Watershed Discipleship: Transformation Through Picking Berries

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Watershed Discipleship1 Comment

Watershed Discipleship Fridays continues with this piece from Kyle Mitchell, who lives with his wife Lynea on the 3rd floor of an old house in Cleveland. They have a couple egg-laying hens in the backyard and tons of red wiggler worms. Kyle spends his days working alongside folks with developmental disabilities on a 2-acre urban farm down the street from his house. In his spare time, he works alongside Lynea in the 2 youth gardens she started in the neighborhood. They are both passionate about growing food, spreading that knowledge, and figuring out ways to get healthy food to folks that don’t have access to it.
——————–
A few years back, I had a dramatic conversion experience. Someone introduced me to the act of picking berries. Continue reading “Watershed Discipleship: Transformation Through Picking Berries” →

The Black Prophetic Struggle Against Injustice

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Cloud of Witnesses, Subverting Empire1 Comment

By Tommy Airey
————————
The great irony of our time is that in the age of Obama the grand Black prophetic tradition is weak and feeble.
Cornel West, Black Prophetic Fire (2014)

The Union Theological Seminary professor & prominent American public intellectual Dr. Cornel West has teamed up with Christa Buschendorf, the professor and the chair of American Studies at Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt am Main, for the newly released Black Prophetic Fire from Beacon Press, a series of extended conversations on six compelling prophetic leaders: Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, Ella Baker (above), Malcolm X & Ida B. Wells. It is a well-timed buffet for people of faith & conscience yearning to eat at the table of a nutritious historic tradition that will energize & sustain subversive lifestyles within the context of 21st century American Empire. Continue reading “The Black Prophetic Struggle Against Injustice” →

A Letter to our Churches

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Feminist/Womanist/Queer Liberation and TheologyLeave a comment

handsWritten by Lydia Wylie-Kellermann in 2012 for the Michigan delegation of United Methodist pastors to General Conference who would be voting on changes to the Discipline around gay marriage.

Dear Delegation,

I have been told by politicians, by laws and disciplines, by bishops, by friend’s partners, by extended family, by neighbors and life long friends, and even by a woman waiting for a bus, that my marriage is wrong. That its mere existence is a cause of harm in this world. Continue reading “A Letter to our Churches” →

Ground the Drones in Michigan- Nov 8

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

“We are building up a new world.battle creek drones 3
Do not sit idly by.
Do not remain neutral.
Do not rely on this broadcast alone.
We are only as strong as our signal.
There is a war going on for your mind.
If you are thinking, you are winning.
Resistance is victory.
Defeat is impossible.
Your weapons are already in hand.
Reach within you and find the means by which to gain your freedom.
Fight with tools.
Your fate, and that of everyone you know
Depends on it.”
-Flobots, “We Are Winning”

Calling all peace activists & nonviolent practitioners within the Great Lakes Region! Today’s blog post is asking for your hands, feet, minds, hearts, time & all the creativity you can muster. Continue reading “Ground the Drones in Michigan- Nov 8” →

I Just Thought Of Something by Ricardo Levins Morales

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

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.

Continue reading “I Just Thought Of Something by Ricardo Levins Morales” →

Wendell Berry on Despair and Freedom

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

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

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Watershed DiscipleshipLeave a comment

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.

————————-

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
————————-
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.

Continue reading “A Penny For The People” →