American Myths About Poverty

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Photo: A Church in Northwest Detroit on Rosa Parks Blvd.
Northwest Detroit on Rosa Parks Blvd.
Some highlights from Eduardo Porter’s recent New York Times piece “The Myth of Welfare’s Corrupting Influence on the Poor“…just more evidence that social analysis must always trump “conventional wisdom.”
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Today, almost 20 years after Mr. Clinton signed a law that stopped the federal entitlement to cash assistance for low-income families with children, the argument has solidified into a core tenet influencing social policy not only in the United States but also around the world.

And yet, to a significant degree, it is wrong. Actual experience, from the richest country in the world to some of the poorest places on the planet, suggests that cash assistance can be of enormous help for the poor. And freeing them from what President <a title="More articles about Ronald Wilson Reagan." Continue reading “American Myths About Poverty” →

Wilderness School

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TwoCoyotes2By Kate Foran. A second installment on her series on alternative education of her daughter Sylvie.

“When I show most people a rock I found, they say, ‘oh, nice.’ But when I show my teachers at Wilderness School, they say ‘Wow! It’s so beautiful! I love it!!” Sylvie, age 5.

The enthusiasm with which nature mentors and children regard rocks is a key piece in this patchwork quilt of my daughter’s education. On Mondays Sylvie spends the day at Two Coyotes Wilderness School, which meets in the woods surrounding Holcomb Farm in Granby, CT. She starts the morning with a gratitude circle, songs and games, and then it’s onto the woods for the day’s agenda (which might be building a fire with a bow drill or gathering wild edibles for October’s Ancestor Feast, or building a shelter out of sticks and branches.) Continue reading “Wilderness School” →

Snowden

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Snowden Meanwhile, the debate has become personal–about Snowden himself more than the issues to which he hoped to draw attention. It isn’t surprising that some Americans are suspicious of Snowdens’s motives. His story seems almost too good to be true: a young man of modest means, propelled by his brilliance to a position that gave him unusual access to the nation’s most closely guarded secrets…
Ted Rall, Snowden (2015)

We live in the heroic age of Assange, Manning and Snowden. Yet, what these men have uncovered for the world to see is so immense and overwhelming that, in order to just cope with our daily lives, we’ve put the issue on the back burner of the collective unconscious. This is one of the lamentations of political cartoonist Ted Rall, whose graphic biography of Snowden was released last month. Like virtually every sample of this genre, Snowden is an easy read. Unlike many, however, it is heavy, exposing the principalities and powers of an Orwellian collusion of government and corporation that watches our every move. It also implicates us: to resist the compulsion to sweep it all under The Carpet.

Rall excerpts

For radicals & progressives alike, militarism (abroad) and authoritarianism (at home) has been the most aggravating failure of the Obama presidency. It has, quite simply, been an escalation of what Bush started post-9/11. Rall both enlightens and entertains the reader, seeking to understand what it was in Snowden’s character or experience that led him to risk it all to break the law and to question why his actions were condemned so ubiquitously among the political elite. We recommend Snowden, as a nice companion to the work of Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras’ Oscar winning documentary CitizenFour.

And, coming up next for Rall, just in time for the primaries in January 2016…

Bernie

Bathing Our Inner World

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EverythingFrom Brian McLaren in Everything Must Change (2009)

Prayer will cease to be a technique for enlisting God to help us ‘make it’ in the dominant system; it will instead become a way of bathing our inner world in the transforming presence of God, a way we seek to be shaped by the new framing story, the new reality, the good news, so that we can be catalysts bringing transformation to the dominant system.

Gates of Hope

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stonesOur mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of hope — not the prudent gates of Optimism, which are somewhat narrower; nor the stalwart, boring gates of Common Sense; nor the strident gates of self-righteousness, which creak on shrill and angry hinges (our people cannot hear us there; they cannot pass through); nor the cheerful, flimsy garden gate of ‘Everything is gonna be all right,’ but a very different, sometimes very lonely place, the place of truth-telling, about your own soul first of all and its condition, the place of resistance and defiance, the piece of ground from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it might be, as it will be; the place from which you glimpse not only struggle, but joy in the struggle — and we stand there, beckoning and calling, telling people what we are seeing, asking people what they see.

  • Victoria Safford

Lift the Ban on Women Priests: An Open Letter to Pope Francis

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Feminist/Womanist/Queer Liberation and Theology8 Comments

royby Roy Bourgeois

Dear Pope Francis:

In 2012, after serving as a Catholic priest for 40 years, I was expelled from the priesthood because of my public support for the ordination of women. My expulsion from the priesthood by Pope Benedict came just five months before you became our Pope.

As Catholics, we are taught that men and women are created equal: “There is neither male nor female. In Christ you are one.” (Galatians 3:28). Pope Francis, why can’t women be priests? Continue reading “Lift the Ban on Women Priests: An Open Letter to Pope Francis” →

Ratzlaff Review: Paul & The Roman Imperial Order

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VernThe legendary Vern Ratzlaff (right), Canadian Mennonite pastor and professor, was sporting his 5-inch beard long before practically every American white guy under 35 started growing theirs. Vern is spending free time at his outpost in Saskatoon reading dense anti-imperial theology and writing concise summaries for the rest of us.

A Ratzlaff Review of Paul and the Roman Imperial Order. (ed) Richard Horsley, Trinity Press, 2004.

Here is another wonderful treatment of Pauline struggles with the cultural and political and social and religious strands of the first century. Horsley states the task clearly in the introduction to the eight essays that make up this volume. We have ‘traditionally understood Paul in opposition to Judaism. Luther’s discovery of ‘justification by faith’ in Paul’s letter to the Romans became the formative religious experience through which Paul’s letters have been read’ (p 1). Continue reading “Ratzlaff Review: Paul & The Roman Imperial Order” →

Drumming and Jack-o-Lanterns

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race2 Comments

pumpkinBy Lydia Wylie-Kellermann

Late at night, I would sneak into our living room, lie on the floor, and put my ear to the ground. I could hear the drumming and catch the tune to the chants that had for years drifted me into dreams. If I really pushed my ear close, I could make out my mom’s voice as she joined with the circle of women monthly sharing song, dreams, and summer vision quests deep in the woods.

My family was deeply Christian. My mom loved incense and the sacraments. But she was also starved for a spirituality that rooted itself on the ground- in the trees and the hawks and the snow. She longed for rituals that connected her body to the waves and the changing moon. She clung to the tension of multiple traditions knowing that she needed them both. Continue reading “Drumming and Jack-o-Lanterns” →

Giving Up The Trump Card

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire1 Comment

LilyFrom our interview with Dr. Lily Mendoza, the author (with her sister Leny) of Back From the Crocodile’s Belly (2013):

For me, the challenge of decolonization and re-indigenization demands a giving up of all forms of supremacy, including that of Christian supremacy—the claim to having the one right formula, the ultimate trump card, the final word. I know of many Christians who struggle with the notion that the Christian story is only one story among many. But I am all too familiar with the damaging effects of the more typical insistence that the Christian story is the only true one—no matter the attempts to wrap it in benevolent and compassionate missionary work. Can Christians engage with others on equal ground without pulling out the trump card in the end? Can they give up the trump card altogether?