If America is to be salvific, it can only be so because underneath our skyscrapers lie the people who have tasted the red clay, the loamy soil. Lashed, hidden, running, captured. Crucified for gain, bloodying the soil. If their dreams can became “we” dreams, hope will spring. “Greatness” is such an egotistical and dangerous word. But in the land of big dreams and bigger lies, we love greatness anyway. And if we want it, if we aren’t afraid to grab it, we have to look South, to America.
By Rev. Roslyn Bouier (above on the mic), the Executive Director of the Brightmoor Connection Food Pantry, Pastor of Trinity-St. Mark’s, UCC, and new church start founder The Beloved Community, UCC. These remarks were given at a press conference yesterday (July 7, 2022) where community leaders called out the latest counterfeit report coming from the Detroit water department, which has shut-off water to more than 170,000 homes over the past decade. The water department just approved an “affordability plan” with little input from experts and few details about how it will be funded and implemented. They refuse to release the full plan to the public.
I am a frontline provider—
I am a Detroit resident—
I am a pastor—
Community leader, advocate for food, water, housing, and basic needs—
I am a mother, grandmother—
But above all of these I am first and foremost a human-being and responsible for my neighbor and doesn’t that count for something?
Image: Matilda’s Debut, Summer 2014, Photo by Joshua Sage.
by Veena Vasista. This first appeared in Geez 64: The Holy Fool. I arrived to my forties wonder-full.
Wondering how to love. Wondering, as a long-time human rights activist, how we can possibly create liberation when we continually replicate the oppression we claim to be dismantling. Wondering how to be free from suffering.
I’d been journeying along life’s spiral with neck tensed, shoulders curved, and legs weakened from bearing a heavy cross of beliefs: Vulnerability is shameful. I am repulsive and disgusting.
By Alicia Crosby Mack, re-posted with permission from Facebook (June 24, 2022)
It is not lost on me that the architects of our present harm are using the Christian faith tradition as their vehicle for violence.
This is my tradition. This is my Christianity.
I will not distance myself from them as a form of absolution but will say this is violent & wrong.
In this moment I resolve to more fervently commit myself to justice, freedom, and agency for all because faith should be a balm for healing, not a bludgeon for to gain & keep control or force others into submission.
I’ve included a mix of light party games, games that have become widely popular in the board gaming community and a few less well known games with a liberation orientation. I’ve roughly ordered them from simplest to most complex (with the exception of the last game on the list). In other words, if you are looking for a game for a party, start at the top. If you are looking for a satisfying compex gift for a board game geek, start at the bottom.
Code Names, Vlaada Chvátil (2015) I’ve seen this game delight again and again at parties. It is a team game where a clue giver on each team tries to give one word clues that connect disparate words together. It takes a minute to understand and join in and offers suspense and intrigue in just the right doses.
If I don’t do it by then, I’ll chicken out and go back outside for another smoke.
There’s this memory that keeps playing in my head that I’ve tried to suppress many times, but the more I try to block it out, the slower it gets. My dad is sitting next to me in the car. He’s yelling, not quite at me because his eyes are on the road and the bottle in his hand. I couldn’t even get his attention when he was mad at me.
I’m 4 years old. I don’t know yet that the clear liquid in the bottle he’s drinking from is gin. I think it’s water. My dad drives the car magically; his hands aren’t on the steering wheel. One hand holds the bottle, the other hand rests outside the window, a cigarette between his fingers.
The origin of the root of this psalm is a riff off a quote by Turkish poet Ilhan Mimaroglu on Freddie Hubbard’s “Sing Me a Song of Songmai. That was 50 years ago and it has haunted me all these years. I immediately thought of couples I knew while growing up in Middletown, Ohio. Most hours of the day, mothers who were wiser and more responsible ruled the homes. However, should a man choose to come home, from being dogged by white supremacy in the outside world, most moms stepped aside to let him dominate. I knew men who left the house without saying where they were going and returned without saying where they had been. As well, I knew more than a few who had lovers and “outside children” elsewhere. IF I’M LYIN’ A FLYIN’.
By Tommy Airey, above with his nephews in Southern California
The day after an 18-year-old white boy livestreamed his mass murder spree in the only supermarket of a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, I was hosting another men’s group on zoom. We were sharing early memories of when our tears and tenderness were not honored by adults in our lives. One participant said something that stoked vigorous nodding from the rest of us. “It really wasn’t what I was told,” he said, “It was what I wasn’t told.” We were forced to fill in the gaps of all those silences. We came up with our own scripts saying we were not good enough and would never really be loved unless we met a certain standard of “success.”
The silence is a slow trauma that seeds deep feelings of self-doubt and worthlessness. It tills the soil of the gun culture, the rape culture, the corporate culture, the cancel culture. The silence sustains the default dominant culture, what Dr. Willie Jennings calls “the pedagogy of the plantation.” Unless we are intentionally taught otherwise, we are trained up to possess, master and control everything we come across. In America, men are the main characters, the owners of the plantation. It’s not just the passionate men with their man caves and their big trucks and their unregulated firearms—but also the passive men who pride themselves on staying safe, stoic, nice and neutral, above the fray, hiding their feelings as they over-function to “provide for their families.”
Radical Discipleship 