Witnessing
By Cait De Mott Grady. Cait De Mott Grady grew up in the Ithaca Catholic Worker Community in Ithaca, NY and has been working as an organizer on political and environmental campaigns since graduating from college in 2012. Cait moved to Detroit this past June and is inspired and humbled by all the people who work to make the Beloved Community a reality.
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief.
Do justly, now.
Love mercy, now.
Walk humbly, now.
You are not obligated to complete the work,
but neither are you free to abandon it.
– The Talmud
I woke up early this morning to darkness and I lay there listening to night sounds – a chorus of crickets and cicadas, punctuated by the occasional engine roar or dog bark. I lay there listening and thinking of my dear friend who is facing a terminal Leukemia diagnosis. I thought about how grateful I am for his life and our friendship and how I desperately want to know that he will be by my side in the coming years, questioning, organizing, marching, imagining, and loving. Continue reading “Witnessing”
Lake Superior Magnificat
Sarah Holst’s art and reflection is the second installment on our monthly bad-ass biblical women series. If you would like to contribute to the series, email lydiaiwk@gmail.com.By Sarah Holst
Last year I attended a workshop led by Onleilove Alston on her work uncovering and uplifting the Black Presence in the Bible. She spoke about the Black Madonna and the importance of reading Mary of Nazareth in the context of her economic, political and cultural setting: a very young woman with brown skin, turned-out, looked-over, and, as poet Kathleen Norris puts it, “capable of walking the hill country of Judea and giving birth in a barn.” This is the historical Mary that was called to participate in liberation and redemption, smuggling God into the world inside of her body.
Grace Boggs Presente!
An announcement from the Boggs Center
Philosopher-Activist Grace Lee Boggs Dies in Detroit: A Champion for the People
October 5, 2015–Grace Lee Boggs died peacefully in her sleep at her home on Field Street in Detroit this morning. She had recently celebrated her 100th birthday at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.
Grace was an internationally known philosopher activist for justice. She had been politically active since the 1930’s working with A. Phillip Randolph’s first march on Washington and later C.L.R. James. For 40 years she worked closely with her late husband James Boggs in advancing ideas of revolution and evolution for the 20th and 21st Centuries.
She helped organize the 1963 March down Woodward Avenue with Dr. Martin Luther King and the Grass Roots Leadership Conference with Malcolm X. Grace Lee Boggs was active in Labor, Civil Rights, Black Power, women and environmental justice movements. Later, with her husband James, she helped organize SOSAD, WePros, Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice, Gardening Angels and Detroit Summer. Grace was a founding member of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership and was a strong advocate for place based education and supported the James and Grace Lee Boggs School.
“Grace died as she lived, surrounded by books, politics, people and ideas,” said Alice Jennings and Shea Howell, two of her Trustees.
Canadian Artists Express Themselves
Hundreds of Canadian artists warned in an open letter this week that the country’s recently passed anti-terrorism law has a “chill” effect and “directly attacks the creative arts and free expression.”
Dear Party Leaders,
We are Canadian artists. We have been blessed to be part of a country that does not send poets to gulags, that does not behead people for saying things a government considers critical of it, and that does not murder dissidents and journalists wholesale.
Continue reading “Canadian Artists Express Themselves”
Cultural Appropriation: Of Dreadlocks, Cell Blocks, and Stolen Rocks (like Plymouth)
By James W. Perkinson, September 29, 2015
Invited by a friend to respond to the recent blog of philosophy professor, Crispin Sartwell, “Should Miley Cyrus Wear Dreadlocks?” I would throw this into the mix. Yes, it is cultural appropriation “all the way down,” but as with ingesting spoiled food, some things come back up. The culture wars rage on, as globalization’s surface sign that something deeper is afoot. The question of taking someone else’s style cannot really be judged except in consideration of the entire regime of planetary “taking” writ large.
Continue reading “Cultural Appropriation: Of Dreadlocks, Cell Blocks, and Stolen Rocks (like Plymouth)”
Towards a Spirituality of Activism
By Tommy Airey
God, help me to refuse ever to accept evil; by your Spirit empower me to work for change precisely where and how you call me; and free me from thinking I have to do everything.
Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers (1992)
On the day we met Bill Wylie-Kellermann back in the summer of ’13, we naively asked him how many times he’d been arrested for acts of civil disobedience: “I stopped counting at 50,” he muttered matter-of-factly. Between sermons and sacraments, Pastor Bill is committed to hitting the streets, participating in what he calls “liturgical direct action.”
Continue reading “Towards a Spirituality of Activism”
