From Chinua Achebe in The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays:
We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own. The Igbo, always practical, put it concretely in their proverb Onye ji onye n’ani ji onwe ya: “He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down.”
The dead are never gone,
they are in the breast of a woman,
they are in the crying child,
in the flaming firebrand.
The dead are not in earth:
they are in the dying fire,
the weeping grasses,
whimpering rocks,
they are in the forest,
they are in the house,the dead are not dead.
-Birago Diop
Tell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who you are.
Ortega Y Gasset
From Matthew W. Humphrey of the Little Campbell River Watershed (right), working to integrate the life of faith with the practices of caring for creation. Since earning an MATS from Regent College in Vancouver, Humphrey has worked with A Rocha Canada, a Christian environmental stewardship organization (www.arocha.ca), as both an educator and practitioner. Alongside overseeing various experiments in sustainable agriculture, Humphrey teaches in churches, colleges, and community settings. In his free time, he enjoys reading, listening to bluegrass, tending his flocks, and spending time outside with his wife, Roxy, and two children, Abigail and Elijah. This is an excerpt from a longer piece that appeared in The Other Journal, which we encourage readers to read in its entirety.
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Continue reading “Reinhabiting Place: The Work of Bioregional Discipleship”
By Joyce Hollyday
In mid-September of 1998, my dear friend Jeanie Wylie-Kellermann learned that she had an aggressive brain cancer and a medical prediction of less than six months to live. The news was devastating to her two young daughters. Six weeks later, on October 25th, 8-year-old Lucy grabbed an onion out of the pantry, placed it on the dining room table, and announced, “Today is Onion Day.” She answered the quizzical looks of her family with, “Well, with all this dying going on, we have to have something to laugh about.” Continue reading “Onion Day”
Joshua Grace is an ENFJ on the MBTI, hits cleanup for the Kensington Royals, is a longtime member of the Psalters, pastors at Circle of Hope in Philadelphia, is married a brilliant woman who turned out to be quite the social entrepreneur. They have two daughters, now in middle school. Joshua spends his free time blogging and other creative endeavors to stop wars, watershed keeping, affordable housing, land use, immigration, and ending handgun violence. You can access his blog Ghostride The Whip here.
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I’m not totally sure how I got on an Ezekiel kick, but I’m on one. While talking to a couple of cool pastors the other day at the Urban Anabaptist Ministry Symposium in Philadelphia we got on the topic. They told me that they stick to Ezekiel’s “greatest hit” – the Valley of Dry Bones. The other week I dipped into this prophet while going through the story about the destruction of the cities Sodom & Gomorrah. God, through Ezekiel, explains the sin of Sodom was that “She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.” If there ever was an Old Testament prophet with a one-hit wonder for pastors – it’s Ezekiel with Valley of the Dry Bones and its “B-side” about Sodom.
The prophet Ezekiel
Continue reading “When God Said Poop: Prophetic Theater & Suffering Through Our Collective Sins”
From Lydia Wylie-Kellermann 
Word and World was birthed three hundred feet away from my freshman high school classes. I have been lovingly molded by this thing as I began to imagine my own vocation in activism and faith. I came to my first school (Philly) when I was seventeen years old. In Minneapolis, the community wrapped my mom in a quilt in her dying months when I was nineteen. The mentoring program called me deeper into relationship with mentors and mothers so deeply needed inspiring and allowing for a love of writing. From marriage to giving birth, anti-war activism in Baltimore to local economies in Detroit, Word and World has been home, church, school, community, and family. My heart aches with gratitude. Continue reading “A Love Letter to Word and World”
The following is Sarah Thompson’s reflection on the Carnival de Resistance, an art intervention and communal lifestyle experiment that set up residencies first in Harrisonburg, Va and Charlottesville, Va in the fall of 2013 then in the Wildgoose Festival in the summer of 2014. Sarah Thompson is the Executive Director of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, an organization that is partnering with nonviolent movements around the world, seeking to embody an inclusive, ecumenical and diverse community of God’s love.
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As a theologian and scholar-activist, I loved sharing circus theology and inviting the curious and the apathetic, the annoyed and the skeptic, into our whirling-twirling experiment of life together under the shelter of God’s big tent. Continue reading “Reflection on Carnival de Resistance by Sarah Thompson”
From Jonathan Safran-Foer’s Eating Animals (2010):
A good number of people seem to be tempted to continue supporting factory farms while also buying meat outside that system when it is available. That’s nice. But if it is as far as our moral imaginations can stretch, then it’s hard to be optimistic about the future. Any plan that involves funneling money to the factory farm won’t end factory farming. How effective would the Montgomery bus boycott have been if the protestors had used the bus when it became inconvenient not to? How effective would a strike be if workers announced they would go back to work as soon as it became difficult to strike? If anyone finds in this book encouragement to buy some meat from alternative sources while buying factory farm meat as well, they have found something that isn’t there.
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We know, at least, that this decision will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve public health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in world history. What we don’t know, though, may be just as important. How would making such a decision change us?
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What kind of world would be create if three times a day we activated our compassion and reason as we sat down to eat, if we had the moral imagination and the pragmatic will to change our most fundamental act of consumption.
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Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can. One of the greatest opportunities to live our values—or betray them—lies in the food we put on our plates. And we will live or betray our values not only as individuals, but as nations.
by Pablo Neruda
Onion,
luminous flask,
your beauty formed
petal by petal,
crystal scales expanded you
and in the secrecy of the dark earth
your belly grew round with dew. Continue reading “Ode to the Onion”
Todd Wynward writes, farms, teaches and leads wilderness trips in northern NM. He is an animating force behind TiLT, an intentional discipleship co-housing community in the Rio Grande Watershed. His new book, Rewilding the Way, is to be published by Herald Press in 2015.
This is the 5th post in an 8-part series every Friday, covering unique experiments in Watershed Discipleship.
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We are making choices that will affect whether beings
thousands of generations from now
will be able to be born sound of mind and body.
Joanna Macy
To what extent can we thrive within the bounty—and the boundaries—of our bioregions? If we are to survive much longer as a species, many of us addicted to unbounded affluenza need to make this question central to our lives. As David Orr writes:
It makes far better sense to reshape ourselves to fit a finite planet than to attempt to reshape the planet to our infinite wants.
How can we—habituated to global gluttony—begin to reshape ourselves, as Orr suggests? Let me suggest a practical challenge that might be contagious: The 25/75/100 Bioregional Food Covenant [bioregionalfoodcovenant.org]. What’s daunting about this is that I’ve never done it before. What’s inspiring about this is that millions of people across the globe are already doing it, whether they’re conscious of it or not. To join, an individual would make this pledge: “By the year 2025, I will source 75% of my food from within 100 miles.”
Continue reading “Watershed Discipleship: Toward A Bioregional Food Covenant”
Radical Discipleship 