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Idols
The beginning and conclusion of Chris Hedges’ latest piece “The Last Days of Gaza.”
This is the end. The final blood-soaked chapter of the genocide. It will be over soon. Weeks. At most. Two million people are camped out amongst the rubble or in the open air. Dozens are killed and wounded daily from Israeli shells, missiles, drones, bombs and bullets. They lack clean water, medicine and food. They have reached a point of collapse. Sick. Injured. Terrified. Humiliated. Abandoned. Destitute. Starving. Hopeless.
In the last pages of this horror story, Israel is sadistically baiting starving Palestinians with promises of food, luring them to the narrow and congested nine-mile ribbon of land that borders Egypt. Israel and its cynically named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), allegedly funded by Israel’s Ministry of Defense and the Mossad, is weaponizing starvation. It is enticing Palestinians to southern Gaza the way the Nazis enticed starving Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to board trains to the death camps. The goal is not to feed the Palestinians. No one seriously argues there is enough food or aid hubs. The goal is to cram Palestinians into heavily guarded compounds and deport them…
…There are people I have known for years who I will never speak to again. They know what is happening. Who does not know? They will not risk alienating their colleagues, being smeared as an antisemite, jeopardizing their status, being reprimanded or losing their jobs. They do not risk death, the way Palestinians do. They risk tarnishing the pathetic monuments of status and wealth they spent their lives constructing. Idols. They bow down before these idols. They worship these idols. They are enslaved by them.
At the feet of these idols lie tens of thousands of murdered Palestinians.
The Radical Power of the Poetic Word
By Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellermann
Walter Brueggemann: A Remembrance (March 11, 1933 – June 5, 2025)
When I was a student at Union Seminary in New York, Abraham Heschel taught at Jewish Theological Seminary across the street. Though he died within my first year, the author of The Prophets, was notorious, it was said, for being the professor who actually believed in God. Something related might be said about Walter Brueggemann who crossed over to the ancestors and saints June 5.
He was an eminent scholar, among those like Norman Gottwald who altered the landscape of biblical studies by bringing sociological analysis to interpretation, and for such reason presided for years in the biblical guild. Yet, as a discipline, he was eminently readable and accessible to movement and church for whom the work was ultimately intended.
Once in a footnote to Israel’s Praise, he cited a 1985 order of the Pretoria regime prohibiting Blacks from singing Christmas carols in the townships because they generated such revolutionary energy. The newspaper report quoted a South African police agent: “Carols are too emotional to be sung in a time of unrest…Candles have become revolutionary symbols.” Which is to say, he could write an analysis of the world-shaking and world-making power of Israel’s liturgy and psalms, but then put out a book of prayers for our own moment. He prayed. He imagined a new world with all his heart. He invited us likewise.
Continue reading “The Radical Power of the Poetic Word”The Crisis
RIP Walter Brueggemann, a biblical scholar who brought the heater. Thanks to Ken Sehested for the image.
Christian Zionism is the Iceberg
From Micha K. Ben-David, a former IDF soldier and the co-founder of Breaking the Silence. This is a response to the violent attack on the pro-Israel demonstration in Boulder, CO yesterday. Re-posted from Ben-David’s Facebook account.
Please. Yeah. I’m pissed.
Because the Israel Lobby, the Zionist communities, and whoever else has their PR hands in this, are already spinning what happened in Boulder into some textbook case of antisemitism. And I hate to say it—but this wasn’t that. Not even close.
I’ve lived in the U.S. for a few years now. I’ve seen real antisemitism—actual swastika-drawing, conspiracy-spewing, neo-Nazi, Christian nationalist, white supremacist hate. The everyday kind that shows up at city halls and school boards, the kind that attacks synagogues and fuels mass shootings. And yeah—it scares the shit out of me. Not just as a Jew. As a human.
But that kind of hate doesn’t come from the Palestinian movement. It doesn’t come from Muslims. And it doesn’t only come for Jews. It hits everyone—Black communities, immigrants, queer folks, anyone who doesn’t fit inside some twisted white fantasy of who deserves to exist.
So no, what happened in Boulder was not that.
I’ve seen that march. Every Sunday, up and down Pearl Street. I’ve watched them defend the un-defendable. I’ve seen the signs that ask people to look away from a genocide, to doubt their own eyes, to stay silent—not just in passive complicity, but in loud, moral support of mass death. It’s not subtle. It’s not peaceful. It’s not neutral.
Continue reading “Christian Zionism is the Iceberg”The Liberation of All Oppressed Peoples
An excerpt from the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977. It comes from a Black lesbian feminist socialist organization that met consistently in the mid to late 70’s.
Above all else, our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s may because of our need as human persons for autonomy. This may seem so obvious as to sound simplistic, but it is apparent that no other ostensibly progressive movement has ever consIdered our specific oppression as a priority or worked seriously for the ending of that oppression. Merely naming the pejorative stereotypes attributed to Black women (e.g. mammy, matriarch, Sapphire, whore, bulldagger), let alone cataloguing the cruel, often murderous, treatment we receive, Indicates how little value has been placed upon our lives during four centuries of bondage in the Western hemisphere. We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work.
This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.
Continue reading “The Liberation of All Oppressed Peoples”What is Radical Discipleship?
