Living in the Tension

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Zadar
Photo: Michael Smith

By Tommy Airey

So many of us wake up in the morning and eat a breakfast of food we don’t believe in and then drive a car we don’t believe in to a job we don’t believe in. We do things that we know are wrong, day after day, just because that’s the way the system is set up, and we think we have no choice. It’s soul-devouring.
Kathleen Dean Moore, Professor of Philosophy at Oregon State University

A hundred days after the U.S. military drone bombed a hospital in Kunduz, killing 42 patients and doctors, and about an hour after I filled up my car for $1.53/gallon, Rev. Peterson shot me an anguished text:

How does one live in an oppressive system but not be of it? My clothes bare the label of oppression. My little retirement fund bares the gains/losses of corrupt capitalism.

For all of us with some semblance of privilege, working tirelessly for church renewal and social change, this is the question. We live in The Tension, a stressful, uncomfortable, inconvenient space often bombarded by guilt, shame, anxiety, fear and exhaustion. Continue reading “Living in the Tension” →

Grandma Drone Resister Appealing While being Remanded to Prison

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Just PeacemakingLeave a comment

(Press Release) Mary Anne Grady FloresHancock drone resister and grandmother Mary Anne Grady Flores will be taken into custody on Tuesday, January 19 at the Town of DeWitt Court at 5400 Butternut Drive, East Syracuse, NY. Her lead Attorney, Lance Salisbury, will speak at the 4:30pm press conference at the court. Grady Flores appears before the court at 5pm.

On May 16, 2014, Grady Flores was convicted of violating an order of protection while taking pictures of eight Catholics nonviolently protesting the US drone assassination program at the Hancock Air Base in DeWitt, New York on Ash Wednesday, February 13, 2013. DeWitt Judge David Gideon sentenced Mary Anne to one year in prison and fined her $1000, but she was released on bail while her appeal was pending.  All eight Catholic drone resisters arrested that Ash Wednesday were acquitted, by a judge who asserted that the protesters intended to uphold law, not break it. Continue reading “Grandma Drone Resister Appealing While being Remanded to Prison” →

Declaration of Intent

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance, IdentityLeave a comment

DSC00576An excerpt from the 2015 poem by Rita Wong entitled “Declaration of Intent,”featured in the upcoming Watershed Discipleship anthology published by Wipf & Stock, edited by Ched Myers and Elaine Enns of Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries:

Let the colonial borders be seen for the pretensions they are
i hereby honour what the flow of water teaches us Continue reading “Declaration of Intent” →

The Unexpected Victories of Insurgents

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

ZinnFrom Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the U.S. (Chapter 24: The Coming Revolt of the Guards):

History which keeps alive the memory of people’s resistance suggests new definitions of power. By traditional definitions, whoever possesses military strength, wealth, command of official ideology, cultural control, has power. Measured by these standards, popular rebellion never looks strong enough to survive.

However, the unexpected victories-even temporary ones-of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people-the employed, the somewhat privileged-are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.

That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attica—expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us.

Certain new facts may, in our time, emerge so clearly as to lead to general withdrawal of loyalty from the system. The new conditions of technology, economics, and war, in the atomic age, make it less and less possible for the guards of the system-the intellectuals, the home owners, the taxpayers, the skilled workers, the professionals, the servants of government-to remain immune from the violence (physical and psychic) inflicted on the black, the poor, the criminal, the enemy overseas. The internationalization of the economy, the movement of refugees and illegal immigrants across borders, both make it more difficult for the people of the industrial countries to be oblivious to hunger and disease in the poor countries of the world.

Empire Cracking: An Interview on Spiritus Christi

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spiritusThis interview was taken by Lydia Wylie-Kellermann as part of a writing project for Geez Magazine entitled “She is Breathing: Listening for Another World and an End to Empire.” It was published in the Winter Issue.

Lydia Wylie-Kellermann:What is Spiritus Christi’s story?

