From Kathy Kelly, just before she finished serving a three-month prison sentence for protesting the U.S. drone war at a military base in Missouri. Originally posted on the Voices For Creative Nonviolence website here.
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Thanks to generosity of people “outside,” I’ve been able to read about two dozen books here in Atwood Hall. Many other books have been sent. Books I had already read were given to other prisoners or donated, as gifts, to the prison library. Still others remain in my locker and under my bed, waiting to be read. Many thanks! The books have generated interesting conversations and helped build a lovely “book club” atmosphere which I’ll genuinely miss.
Continue reading “From The Prison Library”
Don’t Read It
From Louise Erdrich in Original Fire: Selected and New Poems
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.
Civil Resistance
Nor is this a private experience because the addictions from which we must turn are systemic economic/political/cultural pathologies. The insights from the 12 Step programs tells us that the dysfunctional system cannot be reformed, it must be disengaged. We must develop collective and long-term disciplines of “turning around” that empower a political practice that is nonagressive and nonexploitative.
It may seem indulgent to talk this way in view of the suffering of the innocent. Yet how, except through suffering, are we to allow God whoever or whatever that might be for us to train us to fling ourselves upon the impossible? For when we learn that behind the impossible is God’s grace and presence; the future is an enigma; our road is covered by mist. But, we need to go on giving ourselves, because God continues hoping amid the night and God continues calling us to put ourselves out there with those who suffer. I don’t believe there is a better way to live than this a life of nonviolent civil resistance.
– Elizabeth McAlister
The Race for Presidency Has Begun
A recent post from Movement giant Ruby Sales, co-founder of The SpiritHouse Project:
Calling friends and shakers and movers for justice. The race for the presidency has begun. Spirithouse Project wants to make it plain that no presidential candidate will make it to the White House on the back of Black people by using anti Black rhetoric to organize and mobilize White people. Nor will anyone get to the White House without addressing racism as a national problem that feeds state sanctioned murders, economic disenfranchisement and the state of Black youth. The road to the White House will not be built on false issues. Rather we demand solutions to the real systemic issues of the day. Race. Economics. Medical industrial complex. Prison industrial complex. Growing homelessness. Corporate monopolies. State sanctioned violence. War on Black people, etc. ADD YOUR ITEM TO THE LIST.
Ruby vigilantly updates her page Breaking The Silence Against Modern Day Lynching on Facebook, a site that documents and records the issues, comments, articles, photographs of the rising rate of modern day lynchings, beatings, drownings (torture) by White police and vigilantes.
An Easter Vigil Word
Preached by Denise Griebler at the Detroit Peace Community/Catholic Worker/ St. Peter’s Episcopal Church Easter Vigil on Mark 16:1-8.
16 When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. 2 And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. 3 They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” 4 When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. 5 As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. 6 But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” 8 So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
The other day I cyber-stumbled on a new childrens’ book called Rad American Women from A to Z – it’s a picture book that teaches kid’s a little women’s history along with the ABCs. A is for Angela (as in Davis) – Z is for Zora (as in Neale Hurston). There’s even X for the women whose names we do not know. It’s a collection form AtoZ of courageous, badass women we want our kids and our grandkids to know. Continue reading “An Easter Vigil Word”
The Pedagogy of Place: The Art of Coping
By Tommy Airey, the first post of a 3-part series about how we learn from our location about what is truly Divine
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Every town has the same two malls: the one white people go to and the one white people used to go to.
Chris Rock
About a month ago, I drove just across 8 mile (the border between Detroit and Southfield) to visit the mall that white people used to go to. I went for one reason: it was closing that week and everything was 60-80% off. I was the only white dude in there. It felt good because it was like I was breaking Chris Rock’s rules.
Continue reading “The Pedagogy of Place: The Art of Coping”
Learning from Laughter: Whose son?
By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann
Sexuality is an invisible identity. We can walk around choosing not to be seen as lesbians in spaces we know would be unwelcoming. This comes with its own layers of grief and internalized homophobia. But we can hide it and we do.
Make Deadbeat Corporations Pay
From Melanie Cervantes, a native Californian creating visual art that is inspired by the people around her and her communities’ desire for radical change and social transformation.
Just One Request
From Osagyefo Sekou, Harvard educated theologian, community organizer and active participant in the community resistance in Ferguson, MO:
If I can just make one request. My request of you all in this room is that when this protest doesn’t look the way you are used to it looking, I ask you to look deeper: Yes it’s profane and it’s angry because we have betrayed our children. And so rather than beginning the sentence or conversation with “If they did it this way,” take seriously the way they are doing it. Take them seriously. Take their humanity seriously. I was born again on the streets of Ferguson. I got saved, as we would say in evangelical parlance, by some kids with gold teeth and tattoos and sagging pants, and so I’m asking you to look at their humanity. So when the media start that “They’re violent,” remind them that they’ve been nonviolent for the vast majority of their protest even after America betrayed them on every occasion. I ask that you keep track of their humanity…they are just trying to find their way trying to make sense of it all.
And my other request is that you put your body in the way. Now let’s be clear in this moment, your whiteness will not save you. They shot a white woman with a collar on. So they will shoot you, but you put your body in the way for them because these are your children too. When you feel like you’re losing your way and you don’t understand I want you to think about your baby, yours, lying in the street for four and a half hours. You’re looking at your baby, you can’t touch your baby just lying in the street. They got police dogs around your baby, keeping you from getting to your baby who you brought into the world, lying in the street, bleeding out. They won’t let paramedics get to your baby. And then you will understand why these folks are so angry and we should be celebrating that there isn’t a riot every 28 hours in America. These people called black have been so disciplined, and America betrays them, and they still refuse to shed her blood. We should be celebrating them. Lifting them up. The way you do that is, next time they shoot one down here you show up. You don’t say a word, you just show up because these are your children too. That is what I ask of you on the behalf of the people in Ferguson.
An Easy Essay
By Peter Maurin
The world would be better off
if people tried
to become better,
Continue reading “An Easy Essay”
Radical Discipleship 