From Ched Myers, posted to social media last week in eager anticipation for the Second Festival of Radical Discipleship in Bangor, PA over this so-called “Memorial Day Weekend.”
I want to offer the edited and abbreviated version below of a “rant” I gave at the 2015 BKI Festival for Radical Discipleship here in Oak View, as a paean to this work and to the vision of radical discipleship that animates our mission at BCM, which will be celebrated this weekend at the Second Festival at Kirkridge Retreat Center. May this tradition carry on!
What is Radical Discipleship?
The etymology of the term radical (from the Latin radix, “root”) is the best reason not to concede it to nostalgia. To get to the root of anything we must be radical. No wonder the word has been demonized by the elite and co-opted by marketing hucksters, and that no one in conventional politics dares use the word favorably–much less track any problem to its root. It is also curious and revealing that the notion of discipleship is so marginal in our churches. Curious, because discipleship is unarguably the central theme of the gospels. Revealing, because it shows how wide the gulf between seminary, sanctuary and streets has become in North America.
The prevailing expressions of faith among Protestant churches—evangelical decisionism, mainline denominationalism and fundamentalist dogmatism—are each problematic in a society that is mired in dysfunctional politics, delusional economics and a distractive culture. Faith as discipleship remains the “road rarely taken” here at the heart of empire. We have yet truly to reckon with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous warning, delivered under the shadow of fascism, that “cheap grace is grace without discipleship.” Radical Discipleship thus calls us to a double commitment: to reveal the roots of personal and political pathologies that continue to shape our imperial society, and to recover the roots of our biblical tradition: the messianic movement of rebellion and restoration, of repentance and renewal, and of a “Way out of no way” that has been going on since the dawn of resistance to the dusk of empire…
Read the entire post here.
Saoirse don Phailaistín
Earlier this month three women from Palestine Action disrupted and confronted a large plane contracted by the US Military at the Shannon Airport in Ireland. Planes such as this one carry Troops, Weapons and Military Equipment that carry out War Crimes in Palestine, Yemen and many other war zones that the USA is involved in. This goes directly against Irish Neutrality and the will of the people of Ireland. This is a statement from one of the Palestine Action Éire activists.
Our government is literally fueling genocide. The government continues to allow troops and weapons through Shannon against the democratic will of the people! Over the last year and a half I’ve realised that the only way to disrupt the war machine is through Direct Action. I’m doing what is necessary to save innocent lives because when I am older I want to be able look back and say I did everything I could to stop this genocide.
Saoirse don Phailaistín
We are in the Spirit
An excerpt from Jim Perkinson’s sermon on John 6 during the Summer of 2018 called “I Am Wind.”
“God” in Hebrew writ, as we have it from Genesis to Malachi, is double-named, a hyphen-Deity, Elohim of the cool, wet coastal mountains, YHWH of the hot sands south and east. And this is likely because Israel was a hyphen-people, a mixed lot, a creole crowd, partly composed of pastoral nomads following Moses and Joshua, coming into Canaan from the forty years of desert wandering, once crossing the Jordan from the east, joining with rebelling Canaanite peasants, going feral up in the central highlands from seaboard cities on the Mediterranean to the west. A motley crew, each group bringing their God into the stewpot, a Midianite-Canaanite mix, worshipping a YHWH-Elohim amalgam of deities. YHWH is a dust-storm deity encountered by a renegade herder horde on a Sinai desert mountain in lightning and thunder. Elohim is a rain-storm deity encountered by an outlaw peasant crowd on a Canaanite coastal mountain in lightning and thunder. One flashes over the vastness of sand; the other over the expanse of sea. And though the name YHWH comes to predominate, Elohim remains in use more than 2500 times in the Hebrew text.
We could go on if there were time. The word for Wind in Hebrew is “ruach,” which also means “Air,” “Breath,” “Spirit.” Gendered female. These are not fully separable ideas. For many indigenous and antique peoples, the Spirit-World is the Natural World, especially in its fluidity as Air, Wind, Breath. It is not so much the case that the Spirit is in us, as it is we are in the Spirit. It moves through and among us all the time.
Everything is breathing Spirit, in and out, every second. And the bodies that navigate the realm of air, the bodies exquisitely attuned to sense every nuance of wind wafting, whispering, upwelling, down-blowing, scudding or sheering—birds—are quintessentially Spirit-Messengers in culture after culture. We, in the biblical tradition, just freeze-frame them and call them “angels”—winged creatures that sing, and bring messages from heaven!
It is the Wind-Spirit that hovers, Dove-like, over the Great Waters of Chaos in Creation in Genesis 1. It is that same hovering Spirit-Wind-Dove that blows back the Red Sea waters for the escaping slaves. It is the Wind-Cruising-Dove that Noah sends forth from the water-bound ark to find land. It is that Dove-Bodied-One who falls on Jesus coming up from Jordan waters, as the Holy Spirit incarnate, says Luke. God as Dove-Animal, shaped by Wind-Air-Breath, tutoring the Messiah in his wilderness vision-quest and then accompanying him at every step along the way as that Spirit-Bird-Familiar by which he confronts demons and exposes Principalities. Spirit-Wind, if you want, as the Third Person of the Trinity, moving in and out of us and of every other living thing on the planet, at every millisecond!
Radical Discipleship 