By Ric Hudgens
Summer Reading Subverting Supremacy Stories
By Tommy Airey, exclusively for RadicalDiscipleship.Net
This summer, Lindsay and I maneuvered a ministry of migration. We pivoted between and beyond the Kirkridge Retreat Center in the Poconos of northeast Pennsylvania, a studio apartment two blocks from the Deschutes River in Central Oregon and a wide stretch of beach on the Pacific Ocean on Acjachemen land in Southern California. I spent some of this time working on a book that lays out a biblical spirituality for white folks and middle-class people breaking rank from the default narratives of dominant culture. Those of us navigating the wilderness that borders both fundamentalism and liberalism need a spiritual training program for the ultra-marathon race of recognizing and resisting the supremacy stories scripted by whiteness, hetero-patriarchy, the profit motive, the penal system and patriotism.
My friend Sarah Nahar says this kind of inner work is like shedding colonial codes of conduct. Rev. Lynice Pinkard compares it to learning another language: speaking treason fluently. I like breaking rank because it sounds so subversive—what spirituality should be. Break rank with supremacy stories and you’ll gain your soul—and lose your social respectability. Try calling out capitalism at your church potluck. It sounds like a conspiracy, which in Latin means “to breathe with.” To grow our souls, us middle-class folk need mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Because our hearts have stopped. But here’s the rub: we can only get CPR from those chronically oppressed by supremacy stories. So we start breathing with those who are Black and Brown, Indigenous and Immigrant, women and working poor.
Continue reading “Summer Reading Subverting Supremacy Stories”Learning from the Other
By Ched Myers, for the 15th Sunday of Pentecost (Mk 7:24-37)
Note: This is a re-post of Ched’s brief comments on the Markan gospel readings from the Revised Common Lectionary during year B, 2015. The original piece was posted on September 3, 2015.
In a doublet I called a “tale of two women” (5:21-43; see my blog on the gospel for 5 Pentecost) Mark presented two linked healings in “Jewish” symbolic territory. He now narrates a corresponding doublet in clearly marked “Gentile” space (7:24). Tyre and Sidon were coastal cities not only well outside Palestinian Jewish society, but historic centers of the Phoenician naval empire, a legendary adversary of Israel (see e.g. Ezekiel 26-28), though now part of the Roman province of Syria. These healings of a woman and man are thus surprising, and serve as object lessons in the inclusivity just advocated in the previous Markan episode. Continue reading “Learning from the Other”
It Is Harder to End a War Than Begin One
By Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler, Senior Minister, Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ & Director & Chief Visionary, Faith Strategies, LLC
Twenty years ago, planes crashed into the World Trade Centers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. There was disbelief, weeping, and shock as people in the affected areas looked for their loved ones. There was a deep eeriness in the air, and grief and disbelief set in, and then the tone began to shift to revenge and retribution. Chants began to arise like “USA! USA! USA!” Politicians and preachers began to use the phrase “God bless America,” as if America was somehow more deserving of God’s blessings than anywhere else.
Three days later I was speaking on the phone with an insurance company representative about a personal matter, and the insurance representative paused the call so that the entire office could sing “God Bless America.” The news sources were all rattling their proverbial sabers, and it would only be a short amount of time before all the pistons would be firing in the war engine. It was a time 20 years ago, a moment, and a setting that the American public could be cajoled and sold anything seemingly patriotic and retaliatory, and it was. The military went into Afghanistan to dislodge Al Qaeda, and it stayed to create a new government and country. Something that the Soviets had tried to do previously. But that was not a history that the US learned from because the neo-cons and the defense contractors with the military industrialists decided that it was an opportunity to reconstruct a region in its own image, control the natural resources of the region, and to create governments loyal to the interest of the west and particularly the US.
Continue reading “It Is Harder to End a War Than Begin One”Wasichu
An excerpt from Alice Walker’s Living By The Word (1988).
Wasichu was a term used by the Oglala Sioux to designate the white man, but it had no reference to the color of his skin. It means He who takes the fat. It is possible to be white and not a Wasichu or to be a Wasichu and not white. In the United States, historically speaking, Wasichus of color have usually been in the employ of the military, which is the essence of Wasichu.
The Wasichu speaks, in all his US history books, of “opening up virgin lands.” Yet there were people living here on “Turtle Island,” as the Indians called it, for thousands of years; but living so gently on the land that to Wasichu eyes it looked untouched. Yes, it was “still,” as they wrote over and over again, with lust, “virginal.” If it were a bride, the Wasichus would have permitted it to wear a white dress. For centuries on end Native Americans lived on the land, making love to it through worship and praise, without once raping or defiling it. The Wasichus—who might have chosen to imitate the Indians, but didn’t because to them the Indians were savages—have been raping and defiling it since the day they came. It is ironic to think that if the Indians who were here then “discovered” America as it is now, they would find little reason to want to stay. This is a fabulous land, not because it is a country, but because it is soaked in so many years of love. And though the Native Americans fought as much as any other people among themselves (much to their loss!), never did they fight against the earth, which they correctly perceived as their mother, or against their father, the sky, now thought of mainly as “outer space,” where primarily bigger and “better” wars have a projected future.
Continue reading “Wasichu”A Kind of Radical Leaning
A few excerpts from Angela Flournoy’s interview with community organizer, scholar and mother-of-three Melina Abdullah in last weekend’s LA Times. The entire interview is well worth the read!
