The Color of Orange

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Identity, and History, UncategorizedLeave a comment
dee dee
Mural on the side of Benjamin Franklin High School. Photo by Charles Fox

By Dee Dee Risher

 

My son, sixteen, knows her son, eighteen.
My (white) son, sixteen,
knows her (black) son, eighteen.
So we all know that what we are
reading in the paper–
the statement by the school district–
is a lie. I am a poet, so I want to write
something true
even though it is not official and will not be believed.

 

(I am white, and I finished college on a full scholarship from a top university,
so I have been conditioned to expect that what I say
will be listened to.
This is the background of this poem.
This is the foreground of this poem.
This is why the school district spokesman will be believed
and her son (eighteen, black, five feet four, eleventh grade) will not be believed
even though his body carries the evidence.) Continue reading “The Color of Orange” →

The Male/Female Image of God Made Flesh

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Feminist/Womanist/Queer Liberation and Theology, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

SophiaBy Wes Howard-Brook and Sue Ferguson Johnson, commentary on the lectionary for May 22

In this ongoing season of Pentecost, we celebrate the Holy Spirit, not simply as “a spirit,” but as Spirit-infused-flesh in human bodies. This week’s reading from Proverbs 8 connects with the recent sequence of selections from the Johannine Last Supper Discourse (John 13-17) to present us with the perhaps surprising portrait of Jesus as the male-female God-made-flesh. Continue reading “The Male/Female Image of God Made Flesh” →

Guerrilla Gardening

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment
Luke
Luke Mattson, Guerrilla Gardener of Southwest Detroit

From Adbusters:

This week we’re calling for a massive worldwide reclaiming of urban space . . . for all you activists with a green thumb to join the global movement of guerrilla gardeners, silent revolutionaries who take to the streets in the dead of night to beautify, utilize and experience a thrill. Continue reading “Guerrilla Gardening” →

A Pentecost Sermon: They become the storytellers

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Uncategorized1 Comment

mimes_10By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann. A Pentcost sermon given on May 15, 2016 in celebration of her dad, Bill Wylie-Kellermann’s 10 years as pastor at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Detroit.

It may be a little known fact around here- but I was once in a mime troop. We did the whole thing- white face, bow tie, suspenders. We were invited to events around the area. Christmas was a particularly busy time for us. We put on shows with short skits and we also were able to just mingle in the crowds. I loved it- particularly the wandering aimlessly with no other job that to be subtly funny and of course not speak with our mouths. Continue reading “A Pentecost Sermon: They become the storytellers” →

A New Poor People’s Campaign

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

PPCAn excerpt from an conversation curated by Tim Shenk, a co-organizer of The Poor People’s Campaign (a ten-day tour of the Midwest from May 17-26) who interviewed John Wessel-McCoy, a Poor People’s Campaign Program Organizer for the Kairos Center, and Willie Baptist, Poverty Initiative Scholar-in-Residence and Co-Coordinator of Poverty Scholarship and Leadership Development for the Kairos Center, about the strategic importance of the Midwest in building a movement to end poverty. Continue reading “A New Poor People’s Campaign” →

Resisting Exotic Problems

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

barnard2An excerpt from Courtney Martin’s essay “Western do-gooders need to resist the allure of ‘exotic problems'” in The Guardian:

It’s intimidating to throw yourself into solving problems that you’ve grown up with and around. Most American kids, unless they’ve been raised in a highly sheltered environment, have some sense of how multifaceted problems like mass incarceration really are. Choosing to work on that issue (one that many countries in the global south handle far better than we do) means choosing to nurture a deep, motivating horror at what this country is doing through a long and humble journey of learning. It means studying sentencing reform. The privatisation of prisons. Cutting-edge approaches, like restorative justice and rehabilitation. And then synthesising, from all that studying, the direction a solution lies in and steadfastly moving toward it.

The activists, entrepreneurs, advocates, designers, and organisers that I admire most these days are up for that kind of investment. They seem to lean in to systemic complexity with a kind of idealistic sobriety. They are people working on the least “sexy” issues imaginable: ending homelessness, giving more people access to credit, making governments work better.

UNDRIP, Christians, and Climate Justice

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Identity, and History, Watershed DiscipleshipLeave a comment

book 2.jpgBy Laurel Dykstra. This piece is part of a new anthology- Wrongs to Rights: How Churches can Engage the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

I am the priest of Salal and Cedar a community in the lower Fraser/Salish Sea watershed whose mission is to grow Christian’s capacity to work for environmental justice. In the language of the global Anglican communion, what we do is “strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.” Continue reading “UNDRIP, Christians, and Climate Justice” →

I Will Pour Out my Spirit on All Flesh!

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation1 Comment

CarnivalBy Wes Howard-Brook and Sue Ferguson Johnson

What transformed Simon Peter, last seen denying his discipleship, into a bold, courageous public speaker and soon-to-be Jesus jailbird? Luke’s exciting, even outrageous, story of the Pentecost outpouring of the Holy Spirit is always at risk of being domesticated as “the birthday of the church.” But heard in the context both of Luke’s two-part narrative and the wider scriptural “religion of creation” story, the Pentecost experience can and must be reclaimed as one of the opening salvos in the confrontation between the Good News of Jesus and the religion of empire. Continue reading “I Will Pour Out my Spirit on All Flesh!” →

Re-Animating Justification, Re-Patterning Our Lives

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Paul

By Tommy Airey

But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the spirit is alive because of δικαιοσύνην. If the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his spirit that dwells in you.
Romans 8:10-11

The Apostle Paul wrote his Romans epistle to a network of house churches pledging allegiance to Jesus in the Empire’s capital city sometime in the 50s, two decades after the death and resurrection of their Leader. The eighth chapter is embedded right in the middle of the lengthy letter that has been cherished by Protestant Christians for the past 500 years. For all of us who first came to view Jesus through a conservative Evangelical lens, Romans has been interpreted through a magnifying glass, focusing on sinners becoming “justified,” neatly explained as “just if I never sinned” so that we can go to heaven when we die. At least, this was how the sincere leaders at Campus Crusade for Christ broke it all down to me using their 4 Spiritual Laws two decades ago. Continue reading “Re-Animating Justification, Re-Patterning Our Lives” →