A Compelling Line-Up for the 1st Half of 2024

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

Do you know about Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center?

With a long, storied activist history (Dan and Phillip Berrigan had a favorite room and frequently led retreats and organized actions there) and an 80-year history of supporting LGBTQI Christians, it’s the kind of place radical disciples should know about. We have a number of retreats coming up that your communities might be interested in attending:

Birthing and Earthing Love: A Lenten Journey with the Gospel of John with Sue Ferguson Johnson & Wes Howard-Brook
Tuesday, February 20 – Thursday, February 22
In this Lenten retreat rooted in the gospel of John, we’ll hear the gospel call to be born anew as “inspired earth” with our identities rooted in God rather than…something else. Join us as we remember what it means when “Love becomes flesh.”

Òrìshà: The Gift of Failure, the Promise of the Monstrous with Báyò Akómoláfé

Friday, March 8 – Sunday, March 10

Drawing on Yoruba indigenous insights, Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé imagines emancipation through the topography of failure. By treating failure, disability, and the destabilizing syncopations visited upon white stability as a form of generative incapacitation, Dr. Akómoláfé invites us to convene at the sites of our greatest vulnerabilities – for it is there that we might take on new shapes. 

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A Healthy Relationship With Anger

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

By Lindsay Lamont-Airey, LMFT (above), some initial musings on how people malformed by white culture can start to get free from our repressive relationship with anger (reflecting on a series of slides below, posted by Rev. Dante Stewart on IG)

Whiteness trains us to be emotionally controlled and repressed. Not whole and free. Do not let the spiritual bypassers shame you for anger at injustice. They are legion, and they dominate the spiritual/cultural/therapeutic waters. It is a reflection of a white western therapeutic culture that has focused far more on what to do with anxiety (the response one has to violation and threats to safety) than on what to do with abuse of power (what causes violation and threat to safety in the first place).

As a trained therapist, I can tell you: anger is a primary adaptable response to active violation – of the self, and also when witnessing violation being actively committed against others. If you struggle to feel, express and metabolize it freely, and in a way that assists you in acting meaningfully in response to violation (I.e.. holding violators accountable vs. shrinking, collapsing, staying silent), then please know you are not alone. It takes a lot of healing and liberating work to get free from the forces of domination that have shaped us, early and often, in the belly of this beast of U.S. empire.

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The Test is What You do in the Moment Right Now

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

In early November 2023, author Ta-Nehisi Coates came on Democracy Now to talk about the mass murder of Palestinian civilians in Gaza – and to share his own experiences in the Occupied Territories earlier that year. He was asked to comment on remarks made by White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre who compared pro-Palestinian protesters to the white supremacists who took part in the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA in 2017. This is how Coates responded.

I’m sure she’s a very, you know, nice person and a very, very kind person. But, you see, all of us stand on the shoulders of Martin Luther King. All of us stand on the shoulders of the nonviolent struggle. And on King’s birthday, the White House, like it’s done for years, stands up, and, you know, it praises Dr. King, and it talks about Dr. King as our modern-day prophet. I don’t know how these people do that and sleep at night. I don’t know how you compare people who are trying to stop a war, who are very much in the tradition of nonviolence, who are trying to stop bombs being dropped, literally, on refugee camps, to neo-Nazi protesters. It’s disgraceful, to use her own words. It’s disgraceful. It’s reprehensible. It is offensive, as far as I am concerned, to the shoulders on those whom we stand right now. I just — I don’t understand it.

I would extend this further. I mean, I think hearing President Biden himself — and here I will personalize it — downplay the number of Palestinian deaths, to say that he doesn’t believe the Palestinians, I just — when his own State Department was citing those figures only months ago, you know? At some point, you know, there’s that saying: When people show you who they are, you have to believe them. And so, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to do the political calculus on this. And I think at a certain point we have to just stop and say, “They believe it.” They believe it. They believe bombs should be dropped on children. They just think it’s OK. They think it’s OK, or at the very least they think it’s the price of doing business.

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Humility and Dignity: White People Unlearning White Supremacy

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Subverting Empire1 Comment

Another compelling offering from Kirkridge Retreat Center.

Are shame, fear, and anxiety limiting your participation in efforts to dismantle white supremacy as a white person? Do you feel insecure in your relationships with Black, Indigenous, and People of Color and unsure how to show up well in BIPOC-led movements? Do you sometimes find yourself stumbling over your words or remaining quiet when you feel called to speak up about racism? You are not alone! Join other like-minded white people who long for an end to white supremacy as we practice showing up with both humility and dignity. We’ll explore embodied practices, ancestral lineage healing, and spiritual tools that will help you work effectively in a multiracial coalition toward a world of equitable, collective flourishing.

