I Just Thought Of Something by Ricardo Levins Morales

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Minneapolis-based artist Ricardo Levins Morales on his craft:

I am an artist/activist…or is it activist/artist? It’s impossible to put one before the other or separate them…I believe that art can contribute to changing people’s perceptions, hearts and understandings of what has been, what is and what’s possible. I’m enough of an organizer to understand that art can’t do it alone; people getting together and acting together is the real source of social change. The dignity and possibility in all people is the underlying message of my work.

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Wendell Berry on Despair and Freedom

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stars
“When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be- I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

Watershed Discipleship: A People’s History of Elkhart, Indiana

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This piece, by Katerina Friesen, is part of a series of Friday posts on watershed discipleship. Katerina hails from central California, and is currently a student in theology and peace studies at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary. She lives in the Prairie Wolf Collective, a co-housing community in Elkhart, with five friends, a cat named Zip, and the newest resident: a skunk that just made its home in the woodpile.

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On a sunny afternoon in late September, I joined a group of neighbors and friends for the 6th annual People’s History tour of Elkhart, Indiana. The tour, in the tradition of Howard Zinn’s classic subversive book, A People’s History of the United States, highlights the often unheard stories of local folks, their memories of south-central Elkhart, the struggles here that must not be forgotten, and people’s ongoing work for change (above: Participants in the tour begin with recognition of the Potowotami peoples whose ancestral lands we inhabit). Continue reading “Watershed Discipleship: A People’s History of Elkhart, Indiana” →

An open letter to my students after my arrest for disorderly conduct

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Just Peacemaking, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

 

kim redigan 2

Kim Redigan teaches theology at University of Detroit Jesuit High School and blogs at www.writetimeforpeace.com. She is a nonviolence trainer and peace educator with Meta Peace Team.

Dear students:

Some of you have contacted me after seeing news of my arrest for a nonviolent action around the water shutoffs here in Detroit. While I am touched by your concern, I implore you to reserve your support for those being affected by the shutoffs and your own generation, which, unless things change, is on track to inherit a commodified world in which beauty, nature, life itself will be sold off to the lowest corporate bidder, an affront to all that is good, decent and human. Continue reading “An open letter to my students after my arrest for disorderly conduct” →

A Penny For The People

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology1 Comment

By Tom Airey, RadicalDiscipleship.Net
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To choose what is difficult
all one’s days
as if it were easy,
that is faith.
W.H. Auden, For The Time Being (1944)

When Penny Lernoux graduated from the University of Southern California, she took her SoCal suburban privilege, Phi Beta Kappa intellect, lapsed Catholicism & journalistic brilliance to Latin America to work for U.S. Information Agency, an organization promoting American policy overseas. Little did she know that circumstances on the ground–unjust & violent–would soon prod her to write prophetic denunciations of the American cluster of principalities and powers (corporations, the CIA, Congress, armed forces, etc) that jimmy-rigged massive parcels of land away from the people of Latin America while propping up military dictatorships in virtually every single country to the south: all in the name of fighting communism.

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Who Are Our People?

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But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’
Luke 10:29

From Justin Ashworth, a candidate in the Duke Divinity School ThD program. Justin is in the process of finishing a dissertation devoted to a theological engagement with U.S. immigration policy, drawing on the Merciful Samaritan parable in Luke 10 (right: painting by Paula Modersohn-Becker, 1907), which challenges followers of Jesus to ask the vital question in immigration debates: “Who are our people?” This is the conclusion from a presentation he gave to a class last week:

…the calling of gentiles to follow Jesus draws us into a life together with people we did not choose. It requires that we deny any notion of a permanently stable identity: we follow the God of the living who is on the move in the world. There may be times for staying put, but the Christian life is fundamentally one of movement towards Jesus and therefore towards the people he is gathering around himself. This recognition requires that we cultivate a posture of openness toward the Spirit of Jesus Christ who blows where the Spirit wills. Continue reading “Who Are Our People?” →

Carnival de Resistance

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Carnival Mask Image

Beginning today, we are excited to hold Mondays as a day to celebrate and give voice to the role of art in discipleship. Today we highlight the Carnival de Resistance!

The Carnival de Resistance is an arts carnival, unconventional school and “village demonstration project” that focuses on ecological justice and radical theology. The Carnival Crew seeks to experiment with how art can teach, play can inspire, practices can transform, and resistance can be embodied. They intentionally look to the wisdom of indigenous and other earth based cultures whose music, spirituality and life-ways preserve a liberating way to resist the dominant culture of oppression. The Carnival de Resistance first launched in the fall of 2013, sequentially residing in and building the Carnival world in two church lots in Virginia. In the summer of 2014, they re-built the Carnival experiment in the context of the Wildgoose Festival.

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Visionary Feminism

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From bell hooks in Feminism is for Everybody (2000):

Visionary feminism is a wise and loving politics. It is rooted in the love of male and female being, refusing to privilege one over the other. The soul of feminist politics is the commitment to ending patriarchal domination of women and men, girls and boys. Love cannot exist in any relationship that is based on domination and coercion. Males cannot love themselves in patriarchal culture if their very self-definition relies on submission to patriarchal rules. When men embrace feminist thinking and preactice, which emphasizes the value of mutual growth and self-actualization in all relationships, their emotional well-being will be enhanced. A genuine feminist politics always brings us from bondage to freedom, from lovelessness to loving.

A Tradition of Resistance

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire1 Comment

set them free

 

“Alongside the history of empire we can study and reclaim the history of resistance to empire. Global capitalism did not appear fully formed at the dawn of time; its rise was engineered and was by no means unopposed. There is a rich tradition of resistance to tyranny throughout history; the things that we seek to do now and the ways we seek to live are neither new nor impossible. Christians who want to live outside empire have a legacy from our predecessors whose successes and failures can instruct and inspire us.”

Laurel Dykstra in Set Them Free: The Other Side of Exodus