Michael Boucher: What happened at Spiritus Christi in 1998 is often narrated as the community of then Corpus Christi Church moving away from the wider church teachings.  The question always arises, however, “Who moved away from the tradition?” Continue reading “Empire Cracking: An Interview on Spiritus Christi” →

Transfiguration

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation1 Comment

transfigurationBy Wes Howard-Brook and Sue Ferguson Johnson, Commentary on Readings for Feb 7, Transfiguration Sunday

Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”

Our gospel this week finds Jesus and a few companions taking some time out on the earth for what Dorothy Day might have called “clarification of thought” or others have called “illumination.” Luke has just shown that the disciples don’t understand who Jesus is. In the wider narrative context, Luke has Jesus ever more clearly revealing that the divine power he embodies and offers to disciples is not that of the warrior “messiah,” but of the suffering Human One (9.20-26). But the disciples, like so many “Christians” through the ages, cling stubbornly to the hope that he would be the military leader who would remove the Romans by force (see Lk 24.21). Even worse, they seem utterly deaf to Jesus’ Good News of radically inclusive hospitality and leadership from below. Surrounding the Transfiguration scene are numerous situations where we see how out of tune they are with the song Jesus is singing. Consider this sequence of encounters: Continue reading “Transfiguration” →

A Double Stance

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Just Peacemaking, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

AORFrom Elaine Enns & Ched Myers in their 2nd Volume of Ambassadors of Reconciliation (2009).  Enns & Myers direct Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries, hosting their annual February Kinsler Institute from February 15-19–this year’s theme is Landscapes of Trauma, Stories of Healing: Women in Luke’s Gospel—ONLY 2 MORE DAYS to register:

To secure peace with justice, whether locally or globally, requires that peacemakers assume a double stance. On one hand, we must be close enough to a given conflict that we can identify the particularities of each party and situation, which calls for the approach of community organizers, social workers and pastors. On the other hand, we also need to step back enough to see the influence of larger historical, social and ideological forces, requiring the skills of social analysis and advocacy. Holistic peacemaking cannot ignore any of these competences or perspectives if it is to be transformative. And if we do not experiment with alternatives, we are left with the retributive solutions of sheriffs and the prison system, which merely manage the inevitable conflicts generated by a dysfunctional society.

Infinite Circles: Celebrating Female Friendship in the Bible and Beyond

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

By Cara Curtis, a lifelong Quaker, a student at Harvard Divinity School, and a fan of noodles of all kinds. This piece is part of the ongoing series on badass biblical women.IMG_3146

When I think about the idea of “badass women of the Bible,” my mind immediately jumps to the several courageous and fierce ladies of scripture who pull off daring and deeply powerful acts. The Magnificat is a downright badass poem. Esther was clearly not one to be messed with. Ruth has a whole book commemorating her faith and story. I celebrate these women in all of their strength and power, as well as the many others like them whose acts of faith and bravery were not preserved for us in the canon. But you know that saying, “behind every successful man is a strong and wise woman”? In my experience, this is just as true of successful women–in fact, I’ve often found that it takes a whole community of women encouraging and supporting each other for acts of deep caring, bravery, justice, and truth telling to become possible. Simply put, badass women help each other be more badass! Continue reading “Infinite Circles: Celebrating Female Friendship in the Bible and Beyond” →

Richard Rohr on White Privilege & The Bible

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race1 Comment

romal tune richard rohrA fabulous dialogue between L.A. based organizer Romal Tune and the Franciscan contemplative Richard Rohr, first published here at HuffPost:

RT:  What does White privilege mean to you? How do you define it?

White privilege is largely hidden from our eyes if we are white. Why? Because it is structural instead of psychological, and we tend to interpret most things in personal, individual, and psychological ways. Since we do not consciously have racist attitudes or overt racist behavior, we kindly judge ourselves to be open minded, egalitarian, “liberal”, and therefore surely not racist. Because we have never been on the other side, we largely do not recognize the structural access, the trust we think we deserve, the assumption that we always belong and do not have to earn our belonging, the “we set the tone” mood that we white folks live inside of–and take totally for granted and even naturally deserved. Only the outsider can spot all these attitudes in us. It is especially hidden in countries and all groupings where white people are the majority. Continue reading “Richard Rohr on White Privilege & The Bible” →