For a Free Palestine

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Feminist/Womanist/Queer Liberation and Theology, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

This is from blackwomenradicals.com. Check out their site for a whole radical Black feminist reading list on a Free Palestine.

WE, WHO BELIEVE IN FREEDOM, WE AS BLACK FEMINISTS WHO BELIEVE IN FREEDOM  –– FREEDOM FROM WHITE SUPREMACY, PATRIARCHY, CAPITALISM, TRANSPHOBIA,  QUEERPHOBIA, ABLEISM, AND OTHER OPPRESSIONS –– UNABASHEDLY BELIEVE IN AND STAND IN SOLIDARITY FOR A FREE PALESTINE. 

As students of Black feminist politics and movements, we know and understand that our liberation as Black women, femme, and gender expansive people in the United States, in the belly of the imperial beast, is tethered to the liberation, freedom, and emancipation of all marginalized peoples around the world. We know that we come from long radical and revolutionary traditions of Black women and gender expansive organizers, educators, and activists who have and continue to be committed to the liberation struggles of oppressed and “Third World” peoples. 

MORE SPECIFICALLY, AND ESPECIALLY AT THIS CURRENT JUNCTURE IN GAZA AND THE WEST BANK, WE KNOW AS BLACK FEMINISTS THAT OUR POLITICAL COMMITMENTS, MANDATES, AND SOLIDARITY ARE BOUND UP AND INTERTWINED WITH THE LIBERATION AND SELF-DETERMINATION OF THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE. 

According to reports, more than 2,383 Palestinians are dead and 10,814 are injured. The organization, Defense for Children International–Palestine has reported that at least 724 Palestinian children have been killed by the Israeli military since October 7th. This past Friday, October 12th, the Israeli army issued an evacuation order – by way of dropping leaflets – of more than 1.1 million Palestinians in northern Gaza, giving them only 24 hours to leave their homes and move to southern Gaza toward a “safe route.” However, when many Palestinians migrated to southern Gaza, the army bombed the south part of the Gaza strip – the only road in and out of Gaza – killing and injuring hundreds. Israel has cut off Gaza from electricity, fuel, food, water, and humanitarian aid.

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Uncompromising Solidarity

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CUNY LAW JLSA STATEMENT ON EVENTS IN OCCUPIED PALESTINE (10.10.2023). The statement was originally posted on Google Docs here, but it has been taken down for violating its terms of service (which raises all sorts of important questions).

In this season of renewal and self-reflection, and as we begin the year 5784, the Jewish students at the CUNY School of Law wish to express our uncompromising solidarity with the Palestinian people in their righteous struggle for self-determination. This feeling is accompanied by a profound sense of grief over the lives that have been lost. We are steadfast in our belief that Zionism – as a political ideology predicated on theft and destruction – serves to imperil both Jews and Palestinians, even though its proponents only target the latter.

In his analysis of the global anti-colonial struggle, Frantz Fanon wrote, “We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.” Such is the case for the Palestinian people, who have, for generations, been made to suffocate under the deadly weight of the Zionist project. This settler-colonial enterprise, promoted by antisemites within the British Empire following World War I, has taken shape across decades of uninterrupted brutality. In 1948, Zionist militias unleashed a campaign of terror marked by mass murder and systematic sexual violence, razing over 500 Palestinian villages and forcing more than 750 thousand Palestinians off their native lands.

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Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance1 Comment

By Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian poet, from his collection Things You May Find Hidden in my Ear: Poems from Gaza (2022)

i

When you open my ear, touch it
gently.
My mother’s voice lingers somewhere inside.
Her voice is the echo that helps recover my equilibrium
when I feel dizzy during my attentiveness.

You may encounter songs in Arabic,
poems in English I recite to myself,
or a song I chant to the chirping birds in our backyard.

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Capitalism and Christianity are Incompatible

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Three years ago, we interviewed Dr. Bruce Rogers-Vaughn (above), an ordained Baptist minister, pastoral psychotherapist and Associate Professor of the Practice of Pastoral Theology and Counseling at Vanderbilt Divinity School, and the author of Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age (Palgrave, 2016). “Neoliberalism,” he writes, “has become so encompassing and powerful that it is now the most significant factor in shaping how, why, and to what degree human beings suffer.”

This is why Bruce presses for a “post-capitalist pastoral theology” that empowers people to resist the system (instead of adapt to it), to embrace communion and wholeness in relation to others and the earth (instead of functioning in accord with the values of production and consumption) and to pursue interdependent reliance within the web of human relationships (instead of accepting shame-based personal responsibility narratives).

Above all, Bruce prods pastors, therapists and social workers to identify the source of personal distress in the social and political environment instead of within the individual (he rejects what he calls “sophisticated exercises in blaming the victim”). Oh—one more thing about Bruce. All of his work is informed by his deep roots in southern Appalachia.

This is an excerpt from the beginning of our five-part conversation. See this for Part I, this for Part II, this for Part III and this for Part IV.

