By Tom Airey, RadicalDiscipleship.Net, Co-Editor
Inspired by Mark 6:30-44 & dedicated to my new friends at Manna Community Meal, in the Corktown neighborhood of Detroit:
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It’s a Miracle!
But only by messianic mandate:
We future the world’s Fate when
We reduce our own plate.
Manna never trickles down
From those who hoard.
Multiply baskets for bored
And hungry sheep.
Innoculate affluenza: descale the heap.
Written by Jeanie Wylie-Kellermann, she reflects on the decision of whether to baptize her daughter, Lydia. Jeanie was a writer, activist, and mother. She died after a long fight with brain cancer in 2005. This piece was published in 1986 for Detroit’s Catholic Worker paper On the Edge.
I didn’t want to baptize Lydia.
My love for her took me off guard. I’d only been able to see her and touch her for a few hours and already I wanted the world for her. I studied her while she lay in my arms to eat and she stared back. I cried often. I was overwhelmed. Continue reading “Within a Communion of Children”
From Ed Crouch, a member of the United Church of Christ, Voices of Palestine, Palestine Task Force and INOC (Interfaith Network of Concern for the people of the Middle East). Published in the Sept-Oct 2014 issue of Hospitality, the newsletter of the Open Door Community of Atlanta.
An evening breeze whispers through
the ripe olive grove, “Ashes to ashes.”
Magnificent, thick, twisted trunks, rooted in
poor soil, withstanding drought for centuries, Continue reading “Arson”
From Daniel Quinn in Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind & Spirit (1992)
You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.
What is the vitality and necessity
of clean water?
Ask the man who is ill, and who is lifting
his lips to the cup.
Ask the forest.
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 first post in an 8-part series covering unique experiments in Watershed Discipleship: every Friday until Advent on RadicalDiscipleship.Net.
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We will not save a place we do not love.
We cannot love a place we do not know.
Ched Myers, citing Senegalese environmentalist Baba Dioum
This is the vital adult education of our time: to become re-placed in our watersheds. To love a place, we must first know it. This means paying attention to it: paying attention to its seasons, its species, its attributes and its attitudes.
I began to seek the wisdom of my watershed about five years ago. What could it teach me about how to live as a place-based person? As I learn to re-inhabit the place I live, I see my region as my rabbi in three specific ways.
On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious MotherhoodBy Frida Berrigan
“A moving chronicle of the things that make for love and peace, elegantly written by a woman who knows more than most about both. How to balance family, children, intimate partnership with urgent rescue of the gravely endangered planet? With wit, stark honesty, and deep compassion, Frida Berrigan suggests a simple answer, drawing on the bliss and grit of her own life as a mother — and as an activist. …This book matters enormously.” —James Carroll Continue reading “Hot off the Press: It Runs in the Family by Frida Berrigan”
Last weekend, we got to spend time at the Rooted & Grounded Conference hosted by Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, IN (photo right: the St. Joseph River Watershed). A lot of focus was placed on the challenge of shifting the epicenter of our discipleship towards each of our unique, respective watersheds during this “watershed moment” of impending climate catastrophe, income inequality, violence & racial tension. King’s giant triplets of evil (racism, materialism & militarism) haven’t gone away. What now? Continue reading “Pledging Allegiance To Watershed Discipleship”
The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost – Pride Day
August 3rd, 2014
Christ Church Cathedral, Vancouver
Laurel Dykstra is a community-based scholar with a long history in intentional communities and the radical discipleship movement. Her justice work focuses on issues of urban poverty; the activism of children, youth and families; challenging white privilege; and Queer and gender-Queer participation and resistance in churches. She is the author of Set Them Free: The Other Side of Exodus (Orbis, 2002), Uncle Aiden (Baby Bloc, 2005), editor of Bury the Dead (Cascade, 2013) and co-editor, with Ched Myers of Liberating Biblical Study (Cascade, 2011).
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I have a lot of favorite bible passages, but today’s about Jacob, his 4 wives and 11 children beside the river Jabbok is one of them–it is complicated, human, and a surprisingly good fit for pride Sunday. Continue reading “Pride Sermon by Laurel Dykstra”
From Marian Wright Edelman, President of the Children’s Defense Fund whose Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities:
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Just released U.S. Census Bureau data reveal 45.3 million people were poor in America in 2013. One in three of those who are poor is a child. Children remain our poorest age group and children of color and those under five are the poorest. More than one in five infants, toddlers, and preschoolers were poor during their years of greatest brain development and vulnerability. Black children saw no decrease and continue to have the highest child poverty rates in the nation. In 20 states more than 40 percent of Black children were poor and nearly one in five Black children were living in extreme poverty with an annual income of less than half of the poverty level or $33 a day for a family of four.
