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.
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.
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.
By Peter Maurin
The world would be better off
if people tried
to become better,
Continue reading “An Easy Essay”
From Jill Shook, who is teaching an innovative course this summer on housing–through the lens of biblical Jubilee:
Ever since the Great Recession, low income people in record numbers have been deprived of their assets and displaced from their homes—from land meant to be used in a way so that all can have access to decent shelter. This is a form of systemic violence that violates the principles of Jubilee justice found throughout the Bible, from Leviticus to the Book of Acts. As Christians, we are called to take action to assist not only the refugees from war and violence but also those displaced in gentrified cities, where rents are soaring.
Continue reading “Housing Justice”
By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann. Originally printed in On the Edge.
I am sorry. I am sorry for speaking too quickly. For saying the wrong thing. Or not saying anything. For speaking unaware out of my own white supremacy.
I am sorry for not learning the history. For the large blind spots I carry. For all the people and creatures hurt along my way.
Continue reading “Repenting White Supremacy”
From Ken Sehested of Prayer & Politiks:
Yom HaShoah (aka “Holocaust Remembrance Day,” more formally “Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day”) is observed one week after the end of Passover, this year beginning at sundown on Wednesday 15 April, the date linked to the anniversary of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Increasingly, the word Shoah (“calamity”) is preferred because holocaust has historical roots in the Hebrew word olah, meaning “completely burnt offering to God,” with the implication that Jews and other “undesirables” murdered by the Nazis during World War II were a sacrifice to God…
Sehested included this powerful quote from Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jew, Hillesum who died at age 29 in Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp, in 1943:
I have looked our destruction, our miserable end, straight in the eye and accepted it into my life, and my love of life has not been diminished. I am not bitter or rebellious, or in any way discouraged. . . . My life has been extended by death, by accepting destruction as part of life and no longer wasting my energies on fear of death or refusal to acknowledge its inevitability. It sounds paradoxical: by excluding death from our life we cannot live a full life, and by admitting death into our life we enlarge and enrich it.
From artist Seth Tobocman:
By Ched Myers
Note: This is an ongoing series of Ched’s brief comments on the Markan gospel readings from the Revised Common Lectionary during year B, 2015.
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I wish to offer another brief midrash on Mark’s spare but evocative Easter narrative, highlighting a central aspect that is routinely overlooked.
Let’s begin with the body. According to Mark, after Jesus’ execution, his body was granted by the Roman procurator Pilate to Joseph, a member of the Judean council that had condemned Jesus. As described in 15:43-46, this has all the hallmarks of a political move aimed at prohibiting those in Jesus’ community from executing their duties according to Purity and custom, thus further cutting off the new movement and preventing occasion for more protest during the volatile season of Passover. [1]
Continue reading “The Women’s Witness: An Eastertide Reflection”
