A Scandalous Shock to the System

On May 27, 2016July 28, 2017 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Feminist/Womanist/Queer Liberation and Theology, Theological Animation2 Comments

By Wes Howard-Brook and Sue Ferguson Johnson

All the dynamics of this week’s passage from Luke’s Gospel are “wrong.” For instance, how are we to imagine Jewish elders in Capernaum speaking on behalf of a Roman centurion? Further, they paint him as the primary patron of their synagogue. And not only this, but the centurion sends the elders to Jesus, at this point in Luke’s narrative, an itinerant preacher and healer with no official authority at all. Finally, Jesus praises the centurion for having a faith that Jesus has not found among the people of Israel. What could be going on here? Continue reading “A Scandalous Shock to the System” →

Persistent Widow

On May 26, 2016October 22, 2016 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Feminist/Womanist/Queer Liberation and Theology, Uncategorized2 Comments

By Lindsay Airey

²He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. ³In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ ⁴For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, ⁵yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’” -Luke 18:2-5

To understand why the Persistent Widow jumps off her small passage in the biblical narrative, startles me into attention, and lovingly beckons me to see and follow her, I first need to give some context. I have been in an active process of 12-step Recovery for a little over a year now. This kind of Recovery is a process that, among other things, encourages me to practice loving myself enough to advocate for myself. It’s the kind of Recovery that’s been helping me to unlearn codependent ways—taking false responsibility for people, only to find myself all dried up at the end of the day. Continue reading “Persistent Widow” →

Some Much Needed Good News

On May 25, 2016May 24, 2016 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

By Tommy Airey

The Gospel is the proclamation and conviction that there is a Force of good that governs the universe, a Power of Love imminently saturating everything, yet bigger than that too: beyond space and time, deep into a future, animated with hope. It woos, beckons and compels people to join in on a mission that bends everything towards justice, that prefigures that hopeful future into the now. Continue reading “Some Much Needed Good News” →

Indigenous solidarity through a Muslim lens: A conversation with frontline defender Anushka Azadi

On May 24, 2016May 17, 2016 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Identity, and History, Uncategorized2 Comments

Re-posted from Breaking the Fast

Thanks so much Anushka for taking the time to talk with Breaking the Fast (BTF).

BTF: Let’s start with introductions. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Anushka: My name is Anushka. I am a frontline defender and legal advocate, broadcast journalist, writer, performer, community organizer and all around bad bitch.

BTF: How did you come to doing work with Indigenous land defenders? When did you start?

Anushka: As an immigrant to so-called Canada, growing up in poverty and fear, in pain and confusion, made me deeply aware of and sensitive to the intersecting oppressions that twisted up, not only my life, but the lives of others as well. I began understanding words like systemic, institutional and I began to understand the horrors that accompanied what was taught to me as the rise of civilization: industrialization, capitalism/free market economies, “democracy”. Continue reading “Indigenous solidarity through a Muslim lens: A conversation with frontline defender Anushka Azadi” →

The Last Thing We Need

On May 23, 2016May 14, 2016 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn RaceLeave a comment

From Catherine Meeks at the Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries Kinsler Institute, during a Q&A after her presentation, “Facing History with Courage,” on the history of lynching in the context of the continuing legacy of white supremacy, February 17, 2016 (photo: Tim Nafziger):

White people need to learn how to have real conversations with other white people. Don’t spend a second feeling guilty. It is a wasted emotion and it doesn’t serve anybody. Those of us who have lived at the foot of oppression, the last thing we need is white guilt. It just takes up your energy. Don’t choose to feel guilty. Choose to act.

Confronting Neoliberalism

On May 22, 2016May 14, 2016 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire1 Comment

An excerpt from George Monbiot’s recent piece “Neoliberalism–The Ideology at the Root of All our Problems” in The Guardian:

So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power. Continue reading “Confronting Neoliberalism” →

In the Land of the Willing

On May 21, 2016May 19, 2016 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, UncategorizedLeave a comment

ken By Kenneth Sehested, from the new book In the Land of the Willing: Litanies, Prayers, Poems, and Benedictions

This is one of those
old fashioned, free-range,
leap-of-faith callings.
Just when you thought
our climate-controlled,
pension-secured culture
had squeezed all the
chutzpah out of the
believing community-
no more burning bushes,
flaming tongues-of-fire,
scary angelic appearances,
even still-small voices-
the Spirit erupts again
for those with ears to hear
and hearts aligned.

The Color of Orange

On May 20, 2016May 17, 2016 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Identity, and History, UncategorizedLeave a comment

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 May 19, 2016July 28, 2017 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Feminist/Womanist/Queer Liberation and Theology, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

By 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 May 18, 2016May 16, 2016 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

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” →