeff Dietrich (right: at the L.A. Catholic Worker) in Broken and Shared: Food, Dignity, and the Poor on Los Angeles’ Skid Row (2011):
I believe the gospels are the best story we have. They are the singular counter-narrative to our consumerist, war-mongering, media-saturated, technologized, dehumanized, death-oriented culture. The story of the gospels–the triumph of goodness and mercy over the powers of death and domination–cannot be proven; and we cannot accept the story on faith alone; but we love the story so much that we want it to be true. To will the story into existence by our own living testimony to its veracity, thus giving witness to our deepest hopes for humanity–that is what attracted me as a young person to the Catholic Worker, and that is what attracts young people still to this day.
To Birth a New Appalachia
From Just as women were the first witnesses
to Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection,
they have been practicing resurrection
at the forefront of Appalachian movements.
Many of the women who have
entered the world of activism
are mothers first
and have chosen to act in the name of life
for the survival of their children,
of babies in the womb,
and of future generations… Continue reading “To Birth a New Appalachia”
Welcome the Stranger
By David Blower
“Salvation comes to us in the form of the tired traveller” – Henri Nouwen
In the UK we’re used to hearing news of refugee camps in faraway places. But since camps have begun appearing on our own borders there’s been no small panic. And while our bombs continue to fall on Syria, Iraq and Yemen, our government has closed its borders tight, keeping out many who are desperate to be re-united to family members in the UK. Continue reading “Welcome the Stranger”
White Niceness
From Elle Dowd last month, a guest blogger at FormerlyUnchurched.com:
For white people and white culture, Niceness is a False Idol. And it’s a False Idol with a body count. In 2015, unarmed Black people were killed by police at a rate of 5 times the rate of unarmed whites. Yet when our Black siblings are crying out, “Black Lives Matter!” we continue to make human sacrifices to the altar of our bloodthirsty God of Niceness, caring more about our own comfort and security than about children dying in the streets.
Body counts and blood sacrifices don’t sound very Nice. But that’s the thing about niceness and its dangerous relationship to power; its slippery and like most other things, finds a way to center itself on white ideals, white experiences, white feelings. Continue reading “White Niceness”
Radical Discipleship 