What are you carrying this Advent season? What is it that you are pregnant with that is growing in you waiting to be birthed?
Witnessing to the Darkness
Reflection given by Lydia Wylie-Kellermann at the Air National Guard Base in Battle Creek, MI where they have begun operating drones.
Luke 1:41-47
I am really grateful to be here today. I grew up spending Mondays in Advent at Williams International. So, this feels like just the right place to be.
These days, I find myself turning to Mary as a mother. She raised an incredible son. Continue reading “Witnessing to the Darkness”
9 Advent Practices For Radical Disciples
by tommy airey
The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.
Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (1978)
Radical discipleship in North America entails much. A life devoted to spirituality, social analysis, simple living & suffering service can overwhelm us, leaving us with the same symptoms of the systems we are struggling against: addiction, alienation and anxiety. This final week of Advent season creates intentional space & time for us to reconsider and repent, alerting us to times we find ourselves sleepwalking an imperial trance. Here are 9 commitments that we can hold up to the light through Epiphany.
——————- Continue reading “9 Advent Practices For Radical Disciples”
When Advent Meets the Academy
By Kim Redigan
One of the principal truths of Christianity,
a truth that goes almost unrecognized today, is that looking is what saves us.
– Simone Weil, Waiting for God
“Be watchful! Be alert!” The words smack like a Zen stick as the stern command is issued to shake off the bittersweet beauty of autumn and awaken to the sober season of Advent.
Advent. The place on the liturgical calendar where I could most easily park my bones, the time of the church year when I feel most at home. Continue reading “When Advent Meets the Academy”
A Feature of the Unjust System
Art as Resistance from Molly Crabapple:
In America, the justice system is anything but just. Courts are conduits for the caging of (mostly black or brown) humans. The police feed people into the courts, and if they sometimes kill those they are arresting it’s regarded as a cost barely worth mentioning. And though they kill a lot of people—in Utah, police shootings are the second most common type of homicide—they are rarely punished. From the fellow officers who write reports and testify on the behalf of killers to the prosecutors who seem determined to let murderers get away, the very system that claims to monitor the police protects them. Police kill. They get away with it. They kill again. Eventually, you realize that this process is not a bug in the system, it’s a feature.
To Fight At Their Side
From Paulo Freire in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968):
[T]he more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.
Church women in El Salvador PRESENTE
“Am I willing to suffer with the people here, the suffering of the powerless, the feeling impotent?
Can I say to my neighbors I have no solutions to this situation; I don’t know the answers, but I will
walk with you, search with you, be with you. Can I let myself be evangelized by this opportunity?
Can I look at and accept my own poorness as I learn it from the poor ones?”
Friday Advent Conversation
As we approach the Joy candle, how can we be and what does it mean to be joyful in the midst of a very dark world?
Mary, did you worry?
By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann
I wrote this poem two years ago when I was pregnant with Isaac. These days in the wake of events in Ferguson, I still hold onto these worries and hopes of what it means to raise a white man today.
Mary, did you worry your son would grow up
to idealize the military and violence around him?
What did you sing in his ear?
What toys did you give him?
That taught him to put away the sword
and to give his life before shedding the blood of another. Continue reading “Mary, did you worry?”
Help Wanted: White Allies
By Tommy Airey
…large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.
Martin Luther King
**This post was updated, edited and reposted on December 11 at 12:45pmEST.
Last week, an old friend checked in on me. He’s a kind-hearted, hard-working and sincere follower of Jesus. He sent me a series of texts in light of the Ferguson decision and in response to what I have written about it. Here’s a sample:
I don’t think the thought ever crossed my mind that the life of a person of color was somehow worth less than that of a white person. I doubt very much that is the mindset of many police or judges either. Hard to believe the kid from Ferguson was killed because of that mindset given the facts in that case. Would be interesting to research the number of black people killed by white people vs. black people killed by black people. God dislikes all taking of life from the womb to the point of natural death. #Alllivesmatter
Radical Discipleship 