The Trenches of Civil Society

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By Rev. Dr. Edgar Rivera Colon (above), re-posted from social media

I will not be preparing to teach for the next academic year. I’m now an independent scholar. In fact, I’ve not taught at USC’s Keck School of Medicine since the spring semester of 2024. Apparently, while I taught my capstone class in the Narrative Medicine course (during which Palestine was never mentioned), someone was monitoring my social media and decided I was a militant anti-Zionist. They were correct.

Suddenly, two very smart and wonderful Jewish students were removed from my class without even a real explanation. I wish those students all the best. Also, all the part-time faculty who were teaching the required three-semester health justice class were fired (I was one of those faculty) because “the full-time” instructors were interested in teaching the course. This was complete nonsense.

The real problem was that a a Mexican and indigenous community member wore a “Free Palestine!” t-shirt and talked about the connection between land and good health here in East LA and Palestine. These comments upset a couple of white liberal Zionists and the administration went nuts.

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A Renewed Prayer

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By Jennifer Maidrand, a professor of Bible, Culture, and Interpretation at United Theological Seminary in the Twin Cities. This is re-posted with permission from her social media page (07.29.25).

After spending the last month and a half in Palestine-Israel for research, I feel a clear affirmation in the work that is ahead and found a renewed prayer of sorts for the journey. And now that I’ve returned to the U.S., communicating what I witnessed during my time in occupied Palestine feels nearly impossible to yet urgent. Research aside, what did I see?

A situation more dire than I’ve seen in the last 11 years of spending time in the region

Countless new checkpoints and gates separating Palestinian society (from Israeli society and from itself) and restricting Palestinian freedom of movement—apartheid at work

The manifestation of the U.S. and Israel’s greenlighting of illegal settlements—outposts being built in hours, rampant settler violence and pogroms (protected by the Israeli military), more cars with Israeli than Palestinian plates in the West Bank

Palestinian homes being seized, demolished, and coercively sold left and right

More than 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed since October 2023

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A 40-Day Prayer Vigil

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A message from Tommy Airey, co-founder of RadicalDiscipleship.net

This is not a famine. This is forced starvation.

The most faithful thing radical disciples can do is publicly call out Israeli and US leaders for what they have intentionally been doing to Palestinians for decades. We should call out our pastors and priests too – whenever they support it with their sermons, or their silence.

When Jesus prayed “give us each day our daily bread,” he was teaching his disciples to live in solidarity with the slaves who escaped from Egypt, trusting that God would sustain them by sending manna in the wilderness.

The first Christians learned to live on just enough so there would be enough for everyone else to live too. Their personal faith was inextricably connected to collective liberation.

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Over the past eighteen months, I’ve been organizing with a collective of Palestinian Christians – and a few allies – who are committed to the love, compassion, truth and justice of Jesus. We are connecting the dots and telling the truth about how Western Christian dogma dehumanizes Palestinians.

Our collective is strategizing to subvert the destructive biblical and theological underpinnings of an overwhelming number of evangelical, protestant and catholic churches in North America that support Israeli apartheid and gen0cide – in the name of Christ.

We are inviting friends in the Christian fold – and those who are Jesus-adjacent – to join us for a 40-day prayer vigil, starting this Saturday (8/2).

Some of us will fast on different days. Some of us will intercede for Palestine at a certain time each day. Some of us will take in fewer calories, in solidarity with our Palestinian siblings in Gaza. All of us will pray, whenever we feel our own hunger pangs.

We are bonding together for forty days to pray for an end to this forced starvation – and for a free Palestine. We are committed to doing whatever we can to stop this gen0cide and inaugurate a new chapter in “the holy land,” where Palestinians are not only protected and affirmed, but empowered to lead.

As the sacred text says, faith without action is dead. Our hope is that our prayers to a Love supreme will conceive unprecedented levels of spiritual depth, moral clarity and political courage that will give birth to a whole new world. If you feel compelled, click on this link and join us.

Daily Bread? Or Three Loaves at Midnight?

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By Jim Perkinson (above), a sermon for St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Detroit (July 27, 2025)

The disciples want to know how to pray.  About time, huh?  Actually, there is more going on here than we usually register.  This is a typical disciple-request of chosen rabbis in 1st century Palestine.  They are really asking for the Teacher to distill the heart of his teaching in a pray-able formula.  They want the essence, the unadulterated core of what is being admonished.  But here the ante is upped. 

Jesus has just set his face to take his show to Jerusalem for the high-noon show-down with the Powers-that-be at the end of chapter 9.  They are going for broke—like going up into White House today to shut down operations in protest of Palestinian genocide while carrying a green card from some place called “Galilee.”  Jesus has just predicted his death in the process in a huddle with his inner circle.  The disciples are beginning to entertain the thought that he might not be around much longer.  So, indeed, what is it he is saying to do?

