Taking the First Step: Addiction, Ecology & Recovery

On July 22, 2015July 22, 2015 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Watershed DiscipleshipLeave a comment

By Rev. Solveig Nilsen-Goodin of the Wilderness Way Community in Portland, a team of Jesus-followers committed to “discovering wisdom for our time, healing for ourselves and our planet, and the power of untamable (resurrection!) life!” She and her partner Peter are also active participants with Eco Faith Recovery, a growing network of faith-based people and institutions within the Christian tradition, waking up to the enormity of the ecological-economic-spiritual crisis before us. Their children, Soren & Stig, recently interrupted our dinner conversation with chants of “We hate coal! We hate coal!” (above: the Nilsen-Goodin family)
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The profound ecological degradation we are currently witnessing and the rise of addictive behaviors such as alcoholism and drug addiction are two sides of the same coin.
Albert LaChance

Waking up to the developing global ecological crisis is like moving from being a child in an alcoholic family to growing up and going into recovery.
Continue reading “Taking the First Step: Addiction, Ecology & Recovery” →

Good Earth to Good Earth

On July 21, 2015July 22, 2015 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as ResistanceLeave a comment

By Denise Griebler

I’ll shake these bones and shout and sing my life away,
It won’t be long before these bones turn to clay.
— from Shake These Bones, by Malcom Dalglish

“Good earth to good earth.”

It’s one of the things we’ll say graveside when we offer back the earthly remains of beloved Bea Wylie. Her ashes will be buried in the UP, alongside her husband, the good bishop, Sam Wylie.

A week ago I rolled out the slabs of clay. And few days later I fashioned the urn. A sprig of lavender harvested from Manna Community Garden along with grasses sporting well-defined seedheads, pressed into the clay. There’s a cross on one wall. And a bird in flight on another. I’m told for 60 years Bea wore a bird like that on a silver chain that rested upon her heart. Unbeknownst, I made the mark of the bird in upward flight, imaging her home-going and the welcome she received as she crossed over to God. Continue reading “Good Earth to Good Earth” →

Apollo

On July 20, 2015July 8, 2015 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as ResistanceLeave a comment

A poem from Elizabeth Alexander, the chair of African-American studies at Yale. Today is the anniversary of the Apollo moon walk (1969).

We pull off
to a road shack
in Massachusetts
to watch men walk
Continue reading “Apollo” →

Too Deep To Measure

On July 19, 2015July 8, 2015 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance, Theological Animation1 Comment

From David Wilcox’s “Deeper Still” (2000)

In this life, the love you give becomes the only lasting treasure
And what you lose will be what you win
A well that echoes down too deep to measure.

Death Poem

On July 18, 2015July 23, 2015 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as ResistanceLeave a comment

By Jumah al Dossari, written while a prisoner in Guantanamo. After five years, he was released without charges. Published in Poems from Guantanamo: the Detainees Speak.

Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.
Continue reading “Death Poem” →

Ratzlaff Reviews: How to Read the Bible and Still be a Christian

On July 17, 2015July 18, 2015 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

The heart of God’s justice is to make sure that the “weak and the orphan” have received their share of God’s resources for them to live and thrive. Retributive justice comes in only when that ideal is violated.
John Dominic Crossan, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian: Struggling with Divine Violence from Genesis Through Revelation (2015)
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The legendary Vern Ratzlaff (above), 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. Here is a recent submission on John Dominic Crossan’s latest publication: How to Read the Bible and Still be a Christian: Struggling with Divine Violence from Genesis Through Revelation (2015, Harper Collins)
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Do we have to deal with a bipolar G-d, a G-d of vengeance and retribution in the Old Testament and a G-d of mercy and love and rehabilitation in the New Testament? A violent G-d and a non-violent Jesus? Crossan develops a way to deal with this conundrum. He takes seriously the full sweep of biblical data. For example, the Year of Jubilee, Leviticus 25, spells out that the land belongs to G-d and every fiftieth year was to be a Jubilee, a year of liberation, redemption and restoration. But if this was the understanding of land tenure, why is there so little mention of it in later texts? Eg Isaiah 5:8 is a diatribe against expansion of real estate ownership. Why the move from divine decree to mere suggestion? Continue reading “Ratzlaff Reviews: How to Read the Bible and Still be a Christian” →

Decolonizing Our People & Culture

On July 15, 2015July 22, 2015 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Cloud of WitnessesLeave a comment

From Evo Morales’ Ten Commandments Against Capitalism, For Life & Humanity.
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Sisters and brothers: We are living in a society in which everything is globalized and homogenized, in which cultural identities seem to smack of the past that everyone wants to ignore. The ancient and ancestral cultures are marginalized in economic and political processes and their cultural and spiritual force and energy are discounted. This has led to a profound dehumanization in the world and discrimination in the spiritual and cultural resources that can give us the necessary strengths to stop the brutality of capitalism. We must:

Continue reading →

Somewhere Between Sturgeon, Graffiti, and Jubilee

On July 14, 2015December 19, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Watershed DiscipleshipLeave a comment

By James W. Perkinson. Written in preparation for the Detroit Spirit and Roots Gathering this upcoming weekend in Detroit hosted in part by Word and World. Published on On the Edge, a Detroit Catholic Worker Paper.

This summer in Detroit, some of us will attempt a new thing. Tentatively, slowly deliberately—we will convene a dialogue among three communities of inspiration. One is rooted in postindustrial soils, breaking street savvy into spit finesse, spun bodies, and tagged walls. Another is deeply historical, born of peasant resistance against ancient Roman might, itself gone genocidal and colonizing. The third, most rooted, is embedded in soils and waters, seasons and weather, enculturated by the place itself. Hip-hop, Christian, and indigenous by other names—three constituencies roughly demarked, will make common cause in concern for the future of de troit, the strait. We have named it the “Detroit Spirit Roots Gathering” and seek to serve a re-spiriting of the city in part by learning from each other’s stories. Continue reading “Somewhere Between Sturgeon, Graffiti, and Jubilee” →

The Well of Grief

On July 13, 2015July 13, 2015 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as ResistanceLeave a comment

A poem from David Whyte, passed along to the RadicalDiscipleship community by Peter Nilsen-Goodin of the Wilderness Way Community of Portland, OR.

Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief

turning downward through its black water
to the place we cannot breathe

will never know the source from which we drink,
the secret water, cold and clear,

nor find in the darkness glimmering
the small round coins
thrown by those who wished for something else.

Journalism

On July 12, 2015July 8, 2015 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Cloud of Witnesses, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

From Janet Malcolm in The Journalist and the Murderer (1990):

What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject’s blind self absorption and the journalist’s skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject’s account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.