Healing the Open Wound: Imagining Christian Border Ethics with Gloria Anzaldúa

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

Border at NightBy Justin Ashworth, first published in The Other Journal

Border encounters occur every day in our global and globalizing cities.[1] We consume food touched by people born outside the United States; we purchase things from non-citizens, brush shoulders with them as we go to work. Some of us kiss immigrants goodbye as we head out the door for the day, while others of us are non-citizens ourselves. Our daily lives are filled with border encounters like these, that is, with economic, political, cultural, and personal interactions between citizens and foreigners.[2] But what should be the marks of these encounters? In asking this question, I am not concerned primarily with how cosmopolitan bigwigs interact with each other but rather with how the images of the border that citizens carry around in their heads influence their interactions with border crossers. Are our border images accurate, and what type of ethic do they imply? Continue reading “Healing the Open Wound: Imagining Christian Border Ethics with Gloria Anzaldúa” →

When Some of the Less Famous Leaders Took Their Turns

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GuellahAn excerpt from Rebecca Solnit’s recent dispatch “Calculated Risk” from the climate summit in Paris, originally posted on the Harper’s Magazine blog:

Obama spoke of his summer trip to Alaska, whose melting permafrost and burning tundra are “a preview of one possible future”—though it’s the present, not the future, for Alaska. Still, Obama did acknowledge one of the central facts of the day: “We know the truth that many nations have contributed little to climate change but will be the first to feel its threats.”
Continue reading “When Some of the Less Famous Leaders Took Their Turns” →

ISIS Has Little To Do With Islam, and Everything To Do With War

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ISISBy Sheldon Good & Cyrus McGoldrick, originally posted to Huff Post

In the wake of the recent attacks in Paris, Beirut, and Baghdad, the majority of people in the U.S. believe we should take part in a military response, including the use of increased U.S. airstrikes and ground forces against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. This would not only be ineffective, but exactly the trap ISIS has set (yet again). If there’s anything we should have learned since 9/11 and the “War on Terror,” it is that violence against the Muslim world cannot defeat terrorism or anti-Western anger; only respect for human rights and sovereignty will work. But before discussing that topic, one must deflate another majority belief in the U.S.: that ISIS is somehow mainstream among Muslims, or that the West is at war with “radical Islam.” Continue reading “ISIS Has Little To Do With Islam, and Everything To Do With War” →

The Most Interesting Woman in the World

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Feminist/Womanist/Queer Liberation and TheologyLeave a comment

samaritan womanBy Rose Marie Berger. Continuing series on badass biblical women.

Have you seen the Dos Equis commercials starring actor Jonathan Goldsmith as “the most interesting man in the world”? “People hang on his every word,” the narrator intones, “even the prepositions.” Though the ad is clever and funny, the “Stay thirsty, my friends” tagline makes clear that what’s being sold is unquenchable thirst.

Contrast this with the Samaritan woman Jesus meets at the well. What’s on offer in John 4 is “living water.” But obtaining it requires a more daring leap than the short-term gains of “Interesting Man’s” carpe diem philosophy.

Who is the Samaritan woman with whom Jesus holds his longest discussion in the gospels? First, let’s clarify what she is not. She is not a whore, nor promiscuous. She’s not spiritually dead or “hopelessly carnal,” as some male interpreters have claimed. Continue reading “The Most Interesting Woman in the World” →

Welcome to the Cult

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Cloud of Witnesses, Theological Animation2 Comments

WesBy Tommy Airey

Here’s an easy way to figure out if you’re in a cult: If you’re wondering whether you’re in a cult, the answer is yes.
Stephen Colbert

Not too long ago, in the years of early adulthood, I was attending a church in Southern California with weekend attendance in the tens of thousands. This was Respectable Religion. The pastor prayed at Obama’s inauguration. But something dreadful was percolating inside of me as I took inventory of what was happening all around me.
Continue reading “Welcome to the Cult” →

#BLACKLIVESMATTER

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Identity, and History, UncategorizedLeave a comment
police
By Nicole Simone Rodrigues

By Leah Grady Sayvetz. Leah grew up in the Ithaca Catholic Worker community. After some years away she has moved back to her home town to join efforts in local social justice organizing, starting at the local level to effect change in the world. 

On a Tuesday morning in early November, on my way driving to work, I was stopped at the bottom of Elm street by a traffic jam, not atypical for 8am on a week day. Thinking nothing of it, I patiently waited for vehicles to move on so that I could pull out onto Floral Ave. The car ahead of me seemed somewhat thoughtless in how they had stopped across a lane of traffic on Floral and did not appear to be moving. An elderly black man turned up Elm, having just come from the Martin Luther King Blvd bridge, and stopped his car next to mine to let out his passenger, a middle-aged black  man. As I saw these two men say good bye, I realized that the driver of the car ahead of me, a white man, had just jumped out of his vehicle and was now pointing a gun at the younger of the two black men. It suddenly became clear that we were surrounded by undercover police. The cars behind us and ahead of us, the car which had just turned onto Floral Ave from MLK Blvd, and other cars waiting in line before the Floral Ave stop sign all carried men in regular dress who jumped out and surrounded this man on the side of the street. All of these under cover officers were white men. Many of them carried guns, some pointed their guns at the black  man who had just gotten out of his friend’s car. I recognized the man being surrounded as someone I see a lot in my neighborhood- he is a neighbor who I know by face but not by name. The cops all wore civilian clothing of various styles, one man had long hair in a messy pony tail and a scruffy beard, they all wore calm and business-like expressions on their faces. Their demeanor communicated to everyone around that this was just business as usual: nothing to be alarmed about.  Continue reading “#BLACKLIVESMATTER” →

The Second Coming

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Son of ManFrom Brendan Byrne in The Hospitality of God: A Reading of Luke’s Gospel (2000):

We retain the doctrine of the “Second Coming” in our affirmations of faith, not because we literally believe–as fundamentalists do–that Jesus will one day appear as Son of Man on the clouds of heaven, but because we believe that the biblical assertions to that effect affirm the eventual triumph of God’s sovereignty in the universe and that all is provisional till that occurs.

This Advent

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This Advent, as we light the candles in the dark and sing for Emmanuel, let’s be even more intentional than usual in clearing the commercial Christmas assault advent wreathfrom our minds and hearts. Whatever God is calling us to has little to do with shopping and driving ourselves into a frenzy creating the “perfect” holiday. We need to honor the silence and the dark, to remember our stories, to teach the youth in our lives what we believe matters. We need to recall, to intuit, to dream the life we’re called to and then make a plan that allows us to strip down enough to have it. In the course of that, of course, we need to give thanks for all that we are and for those traveling in our circles and beyond.    -Jeanie Wylie-Kellermann, THe Witness 1998