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More Than Just a Holiday

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Cloud of Witnesses, Subverting Empire, Theological Animation2 Comments

On this site, we are committed to celebrating the life and teaching of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 366 days a year. King represents what a radical, biblical Christian witness looks like in the context of empire. Dr. King broke rank with bogus Christianity. But he did not cast off the bible. He composted it. Dr. King knew secrets because he was inextricably tied to the long tradition of a biblical Black folk religion rooted in the spirit of the land, in the liberation struggle and in a love supreme. King was bound to a faith in Jesus that, in the words of Howard Thurman, redeemed a religion that white Christians profaned in their midst.

From the time they arrived on Turtle Island, enslaved Africans creatively counter-quoted the scriptures to call out white male preachers quoting the bible to support their destructive hierarchy of value. They transformed the sacred text into a liberation manifesto scripting hope in the midst of political, economic and social struggle. The bible proclaimed that Black people were beloved and that they belong – no matter what white folks said or did. They subverted supremacy and scripted Something Else.

In his book Conjuring Freedom, Johari Jabir, a cherished contributor to this site, wrote that enslaved Africans used the bible “to turn the toxic into the tonic.” In the same way that they salvaged remnants of cloth from garbage dumps and transformed them into quilts that kept their families warm – and in the same way that they kept hunger at bay by taking the intestines of pigs that plantation owners refused to eat and turning them into cooked chitlins. They made a way out of no way – and that way was abundant and beautiful.

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Three Wise Dreamers as the Year Turns

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation2 Comments

By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann, editor of Geez Magazine, director of Kirkridge Retreat Center and author of The Sandbox Revolution: Raising Kids for a Just World

I was a bit undone by the story of the three wise astrologers this year.

“He sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.” (Matthew 2:8)

How easy it is to be tricked. How easy it is to believe fully that we are doing good while the powers are using us in horrible ways. How easy it is to become distracted by something else while the rulers make plans for power grabs and murder.

As the world is witnessing the slaughter of children in Gaza, a slaughter of innocence, I fear for the ways I am unknowingly being tricked. I know, without fully understanding, that I am constantly being manipulated by the empire that is sending the bombs and blessing the genocide.

Yet, it is in a dream that these three find the truth and figure out a different way. They awake with knowledge in their bellies and truth on the tips of their tongues quickly disappearing as dreams tend to do. They share their dreams with one another, trust the deeper knowing, and move together.

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No More Genocide in God’s Name

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance, Subverting Empire1 Comment

By Dean Hammer, a poem offered in the spirit of World Peace Day, which is January 1 in the Catholic Church

Why have our history books lied
When millions of BIPOC
Hostages brutally died
Of Euro-settler ruthless bellicosity.

We don’t want more of the same
No more genocide in God’s name
Neo-Nazi forces grow again
Far-right fascism teach children not to refrain.

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Christmas in the Shadow of Genocide in Gaza

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

By Rev. Dr. Edgar Rivera Colon

“The Israeli hasbara apparatus — roughly translated as the explanatory structure for the State of Israel — works to perpetuate images of Palestinians as terrorists whose rockets deliberately kill civilians while Israeli airstrikes are conducted with “surgical precision” even if fifty or more Palestinian children are bombed “by mistake.” All of these activities are based on a biblical discourse that gives the settlers the requisite theological rationale. This Israeli settler colonial endeavor has to be seen as the last chapter of the Western settler colonial project, taking place today in the twenty-first century in Palestine. It continues to be serviced and powered by the motherland: the Anglo-Saxon world.” – Mitri Raheb, Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, The People, the Bible.

This is a bitter and grief-stricken Christmastide. It is bathed in the blood of Palestinian children, women, men, elders, and people with disabilities. An even more revanchist form of the 1948 Nakba is being executed — and that is the proper word for it — on Palestinians by the Israeli regime and its military apparatus. Despite the faux hand-wringing noises coming from the Biden administration and the Pentagon, all sensible observers know that this is malign shadow puppet theatrics just in case a miracle happens and the International Criminal Court, going against all its previous history to date, decides to prosecute Israeli and US officials for genocide and war crimes. Let’s hope that miracle emerges. But I would not bet on it.

I find it almost impossible to convey Christmas greetings this year. I write as a minister ordained in a Black LGBTQ led fellowship of believers in a radically open and inclusive Gospel. Not the Gospel of bigotry, hatred, exclusion, and genocide which is at the core of the neo-confederate and ethnonationalist fascist movements in the ascendancy in these lands. We know these people to be the purveyors of unfreedom and political violence which grows daily in the US and throughout the world. They are our enemies. But what of Biden and his ilk? They are not much better since the economic policies that the Clinton Democrats, enacting friendly amendments to 1980s Reaganite policies, elatedly rushed to impose on this country’s working people created the material conditions for Trumpism. Of course, no one in the Democratic elites would confess to their complicity in this turn of events. That would require moral clarity and political courage. Thus, the people who actually own and run this country will stand by and watch Israel commit genocide and see it largely as a public relations problem to be managed in light of the run up to the 2024 national elections. How to manage the optics and messaging around the mass killings and expulsion of thousands of Palestinians are their only concern.

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