The prose and poetry have been pouring out of the Ventura River Watershed over the past two weeks since the conclusion of the Festival of Radical Discipleship. This is from Ted Lewis, a restorative justice practitioner in Duluth, MN.
Self-Portrait
Robert Two Bulls is the RadicalDiscipleship.Net artist of the month. “Self-Portrait” (below) is a piece that Two Bulls utilizes to creatively confront stereotypes. He explained this piece five years ago, “I chose the war bonnet and red blanket images in profile because it’s a well-worn, universal image … an image used famously by Hollywood,” said Two Bulls. Although such images date back more than a century, they persist in contemporary culture “as images most folks will now conjure up when thinking of what an American Indian looks like.”
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30 Years Later: William Stringfellow
From William Stringfellow (April 26, 1928 – March 2, 1985), lawyer for the least of these and writer for the rest of us:
I believed then, as I do now, that I am called in the Word of God–as is everyone else–to the vocation of being human, nothing more and nothing less. I confessed then, as I do now, that to be a Christian means to be called to be an exemplary human being. And, to be a Christian categorically does not mean being religious. Indeed, all religious versions of the Gospel are profanities. Within the scope of the calling to be merely, but truly, human, any work, including that of any profession, can be rendered a sacrament of that vocation.
Is it True?
Written by Osama Abu Kabir, prisoner in Guantanamo,
Published in Poems from Guantanamo:The Detainees Speak (2007) compiled by Marc Falkoff.
Is it true that the grass grows again after rain?
Is it true that the flowers will rise up in the Spring?
Is it true that birds will migrate home again?
Is it true that salmon swim back up the stream?
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Godly Play
From artist Katherine Parent of the Redeemer Center for Life:
These are collaborative icons made by my coworker Helen Collins and I with Sunday School children at Redeemer Lutheran Church in North Minneapolis. We are using the Godly Play method of Sunday school, which involves storytelling and responding to stories through art as sacred practices. Our creative, lively multiracial church is housed in a hundred-year-old building full of stained-glass images of a blond white Jesus–but we as a congregation have many more ways of seeing our savior. Continue reading “Godly Play”
What is Radical Discipleship?
By Ched Myers, excerpted from “What Is Radical Discipleship? An Introduction to the Bartimaeus Kinsler Institute,” Ventura River Watershed, Feb 16, 2015
Radical Discipleship is NOT a dope slogan, or a mobilizing soundbyte, or a hip brand, or an ironic twitter handle. Hell, these terms aren’t even cool anymore. “Radical” is a term as unfashionable today as it was trendy in the 1960s. The notion of “discipleship,” meanwhile, is entirely shrugged off in liberal church circles, and trivialized in conservative ones. So let me explain why this is the handle of this Festival, why we insist on using the phrase. The etymology of the term radical (for the Latin radix, “root”) is the best reason not to concede it to nostalgia. If we want to get to the root of anything we must be radical. No wonder the word has been demonized by our masters and co-opted by marketing hucksters, and no wonder no one in conventional politics would dare to use the word favorably, much less track any problem to its root. Continue reading “What is Radical Discipleship?”
Cannibals
By Tommy Airey
…you who hate the good and love the evil,
who tear the skin off my people,
and the flesh off their bones;
who eat the flesh of my people,
flay their skin off them,
break their bones in pieces,
and chop them up like meat in a kettle,
like flesh in a cauldron…
Micah 3:2-3
*This is the third installment in a series of seven pieces on Micah posted every Wednesday during Lent.
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Surely, Micah wasn’t winning any popularity contests by openly comparing political and religious leaders to Jeffrey Dahmer. The prophet homed in on two socio-economic atrocities. First, the decisions that social, corporate, political and religious elites make have a direct effect on the livelihood of everyday people. Masses of people are trying to survive slave conditions. Many live and work in toxic and hazardous environments. Those who can do something about this almost always don’t.
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Love Story to Narnia
By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann (First published at http://www.dlmayfield.wordpress.com)
Frustrated he said, “Well what would you do if you were trying to convert someone?” He had been following my mom around campus for months trying to convert her to be a Crusader for Christ by following the 5 spiritual laws of conversation. Without needing a minute to think about it, she said “I would ask them to read the Chronicles of Narnia and then invite them to talk about it.” Continue reading “Love Story to Narnia”
The 38 Tears of Bishop Whipple
Seven or eight years ago when I lived and served in the Diocese of Los Angeles, I began teaching a class on Art and Spirituality and the marketing of Native American Indian Art. From these two experiences, coupled with my own art-making, I found that individual minds are opened by art. Art can transform the individual. When Native artists create art that is not necessarily tribally themed, non-Native viewers often voice surprise. Continue reading “The 38 Tears of Bishop Whipple”
The Festival of Radical Discipleship
Radical Discipleship is about nothing more and nothing less than laying bare the roots of the personal and socio-political pathologies of our imperial society and its dead-end history, even as we seek to recover the roots of our deep biblical tradition. And what tradition is that? It is the messianic movement of rebellion and restoration, of repentance and renewal, a “Way out of no way” that has been going on since the dawn of resistance to the dusk of empire.
Ched Myers, Opening Ceremony of The Festival of Radical Discipleship, Feb 16, 2015
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Last week, Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries hosted their first ever Festival of Radical Discipleship in the Ventura River Watershed of Southern California. The 60th birthday of Ched Myers, one of the godparents of the Radical Discipleship Movement, provided an ample excuse for 170 of us to get together for inspiration, prayer, strategy, celebration and mayhem. Myers asked, “How might our Movement be more healthy and sustainable if we celebrated each other more often?”
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Radical Discipleship 