Learning from Laughter and the Trees: Sometimes I Feel like it’s the End of the World

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation2 Comments

By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann

Sometimes the most miraculous moments of parenting happen in those late night hours when you wish your kids were asleep, but you are snuggled up beside them and they begin to speak.

A few months ago, as the leaves were just beginning to fall, I was lying with Isaac rubbing his back. The lights were off, but the moonlight was streaming through his window. Isaac is now ten years old. I don’t know if you remember fifth grade social studies, but this is the year when the curriculum teaches about “the founding of America.” And Isaac has been struggling. He is learning it in a very different context from our beloved Detroit to our new home in the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania.

We had been quiet for quite some time and I wondered if he had fallen asleep, when suddenly he said, “I miss Detroit.”

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Until Freedom Reigns for All

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire2 Comments

The Council of Bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church calls for the immediate withdrawal of all financial support from the US government to Israel.

Today as we celebrate the birth of Richard Allen, the apostle of freedom, Israel has trapped 1.6 million desperate Palestinians in the southern Gaza city called Rafah. Most of them are women and children. They have denied them access to food, water, shelter, and health care. After this torture, they plan to murder them. The United States of America will have likely paid for the weapons they use. This must not be allowed to happen.

The Council of Bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church calls on the United States Government to immediately withdraw all funding and other support from Israel. Since 1954, Israel has shown a willful disregard for the human dignity of Palestinians. Since October 7, 2023, in retaliation for the brutal murder of 1139 Israeli citizens by Hamas, Israel has murdered over 28,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children. The United States is supporting this mass genocide. This must not be allowed to continue.

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Having Nothing and Yet Possessing Everything

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It’s Ash Wednesday. A day for personal recommitment to collective liberation. A day marked by scrutiny, accountability, confession. A day to rediscover our identity and worth in the well-being of others. A day to remind ourselves of our baptism into the struggle for Something Else, from the ghetto to the Gaza Strip. A day to double-down on rebuilding what supremacy has burned down. A day to start giving up what weighs us down and holds us back. A day to embrace the beautiful, ancient tension of what the sacred text says in 2 Corinthians 6:4-10:

…but as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.

Christians for a Free Palestine

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Join Christians across the United States for a mass call this Thursday, February 15th, from 8-9:30pm EST (5-6:30pm PST) to learn about our plan for direct action against the US-funded genocide in Palestine, and the manipulation of Christianity by Christian Zionists.

Our goal is to get 1000 Christians on this call! Sign up today. Register HERE.

We will gather together for a time of lamentation, learning, prayer, and action. We’ll hear from powerful speakers including Palestinian and American Christians, a representative from the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinic Council, and leaders of Christians for a Free Palestine.

Together, they’ll speak to the crisis in Gaza and the West Bank, and call for Christians across the U.S. to join the worldwide interfaith movement that is taking public, nonviolent action to stop the genocide and speak out against Christian Zionism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia.

We’ll share specific and concrete ways that you and your community can take public action for a free Palestine, and we’ll announce future trainings and mass organizing calls.

Hope is a Deeper Current

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From Ken Sehested’s newsletter Prayer & Politiks (Jan 30, 2024).

My friend Richard sent me strong words of encouragement regarding something I’d written, particularly this line: “”Despair is often a disguised form of narcissism. Get over yourself.” He then recounted a recent conversation, saying “I told a friend the other day: “When I think about 2024, I am not as hopeful as you are. But I wish I were. Does that count?”

It is a pertinent question requiring a thoughtful response. I responded:

Thanks for your words of encouragement. I certainly resonate with the sentiment you spoke to your friend; though I would use the word “optimistic” instead of hopeful. When it comes to public policy, I am as pessimistic as I’ve ever been.

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Three Dominating, Antidemocratic Dogmas

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An excerpt from Cornel West’s Democracy Matters (2013).

The problems plaguing our democracy are not only ones of disaffection and disillusionment. The greatest threats come in the form of the rise of three dominating, antidemocratic dogmas. These three dogmas, promoted by the most powerful forces in our world, are rendering American democracy vacuous. The first dogma of free-market fundamentalism posits the unregulated and unfettered market as idol and fetish. This glorification of the market has led to a callous corporate-dominated political economy in which business leaders (their wealth and power) are to be worshipped—even despite the recent scandals—and the most powerful corporations are delegated magical powers of salvation rather than relegated to democratic scrutiny concerning both the ethics of their business practices and their treatment of workers. This largely unexamined and unquestioned dogma that supports the policies of both Democrats and Republicans in the United States—and those of most political parties in other parts of the world—is a major threat to the quality of democratic life and the well-being of most peoples across the globe. It yields an obscene level of wealth inequality, along with its corollary of intensified class hostility and hatred. It also redefines the terms of what we should be striving for in life, glamorizing materialistic gain, narcissistic pleasure, and the pursuit of narrow individualistic preoccupations—especially for young people here and abroad.

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The Liberation of All Oppressed Peoples

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Feminist/Womanist/Queer Liberation and Theology, Race, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

We’ll tip-off Black History Month with this excerpt from the Combahee River Collective Statement (1977). The Combahee River Collective was a group of Black feminists who met consistently for three years to define and clarify their politics while they worked in coalition with other progressive organizations and movements

We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation. We have arrived at the necessity for developing an understanding of class relationships that takes into account the specific class position of Black women who are generally marginal in the labor force, while at this particular time some of us are temporarily viewed as doubly desirable tokens at white-collar and professional levels. We need to articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives. Although we are in essential agreement with Marx’s theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women.

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The Exodus Story of Genocidal Resistance

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By Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler (above), Director and Chief Visionary, Faith Strategies, originally posted on the Faith Strategies weekly newsletter email (Jan 27, 2024)

One of the problems with telling and understanding biblical stories is that we take what is allegorical, symbolic, and/or critiquing of the human condition and seek to make it literal, factual and fixed in time. We have lost the art of story-telling, and in that we have lost the ability to see and understand what sage story-tellers of old were trying to communicate both then and now.

In the Exodus (1:15–1:21) story, Pharaoh reacts to the proliferation of the children of the oppressed and enslaved with a policy to kill all new born male children. This implies that the oppressed and enslaved female babies of the women were to be spared and used to procreate Egyptian children. Puah and Shiphrah, who are midwives are given orders by Pharaoh that while attending to enslaved and oppressed woman in labor, if it is a male child to kill him, and if a female baby to let her live. But in classic story-telling that speaks to the art of resistance, when Pharaoh realizes that just as many male children were being born as before, he summoned the midwives to make account. They stated to Pharaoh “You don’t know these women or their strength. When we are summoned, by the time we get there, they have already given birth!” These midwives were in defiance to the genocidal orders given by the king.

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