—————————————————————————————-

Neoliberalism is simply an awful word. It is almost inevitably misleading. When I first encountered this expression, I imagined it was designating some new (“neo-”) form of political or theological “liberal.” But, actually, the term originates from economic philosophy. Its first proponents—the so-called “German Ordoliberals”—coined the name during the 1930s. Today the word is used, almost exclusively by its critics, to refer to the current phase of capitalism. This phase gained political traction in the USA and the UK in the 1980s, during the Reagan and Thatcher administrations, and by the mid-1990s was the dominant way of thinking and believing that guided global economics, politics, and culture.

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Say Anew to this Festering World

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

By Ken Sehested, in honor of Rev. Cindy Weber

My friend Cindy Weber, pastor of Jeff Street Baptist at Liberty in Louisville, Ky., retired last month. Tomorrow, 1 October 2023, her congregation is celebrating her ministry.

She was initially called to serve as associate pastor (1984-1991) and then as pastor (1991-present). The congregation was expelled by the (Southern Baptist) Long Run Baptist Association when Cindy was called as pastor (because she was female).

The congregation’s history traces its roots back to a ministry to the city’s “derelicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, and homeless in 1881.” In the early ‘40s, Clarence Jordan, who would later co-found Koinonia Farm in Georgia, played a role in supporting the mission.

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The Biggest Mouth in the World: A Riff on Genesis 4:8-16

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Uncategorized1 Comment

By Jim Perkinson, a sermon for St. Peter’s Episcopal Church (October 1, 2023), a

So, land.  A big topic.  My wife was recently asked to open a Michigan Climate Summit Conference hosted at Oakland University where she teaches with a formal land acknowledgement and after giving greetings in her native tongue of Kapampangan from the Philippines, the traditional homeland of the Ayta, she offered the following:

I’ve been asked to do the Land Acknowledgment to set the tone for our gathering today and it is fitting that I do so because I, too, am a settler here on Turtle Island. As one Mohawk scholar once said to me once, “It doesn’t matter if your people were brought here through historic colonization, as far as Native peoples are concerned, you are still settlers.” Something I’ve had to sit with for a long time and ponder.

And as protocol goes, it is settlers like myself—not Native peoples—who must acknowledge whose land we’re on—that we are here on Native peoples’ stolen land. And we name this truth not just as pro forma, but as part of the discipline of facing into—and beginning to unlearn—our settler privilege—recognizing that our presence here on this land as non-indigenous peoples means we are beneficiaries not only of native genocide and dispossession, but of other kinds of historic oppressions such as African slavery, U.S. imperialism abroad, and the ecocidal clearing of forests and decimation of wildlife habitat in order to build our cities that’s part of what is driving climate change.

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Incomplete Without the Other

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By Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler

Humanity is naturally separated by language, geography, culture, race, existential narratives, and many other cultural accents that make us uniquely different. We are divided ideologically, politically, racially, by class, belief, faith, and theology. Each group and sub-group has its own ways of expressions and customs, but unfortunately, in one way or another, each group and sub-group claims that its ways and thoughts are uniquely more significant than everything and everyone else in creation. This is human nature where the familiar becomes the norm, and our norms becomes the vehicle by which we evaluate everything and everyone else. For example, in Christianity, Jesus is the way and there is no other way. In Islam, there is no god but God, and Muhammad (Peace be upon him) is the Messenger of God. Historically, Judaism believes that there is only one God who has established a covenant, or special agreement with those of the faith (or traditions). Buddhism believes that life is one of suffering, and that meditation, spiritual and physical labor, and good behavior are the ways to achieve enlightenment, or nirvana and to overcome. In general, Hinduism believes that there are four goals in human life – kama, the pursuit of pleasure; artha, the pursuit of material success; dharma, leading a just and good life; and moksha, enlightenment, which frees a person from suffering and unites the individual soul with Brahman. There are many other cultural- religious understandings in the course of human thinking and they all grapple with the meaning of life, how to effectively live life, and how to live righteously in the human community. Each cultural-religious perspective emerges out of geography and context that frames language, perspective, and understandings.

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The Journey

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Thank you, Mary Oliver.

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Banning of Native Voices/Books

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire2 Comments

This is reposted from American Indians in Children’s Literature (AICL) which provides critical analysis of Indigenous peoples in children’s and young adult books. AICL was established in 2006 by Dr. Debbie Reese of Nambé Pueblo. Dr. Jean Mendoza joined AICL as a co-editor in 2016.

The year is 2023. 

People continue to take from Native peoples and Native Nations. It started with our lands and our children. It included efforts to destroy our nationhood and cultures by making it illegal for us to speak our languages and tell our stories and practice our religions. 

We persevered. 

In recent years more and more of us are being published. Through books, we are using our voices, telling our stories to our children and yours, too, in pre-school and kindergarten story times and in high school classrooms. 

But now, our books–our voices–are being removed from libraries and classrooms. 

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