The Last Thing We Need

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn RaceLeave a comment

Catherine MeeksFrom 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 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire1 Comment

George MonbiotAn 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 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, UncategorizedLeave a comment

kenBy 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 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

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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.