When we think about the Black Radical Tradition, we traditionally go back to the ’60s. But I think that we actually want to go back further — we want to go back to the moment that we were stolen from Africa. If we think about the freedom struggle from chattel slavery, Mama Harriet [Tubman] wasn’t saying, “Just end slavery,” she was saying, “Let’s get to freedom.” That’s the Black Radical Tradition, not just freeing ourselves from conditions but freeing ourselves from an entire system that’s built on our exploitation and our un-freedom. When you talk about the anti-lynching movement, Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell, they were intent not just on ending lynching but also building a world where Black people could grow and prosper. The Black Radical Tradition is abolitionist. It’s about upending unjust systems. But also, there’s another side. Angela Davis reminds us you have to upend unjust systems and you have to envision and build towards new ones. You have to have the vision to build towards a new world.
Continue reading “A Kind of Radical Leaning”Sisters of the Same Seed
Image credit: Kris’ daughter Flora, 3 (top), and Em’s daughter Lorena, 2.5 (bottom) kneed dough from the same family sourdough starter 1,400 kilometres apart, Em and Kris Jacoby, April 2021, Castleton, Vermont and Chicago, Illinois.By Em Jacoby. Originally published in Geez 61: Seeds are Sacred.
I am repeatedly called back, like a ministry, to the growing, tending, gathering, transforming, and sharing of food.
The seed was planted during one of my teenage summers spent living on my sister’s small homestead in rural Vermont. I heard my sister say: Why not centre your life around something that is essential for it? I looked down at the dough I was kneading as I heard the coos of my infant nephew.
Two decades later, though Kris remains on that rural homestead and I live in a dense urban neighbourhood 1,400 kilometres (880 miles) away, we share a calling to food as though we share a kitchen. I can still taste that dough we were kneading, rich with ricotta and basil. Only now, my ricotta comes from boiling cast-off gallons of food-bank-donated milk from a Nicaraguan neighbour; Kris’ comes from Tulip, the brown cow born and raised in view of the kitchen window, milked a few hours earlier. While my basil grows in hand-built boxes that hang over my porch railing two stories up, Kris’ comes from the rows of vibrant green herbs in her fields ready to cut for farmers markets.
I easily spend 40 hours a week in my kitchen. I find my vocation in the grinding of grains mounding into a peak in the shiny metal bowl beneath, the dripping of whey from fermenting cream cheese, the snap of a sealed jar of canned tomato sauce speckled with basil and peppercorn. Because of my sister’s words – their grounding in sustainability and history – I am repeatedly called back, like a ministry, to the growing, tending, gathering, transforming, and sharing of food. Even sitting here to write these words, my mind wanders to the seedlings sprouting up from dirt-packed milk cartons resting on my bathroom tiles, and to the pumpkin roasted last fall now thawing to bake into spice bread as edible gratitude for a neighbour.
Continue reading “Sisters of the Same Seed”On the Wild Goose Festival
Re-posted with permission from the social media account of Alicia Crosby, a writer, speaker and justice educator from Chicago (August 18, 2021).
When I resigned from my leadership position at the Wild Goose Festival in 2016 I asked the board a question.
Do you want to be a prophetic place for transformation or a playground for white progressives?
When <10 sessions out of 400+ focus on racial equity, the answer is clear.
I should note that most of those <10 sessions are not explicitly named as racial justice spaces but I can trust @lennyaduncan, @JoLuehmann, @irobyn, @RevDrBarber, & my beloved Dr. Forbes to prioritize what is just because I know their public theology & preaching pushes for this.
Aside from the impudence of still hosting an multi-day, in-person event in which masks are not required during a COVID surge across the South, it’s clear to me that safety is still not being prioritized in myriad ways.
Continue reading “On the Wild Goose Festival”Other Vehicular Pathways of Prayer
By Bayo Akomolafe, a re-post from social media (August 9, 2021)
Growing up in an evangelical Christian community meant I was coached to think of prayer as a direct line to heaven – a telephone call I could make anytime I wanted. The problem was: God didn’t always pick up.
How does one make sense of that?
Competing theologies of prayer had different ways of making sense of divine rejection. God said no when we had not atoned for unconfessed sins, intoned one theory. Another theory presumed the pre-eminence of God’s Will, an intelligently composed plan so far-reaching in its consequences, so cosmic in its details, so wise in its objectives, that the only way an omniscient, omnibenevolent deity could ensure its completion was to lovingly reject our counter-proposals scripted in mortal and flawed ignorance. The clergy class therefore exhorted us to “pray in God’s will”: that is, to learn the details of this vast fabric of Being, and thread our petitions through the embroidery of this predetermined material. If the answer we sought wasn’t coming, we were to keep praying anyway (“delay is not denial”). The rumour that God worked in mysterious ways kept things fresh and exciting.
Continue reading “Other Vehicular Pathways of Prayer”Los Samaritanos
An update from Chava Redonnet (right), the priest at Oscar Romero Inclusive Catholic Church (Sunday, August 8, 2021).
Dear Friends,
Three years ago we invited some folks in Batavia to get together and talk about how we might support people being released from the detention center. Fili and his family had noticed that there was a need. We wanted to respond as St Romero’s but soon realized that we needed people who lived closer to the center, and needed the input and participation of people and churches in Batavia. The group that met that first night included several pastors – Presbyterian, Methodist, UCC, and myself, as well as some folks not connected with churches. It took us a while to figure out the details, but eventually we had a sign hanging up in the gas station where people are left to wait for a bus, with a number to call if you needed help and a bilingual person holding the phone, who could alert folks that there was a need. Fili told us that we should include on the sign the message, “You are not alone.”
Continue reading “Los Samaritanos”
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