The so-called “Lord’s Prayer”—that the Black Church in this country more accurately calls the “Disciples Prayer”—is a stripped-down version of the more lyrical rendition we meet with in Matthew.  And its heart is food and debt.  “Give us this day our daily bread” is an invocation of the prime lesson of the Exodus walkout from Egypt when escaped slaves were directed to “gather”—as in hunt-and-gather—”manna,” which literally, in Hebrew, means “what the F is it?”

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Root Shock

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An invitation from Rev. Dr. Edgar Rivera Colon, reposted from his social media account.

Beloved Comrades:

These are confusing and chaotic times in the US and across the globe. Please consider coming to this class on “Confluence of Crisis: Understanding and Deploying a Root Shock- Informed Approach” directed by Mindy Fullilove, Molly Kaufman, & Bob Fullilove. These folks have been dealing with the problems of dispalcement and the consequences of structural violence over four decades. We need their wisdom and practice-based learnings more than ever.

There is a suggested scale of donations for UofO to meet the increasing demands for consolidating our community bases and broadening our resistance. But no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Please share this post widely.

I’m a board member at UofO Free People’s University and one idea we always emphasize is that all of us can things to learn and to teach. In that spirit, come and learn as well as teach with us.

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Cruelty as National Policy

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By Will O’Brien (above, right, in DC earlier this month)

The outrages of the Trump Administration are legion, but in recent days I have been especially distressed by one aspect: the brazen cruelty coming out the of the White House.  I am not talking about the policies, which are arguably cruel in themselves, but the intentional and insistent PR campaign of using social media and other public outlets to gleefully mock and degrade immigrants. 

Not that it’s new: In March, the White House X account featured an image of a handcuffed and weeping Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, who had been violently seized on the streets by ICE agents – cartoonized in the style of Japanese Studio Ghibili animation.  In April, the White House posted a video showing men in shackles preparing to board a deportation flight – to the music accompaniment of the old pop song  “Na na hey hey (kiss him goodbye).”  The Department of Homeland Security infamously circulated the photo of “ICE Barbie” Kristi Noem at the El Salvador prison, the detainees shaved and in nothing but underwear while she flaunted her flowing hair, a tight-fitting white shirt, bounteous make-up, and a $50,000 Rolex.

This campaign of orchestrated public cruelty has reached a new level – starting with the offensive name – with Alligator Alcatraz.

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The Holy Spirit Roars

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An excerpt from the Substack newsletter of Dr. Farah El-Sharif (above), a professor of Islamic history at Stanford University. Radical disciples have so much to learn from Muslims fearlessly resisting empire. Read her entire love letter to Jerusalem here.

The Holy spirit—ruh al-quddus—isn’t “moderate” in the face of tyranny. It doesn’t act “nice” with tyrants. It does not “obey” religious rulers who are more afraid of creation than they are of the Creator. Holiness does not bend to the sinister will of powerful “peacemakers” who only sow mischief in the land (Baqarah: 11). The Holy Spirit roars. The Holy Spirit fights back darkness with light. It is so imbibed in Divine love, it becomes a fearless tsunami with a tide so powerful, that it drowns both idols and demons in its wake.

Jerusalem carries herself like a “sitti”, like a wrinkly, beautiful Palestinian grandmother who was has witnessed the ongoing nakba of her people for far too long. Her eyes are lined with the kohl of sadness from witnessing far too many children gunned down and the torching down of her childhood grove’s favorite millennia-old olive tree.

The Efficacy of Protest

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By Jonny Rashid (above), re-posted from his Substack newsletter

I was one of the organizers for the Interfaith Action for Palestine protest of the CUFI convention. CUFI is a Christian Zionist lobbying group that believes that Israel needs to be restored in order for Christ to return, and God judges the Jewish people they are supposedly advocating for. It is deeply harmful eschatology and also deeply antisemitic. We were organizing for Palestine, against Christian Nationalism and Zionism, and against antisemitism.

We had many meetings, exchanged thousands of Signal messages, and held trainings in person to make sure that our protests went as seamlessly as possible. Our goal was to be organized, effective, and kept everyone as safe as possible. This weekend, hundreds of us gathered with power, enthusiasm, and confidence that we would make our voice heard.

On the evening before our protest, our team left DC proper and went to the National Harbor to do some reconnaissance. Our plan was the enter the hotel hosting the CUFI convention, sing songs, lead chants, blow horns, and drop and display banners that reminded the attendants of the conference that CUFI kills, that God doesn’t bomb children, that Christian Zionism is antisemitic, and that God loves Gaza. But when we got to the hotel, we learned that in order to enter, one needed a room key or a lanyard. We felt defeated at that prospect; it felt like months of organizing just went down the drain.

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