By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann (printed in Conspire, Fall 2014)
It was unseasonably warm as I carefully stepped onto the next wrung balancing the extra weight and size. My body called me into those trees as I deliberately and gently trimmed the small, sucker branches. First the apple tree, then the peach, then the plum. Being past my due date, I knew I probably shouldn’t be on a ladder, but I kept climbing higher and higher. Continue reading “Birth: The conspiracy of Soul and Body”
…moving forward on the journey of being organized agents for transformation…from the inside out.
Warren Cooper (photo right)
During a wonderfully painful & hopeful confluence of the #BlackLivesMatter and #ICantBreathe spotlights on systemic racism and the release of the film Selma, Philadelphia joined many other US cities in the effort to reclaim the MLK holiday as a day of disrupting the status quo. Our church, Circle of Hope, has been making some concerted efforts this month to be shaped deeper by the legacy of Dr. King as well as open our sails wide to the winds of the Spirit.
Continue reading “Sacred Jazz As Spiritual Midwifery by Joshua Grace”
From Grace Lee Boggs in The Next American Revolution (2012):
Radical social change had to be viewed as a two-sided transformational process, of ourselves and of our institutions, a process requiring protracted struggle and not just a D-Day replacement of one set of rulers with another. The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56 was the first struggle by an oppressed people in Western society from this new philosophical/political perspective…not only desegregating the buses but creating the beloved community.
“Our strategy should be not only to confront the empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness- and our ability to tell our stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling- their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
Arundhati Roy
…this book is about how parents can create lasting and meaningful bulwarks between their kids and the violence endemic in our culture. It posits discipline without spanks or slaps or threats of violence, while considering how to raise thoughtful, compassionate, fearless young people committed to social and political change — without scaring, hectoring or scarring them with all the wrongs in the world.
This week we got a chance to talk with Frida Berrigan, author of It Runs in the Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood. Continue reading “It Runs in the Family”
By Ched Myers, Third Sunday in Epiphany (Mk 1:14-20)
This is an ongoing occasional series of Ched’s brief comments on the Markan gospel readings from the Revised Common Lectionary during year B.
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The Sea of Galilee is the ecological and social setting of the first half of the gospel of Mark. A large freshwater lake about seven miles wide and 13 miles long, its shore is dotted with villages connected with the local fishing industry, the most prosperous segment of Galilee’s economy. The lake (also called Sea of Genneseret, Lake Kinneret or Lake Tiberius) is fed by the Jordan River, which flows in from the north and out to the south. Some 209 meters below sea level, it is the lowest freshwater lake on Earth. Due to this low-lying position in a rift valley, the sea is prone to sudden violent storms, as attested in the gospel stories.
Continue reading ““Let’s Catch Some Big Fish!” Jesus’ Call to Discipleship in a World of Injustice”
By. Dr. Jim Perkinson, Keynote at the Islamic House of Wisdom (Detroit, MI, 1-18-15)a
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One of those shot in the Charlie Hebdo incident in Paris on Jan. 7 was a Muslim policeman named Ahmed Marabet killed while trying to defend that newspaper’s staff. The next day, Dyab Abou Jahjah, a Belgian news columnist and Muslim, responded to all the “I am Charlie” signs appearing in the Paris streets with a tweet saying: “I am not Charlie, I am Ahmed the dead cop. Charlie ridiculed my faith and culture and I died defending his right to do so.
Continue reading “Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, and Martin Were Movement Men: The Demand Before Us Today”
To read more about the work of Witness Against Torture, read Fighting racism and torture from Ferguson to Guantanamo
Cornel West on the four persistent American catastrophes that Martin Luther King identified at the end of his life:
Militarism is an imperial catastrophe that has produced a military-industrial complex and national security state and warped the country’s priorities and stature (as with the immoral drones, dropping bombs on innocent civilians). Materialism is a spiritual catastrophe, promoted by a corporate media multiplex and a culture industry that have hardened the hearts of hard-core consumers and coarsened the consciences of would-be citizens. Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.
Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. Arbitrary uses of the law — in the name of the “war” on drugs — have produced, in the legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s apt phrase, a new Jim Crow of mass incarceration. And poverty is an economic catastrophe, inseparable from the power of greedy oligarchs and avaricious plutocrats indifferent to the misery of poor children, elderly citizens and working people.
From Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (January 11, 1907 – December 23, 1972):
The whole future of America depends on the impact and influence of Dr. King.
Radical Discipleship 