The Real St. Valentine

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Cloud of Witnesses2 Comments

ValentineFrom Ken Sehested on his wonderfully illuminating Prayer & Politiks site. Subscribe to his weekly e-newsletter here.
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Every year, prior to Valentine’s Day (celebrated in a surprising number of countries), children in our church create homemade Valentine’s cards to send to inmates, observing St. Valentine’s Day as the occasion to remember those in prison. Here is a little background.

While the existence of St. Valentine is not in doubt—archeologists have unearthed a chapel built in his honor—reliable accounts of his life are scarce. Which is why, in 1969, the Vatican removed St. Valentine from its official list of feasts.
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Creatively Resisting A Fracked Up California

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CA ProtestExcerpts from a piece by Sarah Lazare of Commondreams.org, reporting from the big climate justice action in San Francisco this weekend:

More than 150 protesters on Friday blockaded the California State Office Building in downtown San Francisco and erected a 16-foot fracking well in the middle of an intersection to demand Governor Jerry Brown cease all drilling and fossil fuel extraction and respect climate justice (photo right from Steve Rhodes).

Campaigners—who hail from labor, indigenous, student, and community organizations—were awaiting arrest at the time of publication…
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A Betrayal of the Disappointed

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Dorothee SoelleFrom Dorothee Soelle in “Christofascism,” in The Window of Vulnerability: A Political Spirituality (1990):

At a mass meeting a thousand voices shouted: ‘I love Jesus’ and ‘I love America’ — it was impossible to distinguish the two. This kind of religion knows the cross only as a magical symbol of what he has done for us, not as the sign of the poor man who was tortured to death as a political criminal, like thousands today who stand up for his truth in El Salvador. This is a God without justice, a Jesus without a cross, an Easter without a cross — what remains is a metaphysical Easter Bunny in front of the beautiful blue light of the television screen, a betrayal of the disappointed, a miracle weapon in service of the mighty.

Putting your shoulder to the wheel of history

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Identity, Race1 Comment

quote“White people are taught that racism is a personal attribute, an attitude, maybe a set of habits. Anti-racist whites invest too much energy worrying about getting it right; about not slipping up and revealing their racial socialization; about saying the right things and knowing when to say nothing. It’s not about that. It’s about putting your shoulder to the wheel of history; about undermining the structural supports of a system of control that grinds us under, that keeps us divided even against ourselves and that extracts wealth, power and life from our communities like an oil company sucks it from the earth.”

– Ricardo Levins Morales

What Would Happen if Jesus Came to Your Home?

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ChedBy Ched Myers, Fifth Sunday in Epiphany (Mk 1:29-39)

Note: 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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In Mark 1:28, Jesus retreats to a home from his confrontation with the “Powers” occupying the synagogue, having created space for change. In Mark’s story, the home seems to be a safe site (5:38; 7:17, 24; 9:33; 10:10; 14:3), in contrast to the synagogue and Temple as places of conflict. Such “politics of space” no doubt reflected the experience of the earliest church—or of any social renewal movement’s relationship with established institutions of control. In this case, we should note that Jesus avails the hospitality of a peasant fisherman, setting the pattern that will continue throughout this story: Jesus abides with the marginalized.
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Agents of God’s Invasion

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Invasion-of-the-DeadSince 2007, Brian Blount has been the president and professor of New Testament at Union Presbyterian Seminary, Richmond, VA, and Charlotte, NC. Before that, Dr. Blount was the professor of New Testament Interpretation at Princeton Theological Seminary for 15 years. In this interview, we focus on his most recent publication Invasion of the Dead: Preaching Resurrection (2014).
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RD: What led you into researching and writing Invasion of the Dead?

BB: I initially wanted to write about our contemporary understanding and misunderstanding of apocalyptic literature. I was very interested in trying to help the church read apocalyptic literature in the context of the 21st century, particularly in light of the way contemporary popular culture was reading apocalyptic language and imagery. This concern developed because of my sense that popular culture had really taken a liking to material that the church had given up on, even though apocalyptic imagery is a part of Christianity’s birthright. The more I worked on it, the more I realized that there were many persons, like my former teacher, J. Christiaan Beker, already speaking to this issue. What they were not speaking to more specifically was the language of resurrection, which is consummate apocalyptic language. As I focused more and more, my interest went more and more to reading resurrection as an apocalyptic theological reality.
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Prayer

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ripple_effectby tommy airey

Prayer from the heart can achieve what nothing else can in the world.
Gandhi

We do not want to be beginners [at prayer], but let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything but beginners, all our life!
Merton
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Prayer is a pilgrimage into the deepest recesses of our being. It is being attentive to God’s active presence both with us and within us. The 15th century Indian contemplative Kabir wrote that “God is the breath inside the breath.” The Apostle Paul quoted the philosopher Epimenides as he sermonized the Athenians: “For in him we live and move and have our being.” God is that energy and power and inspiration that we draw upon to live and thrive. Continue reading “Prayer” →

The Lessons of Groundhog’s Day

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joyceBy Joyce Hollyday. First published on her blog http://seekingcommunity.ca in 2012.

Tuning in to life’s rhythms

A Sunday school teacher was asking her young class about Easter. A 5-year-old boy piped up, “That’s when Jesus comes out of his tomb, and if he sees his shadow, we have six more weeks of winter.”

This story may not be funny or make any sense to you, because I don’t know if you have this bizarre holiday in Canada; but yesterday in the U.S. of A., we observed Groundhog’s Day. And by “observed,” I mean we totally ignored it except to ask at the end of the day, “Anybody know what Punxsutawney Phil saw today?”
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The E-Dictionary

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ethelbert millerFrom literary activist E. Ethelbert Miller, the board chairperson of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a board member of The Writer’s Center and editor of Poet Lore magazine (a recommendation of Rose Berger):

It’s my belief that in order to usher in a better society a new language and vocabulary will need to be created. I’ve slowly started developing my own personal new dictionary. This creation I feel will help add clarify to my understanding of the things taking place around me. Many of the words and terms I’ve coined or have “borrowed” from others can be linked to our technology changing how we live. In my essays and public conversations I try to use these words as often as possible. So far I have 14 entries in my dictionary. Here they are.
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The Movement For God’s Beloved Community

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greensboro1Today, we honor those nonviolent freedom fighters who sparked the sit-in movement at lunch counters exactly 55 years ago. It is also the 50th anniversary of the first mass arrests in Selma–Dr. King and more than a thousand demonstrators, including more than 500 children were jailed on February 1, 1965 (many these same children prayed for Sheriff Clark’s speedy recovery from exhaustion outside a hospital days later). Lastly, we celebrate the 60th birthday of Ched Myers, a man who has committed his life to the legacy of Jesus & Martin Luther King. This is an excerpt from an article he published 10 years ago in Transmission (U.K) titled “Was Jesus a Practitioner of Nonviolence? Reading through Mark 1:21-3:19 and Martin Luther King”, an appropriate piece of vision-casting for all of us who dare to resist like it’s 1960 Greensboro & 1965 Selma:

At the end of their lives, Jesus and King were each hemmed in by all the factions of their respective political terrains. They had to navigate death threats from without, dissent from within their own movements, and had as colleagues only a relatively tiny group of feckless companions. But that is how it always is struggling for the Kingdom of God in a world held hostage by tyrants, terrorists, militarists, and kingpins, unaided by ambivalent religious leaders and insular academics and utterly distracted young folks. Despite all this, however, both Jesus and King chose nonviolent love without compromising their insistence upon justice. They believed that the movement for God’s Beloved Community was worth giving their lives to—and they invite us to do the same.