By Tiffany Ashworth
For my first two years out of high school, I read N.T. Wright at every opportunity. People close to me, starting on the road to seminary themselves, introduced him and other authors to me that I had never encountered in my conservative evangelical upbringing. A new world of theological possibilities opened to me, further igniting yet significantly shaping my passion for ministry. Continue reading “The Spirit in “Worldly Things””
By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann.
It has been eight wonderful years being with Erinn and as I look back I am struck by the trees. Leaves and branches and carpets of needles weave together our love story. At twenty-one, we climbed up an old tree laughing as we listened to the bells ring from the Taize monastery at the top of the hill. That tree led us to the hillsides in Palestine where we fell in love with the Olive trees as we watched them go up in flames from the Israeli-shot tear gas canisters. Soon, we lay together in a hammock beside my mother’s grave held in a circle of cedars imagining a life together. Then we committed our lives to one another under a red maple on the banks of the Tahquamenon River as we broke bread and shared wine. Soon, on a cold April day, we stood in a foreclosed yard covered by budding fruit trees staring up at a house where we would build a life. In that yard, the peas now climb the handcrafted cedar and grapevine arbor that canopied our vows. It was an apricot tree I was pruning when contractions began with Isaac. Continue reading “Learning from Laughter AND THE TREES”
By Ric Hudgens, January 27, 2015
Last night at Northwestern
Michelle Alexander wielded words
like swords slicing
shrouds of persistent illusion.
#ReclaimMLK.
Not MLK the reformer
pushing legislation
only making things “better”
never making them whole.
Rather the Rev(olutionary) King
preaching the words of Jesus,
setting the captive free,
overturning the tables,
the first last the last first.
The charter of liberty for
an America that does not yet exist.
University admins, Gov officials,
parents and children of privilege,
ovate her celebrity before and after,
but don’t feel the shaking
of the foundations. When
such words scare them,
when they feel their threat,
when they hear the storm
rattling the windows,
see waves crashing at the door,
then we will know
they truly understand.
From Dr. King’s last public speech (“I’ve Been to the Mountaintop“) in Memphis, TN on April 3, 1968:
We have an annual income of more than thirty billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States, and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That’s power right there, if we know how to pool it.
We don’t have to argue with anybody. We don’t have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don’t need any bricks and bottles. We don’t need any Molotov cocktails. We just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, “God sent us by here, to say to you that you’re not treating his children right. And we’ve come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment, where God’s children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you.
From Dr. King’s last sermon “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” March 31, 1968:
We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.
——————–
Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do right.
This 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: Biefly, what is Wilderness Way’s story? How did it come to be? What was it in response to? What was it a calling away from and a calling to something different?
Solveig Nilsen-Goodin: Wilderness Way began with a friend of mine coming over one day in 2006 saying he was feeling led to start an alternative church at the margins of Christianity, and something inside of me immediately responded, YES! We spent the next six months listening for what “at the margins of Christianity” meant to us, and gathering others to join us, and soon the name, Wilderness Way Community, emerged. The name signifies the particular place we are planting ourselves. Biblically, the wilderness is the place outside the walls of empire, the place where prophets are called and fed, the place where manna is given and enoughness is taught, the place where John the Baptist initiated those who were defectors from and dehumanized by empire; the place where Jesus was tested and prepared for his prophetic, spiritual leadership. Wilderness also signifies the wild spaces that emerge and exist without human control. Within the context of Western civilization (particularly urban contexts) most of us are profoundly cut off from the “natural” world – a disconnection that is having devastating consequences for the planet, the poor, and our very souls. The values we seek to bring forward are, in fact, values found deep in the wilderness of both scripture and nature: the values of Sabbath, jubilee and shalom. When manifested, these values look a lot like what Jesus called the Kingdom of God, and that’s the new (old) world that is emerging. Continue reading “Empire Cracking: An Interview with Wilderness Way”
People who believe that
don’t really care about the Bible, though—
he said it with so
much certainty—like he was coached,
like his life depended on being Right every time.
Anything less is a crime.
Continue reading “The Conversation Stopper”
By Kate Foran. The following is the fourth post in a series by Kate Foran exploring an alternative kindergarten education for her daughter Sylvie.
Part of my inspiration for pursuing an alternative education for my five-year-old daughter Sylvie has been the work of Communitas, a Connecticut-based organization focused on building inclusive community, particularly for people with disabilities. Since the 1980s Communitas has pioneered the model of “circles of support” which focus on the dreams and capacities of people with disabilities to enhance their lives and their communities. This model of organizing came out of a time when people with disabilities were often shut away in institutions, and were seen as a collection of needs and problems rather than individuals with gifts and desires for their own lives. The idea was deceptively simple: the focus person gathers together people who will help identify and enact a vision for a full and satisfying life. Through this model, Communitas has helped people start housing co-ops, find employment, publish books, and make art. With circles of support people have been able to do everything from coordinate caregivers to meet their basic needs so that they might live more independently, to travel the country on speaking tours. Continue reading “Circles of Support”
From Dr. James Perkinson, Professor of Ethics and Systematic Theology at Ecumenical Theological Seminary, Detroit, MI:
I am very close to arguing — as a kind of hermeneutic strategy of trying to occasion conversion by way of “shock” — that I don’t think it is possible to live in the suburbs (or their commuter-friendly equivalent of gentrified and gated “enclosures” inside the city itself) and be Christian. At least, not to live “peacefully” in the suburbs and try to make sense of being a disciple only on its own terms. If one lives there and regularly raises issue with who is being excluded from there, that is a different story. If one advocates for low-income housing, or homeless shelters, or HIV-treatment centers, and tries to make apparent the way a “suburb” constitutes a kind of simultaneous realization of economic appropriation (of resources from elsewhere) and social exclusion (of people whose class position and racial affiliation make them “suspect”), then that is a serious form of witness. But simply to live in a suburb “neutrally” is merely to participate in — and perpetuate — a quintessential American fiction of innocence. The suburb is not, and has not ever been, a neutral entity. Neither is it innocent.
Radical Discipleship 