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Jesus Radicals Blog 2005-2017
By: Dominique Chew ![]() Lift ev’ry voice and sing, till earth and heaven ring, ring with the harmonies of liberty. Let our rejoicing rise high as the list’ning skies, let it resound loud as the rolling sea. We’re too intimate with brutality,” said Gina Athena Ulysse, author, feminist anthropology professor, ethnographer, member of the Haitian diaspora and performance artist, at a recent lecture I attended during the Brooklyn Book Festival. As she said these words, slow with firm intent, “We’re too intimate with brutality,” I thought of the time I was driving this summer, days after Sandra Bland’s death, and I noticed a cop car behind me and remembered that I didn’t have to be doing anything but looking like myself to get pulled over. I rehearsed what I would say to them to save my own life if they flashed their lights.
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12/27/2015 Comments Where can anger live?![]() By: Austin Channing Editorial note: This post was originally published on www.austinchanning.com My friend made plans to come over. Before she arrived, she sent me a text warning me that the "well-meaning" white folks at her para-ministry job made her especially mad that day. She then added, "I hope my anger will wear off by the time I arrive." Without thinking about it I replied, "Your anger is welcome here". As I thought more about her concern of carrying the anger with her, I tried to think of places where our anger is truly welcome. It's generally not safe to be angry at work- even if there is good reason to be. It's certainly not safe to be angry at church- violating the unspoken rules of niceness, politeness, graciousness and forgiveness. To be angry at school is often invalidated or dismissed altogether. I remember often being asked, "If you are so angry here, why not just go to another school?" So where can we be angry? By: Jhon ![]() In my experience as a Christian anarchist I feel that most Christians who have become anarchists do so by following their theology to its logical real world conclusions, that is to say they come to realize that Jesus teachings imply some sort of anarchism. But because they are Christians who have become anarchists they often focus on their personal theology and how they as Christians should practice this theology. I think this is great, but as an anarchist who became a Christian I feel I have acquired another perspective. All my friends are anarchists and I spend my time with them, not with any church. In spending all my time around secular anarchists I have noticed I am in a rather strange position. In being alone in this position I have noticed a huge problem. This problem seems to go rather unnoticed by everyone within these two separate worlds. The problem is simple: these two worlds are separate. As anarchists we want to end capitalism. As capitalism involves few people ruling over many and implementing economic policies that serve the few and not the many, capitalists need to keep the many convinced that their polices are in the public's best interest. So then, If we want to topple capitalism we need to inform the public that these polices and system are not in their best interest. In other words to have a successful revolution we need the public’s popular support of anarchism or a libertarian socialist economic model. 11/8/2015 Comments Is Eating Animals An Act of Love?By: Kyle Sumner ![]() According to traditional Christian thought, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus lays out a framework of sacrificial love for both God and neighbor. The Gospels of the New Testament are centered on the idea of a God who forsook Heaven to dwell among and restore a fallen creation. Rather than using power to rule in a top-down fashion, God took the form of a servant and chose to embrace the brokenness of the world. Biblical restoration, in essence, starts from the bottom up. This view of the biblical narrative supports a theology of liberation that has influenced black, feminist, womanist, and queer theologies in recent history. This view of a Messiah who stands in solidarity with the oppressed and marginalized has provided a foundation for many human rights campaigns and social justice issues, but many theologians who claim to be motivated by a God of liberation have largely glazed over issues of animal exploitation. This lack of concern for the non-human animal world has caused me to ask quite a few questions: Are animals to be considered fellow Creatures deserving of respect? Does a faith that is rooted in the life and teachings of Jesus demand of us a new way of living in relation to non-human animals? Is it possible for one to consider ones self on the side of the oppressed if they consume the flesh of those they seek to liberate? In order to answer these questions we must first look at Jesus’ unique relationship with food.
![]() AMARYAH SHAYE JONES-ARMSTRONG: WHITENESS/CREDIT AS A DEFORMED THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY The telos of border imperialism as described by Walia and served by policies like the Priority Enforcement program is manifestly blasphemous on any number of levels. The most obvious, and the most commonly identified by theologians is that it denies the presence of Christ in the persons of exploited, oppressed, colonized, and working people. On Good Friday 2013, in the middle of the campaign for Jose Maria Islas, over 200 of us gathered on the New Haven Green for a rally against Secure Communities under the banner Deportation Crucifies. The claim was simple: racist state violence is crucifying violence against the body of Christ, whose very flesh is the people. Christ identifies with every person in a deportation process, every person whose wages are stolen because they are undocumented, every person who is racially profiled by the police, every person under arrest or in detention, and, in so doing, reveals Barack Obama (and any other deporter-in-chief) to be a modern day Pontius Pilate.
Note: This article originally appeared at Political Theology GregoryWilliams ![]() On 13 August, the main floor of the New Haven People’s Center was characteristically hot and unusually crowded for a late summer evening. About half a dozen lawyers, nonprofit workers, and labor union staff were there for a meeting of the Connecticut Immigrant Rights Alliance. So, too, were scores of rank and file members of the New Haven Workers’ Association – Unidad Latina en Accion (a group that I worked with as a white co-conspirator for three years and am very thankful to for giving me permission to write this article, as well as some guidance as to its content). The subject of the meeting was ICE’s new “Priority Enforcement Program” (PEP), the latest instantiation of information-sharing between immigration and local law enforcement, which now threatens to make not only police stations, but also probation offices, drug treatment programs, and other elements of the criminal (in)justice system unsafe places for immigrants, places where they could easily be handed over to immigration and taken away from their family in chains. “It can happen to anyone” and “it can happen anywhere” were the twin themes of the evening. To me, and to a growing number of Jesus-followers in this country, it is patently obvious that the complex of policies, institutions, discourses, and practices known collectively as “the immigration system” violates every possible standard of hospitality—not to mention basic justice—that could conceivably be adopted within a recognizably Christian social ethic. Excellent work has already been and is currently being done to flesh this out by far more able theologians than me. A prime example of this is the excellent documentary Trails of Hope and Terror recently written by Iliff School of Theology professor Miguel de la Torre. This work – and the particular directions that the system is moving, especially in the ways that it is drawing local police into the task of “enforcing” the racialized boundaries of American civic life prompt another question: just what are the theological claims borne within the system itself? What theses about God, about morality, and about the nature and good of the human person are being articulated in concrete and barbed wire, and in the laws and practices that legitimize and empower these technologies of violence? And how does this question relate to the theological problem of race in America more generally? And how might practices like grassroots community organizing and direct action pose alternative claims that are in greater conformity to the gospel of Jesus Christ?
Sermon Audio: ![]() I want to turn back now to my own story, to try to share with you some more of my process of liberation. Because I know lots of us here are thinking right now: what about the happy cows, what about the good farmers, what about how my family has raised animals for generations, what about my pasture-raised chickens, what about the Goshen farmer’s market, what about the Amish cheesemakers? Certainly, this isn’t all bad, is it? I asked those same questions for five years, from my first month on Heifer Ranch when I helped kill and process 90 chickens with my friends, to Ash Wednesday of 2014 when I realized I was vegan. But the most important query of all was the one the lawyer asked Jesus in Luke 10, “Who is my neighbor?” Because the gospel makes it clear that our experience of eternal life, our experience of the Beloved Community, depends on our answer to that question. Who is it that gets to participate in our community as neighbor, and conversely, who is it that must participate in our community as a slave, a prisoner, a non-member? I’ve shared about Cinnamon, now I want to tell you about Gloria. Gloria was a pig we took care of at the Ranch. She came to us in the autumn with a couple others, all of them were feeders, piglets who were weaned, weighing about 30 pounds. Gloria and the others were cute, curious, and friendly. Every day through the fall and winter we would bring them scraps from the kitchen to supplement their grain diet. It was such fun to be with the pigs when they were enjoying these treats we brought. Gloria was eating basically what I was eating from the cafeteria. This commonality made Gloria feel to me as if she were a community member. Interacting with her was part of my daily routine, she responded to my touch when I patted her head, and she came up in conversation with other community members. It seemed she was my neighbor, and I thought of her as such. By: Joanna Shenk Note: Originally published at Geez Magazine ![]() Living in the Shadow of the Cross: Understanding and Resisting the Power and Privilege of Christian Hegemony by Paul Kivel New Society Publishers, 2013 What do post-Christendom and the “War on Christmas” have in common? They both acknowledge that Christian authority is being challenged in the Western world. For the post-Christendom camp this is a welcome change, since Christianity has been severely compromised due to its collusion with empire throughout history. For those concerned about the War on Christmas, it is an affront to their faith and their understanding of what it means to live in the United States. In his book Living in the Shadow of the Cross: Understanding and Resisting the Power and Privilege of Christian Hegemony, Paul Kivel challenges readers to deepen their analysis. Deeper than post-Christendom and the War on Christmas is the massive system of Christian hegemony. Whereas the former ways of thinking acknowledge that norms are shifting, an awareness of Christian hegemony unmasks the framework that created and perpetuates the norms.
Sermon Audio: ![]() “Is this not the fast that I choose:...to let the oppressed go free and to break every yoke?” Sometimes liberation happens in an instant; with great power, the Spirit of God releases us from some great oppression. We recall the story of the exodus, the resurrection, the healing of lepers. Paul and Silas busted out of prison. More often, though, liberation is a long walk, full of resistance, struggle, and repentance. Perhaps we can think of growing into freedom, like how, over years, the persistent work of shoots and sprouts can fracture pavement and liberate the land beneath. I want to share with you this morning a testimony of this slow kind of freedom, of how many seeds took root in my concrete heart and grew to set me loose from the violence on my dinner table. Thanks be to God, now I can eat in peace. Five years ago, I watched a goat die in my arms. She was called Cinnamon, and her death was an accident. I was working at the time as a livestock volunteer at Heifer Ranch, a large farm and education center operated by Heifer International. My work was to help care for Cinnamon and all the other animals there. She had been in a temporary paddock with the other dairy goats. We used portable electric net fencing to set up grazing areas all over the Ranch. The goats helped us maintain healthy grassland by clearing foliage from brushy places. Sometime during the night, Cinnamon had become entangled in the fence. Normally, the pulse of electricity in the fence would give a shock that hurts about as much as being pinched or poked with a needle. Once she was stuck, that pulse became a torturous metronome in the pre-dawn hours. She was crying out in pain as we came to check the goats in the morning. Her eyelids and gums, normally flush and red, were ghostly white. A few minutes after we injected a dose of opiates, she died. By: Rev. Dr. Jarrod Cochran ![]() I've chewed on the whole Kim Davis controversy in the media for the last few days and I think I've gathered my thoughts enough to make a greater comment. I'm a radical Christian, so naturally I support disobeying authority when it works against, subjugates, and oppresses others. Following a long line of Jewish prophets and Jesus himself, creative, nonviolent civil disobedience is called for against corruption and injustice. With that said, I've seen quite a few posts attributing Davis' refusal to issue marriage licenses to gay couples in line with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his defiance of an unjust government. However, King and the countless other leaders in the Civil Rights Movement defied a government to obtain equal rights, while Davis adamantly stands opposed to granting equal rights towards those she deems go against "God's will". Make no mistake, Kim Davis nor the profiteers who are piggy-backing on her 15 minutes of fame for political points (Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz) are anything close to prophets. If we must to attempt to compare Davis and Company to people of eras past, we would find her not on the side of King but amid the throng of racists on the sidewalk supporting segregation during one of King's marches. |
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The viewpoints expressed in each reader-submitted article are the authors own, and not an “official Jesus Radicals” position. For more on our editorial policies, visit our submissions page. If you want to contact an author or you have questions, suggestions, or concerns, please contact us. CategoriesAll Accountability Advent Anarchism Animal Liberation Anthropocentrism Appropriation Biblical Exegesis Book Reviews Bread Capitalism Catholic Worker Christmas Civilization Community Complicity Confessing Cultural Hegemony Decolonization Direct Action Easter Economics Feminism Heteropatriarchy Immigration Imperialism Intersectionality Jesus Justice Lent Liberation Theology Love Mutual Liberation Nation-state Nonviolence Occupy Othering Pacifisim Peace Pedagogies Of Liberation Police Privilege Property Queer Racism Resistance Resurrection Sexuality Solidarity Speciesism Spiritual Practices Technology Temptation Veganism Violence War What We're Reading On . . . White Supremacy Zionism ContributorsNekeisha Alayna Alexis
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October 2017
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