Beyond a Brave New World:
Anarchism and Christianity for the Coming Age

July 29 & 30, 2011

Location
Faith Mennonite Church
Minneapolis, Minn.

Updated July 20, 2011. Schedule is subject to change as sessions are finalized.

FRIDAY

Noon: Arrival

1 p.m. – Welcome and Worship

2:30 – 4 p.m.
Anarchism and Christianity Primer
What is anarchism? Can a Christian be anarchist? How can these two concepts fit together? Explore the connections between anarchist ideology and practice, and Christian faith. This session is ideal for who the intersection between anarchism and Christianity is a relatively new idea.
Speakers: Sarah Lynne Anderson and Mark Van Steenwyk

Rise of the Technological Panopticon
This session will explore systems of control with a focus on the ideas/archetypes that form them. Presenter Mike Sosteric will discuss the examine the school system, the church, media, and Hollywood as agents of indoctrination who, wittingly or unwittingly, inseminate the mass consciousness with “system archetypes” thereby re-creating system and perpetuating domination. After establishing the nature of “the system” and exposing some of the key archetypes, he will explore surveillance as a way to monitor and control ideas. with a focus on Facebook and Google as building blocks in the quintessential global panopticon. Finally, the session will close with methods of resistance.
Speaker: Mike Sosteric

4:15 – 5:45 p.m.
Learning for Liberation: The Intersections of Education, Oppression, and Spirituality
This session will use a participatory approach to explore how the dominant education model in our society of “schooling” prepares us to be complicit in an unjust society, encourages us to live lives that are antithetical to Christ’s vision, and problematizes the role of spirituality in learning through politicization and oppression. Beginning by looking at Jesus’s teaching style, the educational process for the disciples and apostles, and what we can gather from other historical information about what “education” looked like in Early Christian Society, we will develop a toolbox of liberative ways of sharing knowledge. We all share expertise in teaching and learning – having learned all our lives – and we will use this shared expertise to look at non-schooling models and frameworks out there for teaching and learning. How are these alternative models different from school? How are we empowered to take action and effect the world around us through alternate frameworks for learning? How do these alternate frameworks shift how we experience ourselves and each other in the educational process? And what are the implications in all of this of the role of the spiritual experience in learning as a visionary part of the process of liberation?
Facilitator: Autumn Brown

Big Brother IS Watching
This presentation will analyze the use of the grand jury system as an investigative tool of the prosecutor, focusing on it’s use against dissidents and radicals. Drawing on her own experience as well as a long history within radical communities of grand jury harassment and resistance, Carrie Feldman will discuss a person’s legal rights when subpoenaed to a grand jury, as well as strategies of noncooperation.
Speaker: Carrie Feldman

6 p.m. – Dinner

7 – 8:30 p.m.
Hope for the 21st Century: Defending the sacredness of life, and the natural order of God’s damaged Creation, in the Robotic-Biotech Age
How can we find the spiritual strength and strategic vision to defend the holy innocents of the 21st century from automated idols that demand a terminal sacrifice of natural life? Unpiloted drones prowling the skies of southwest Asia and beyond, tracking suspected insurgents and rocketing mud walled villages, are just the most visible tip of a swiftly emerging new era in human and planetary history. The secularizing power of materialist science, moral relativism, and techno-consumer society has brought us the final stage of imperial civilization–laying siege to the very definition and integrity of life in God’s already damaged natural Creation. As a global resource extraction economy pulls the fraying fabric of human society into militarized peak-output crisis, the accelerating merger of corporate/state robotics, nanotech and biotechnology is preparing a final solution more ominous even than the problem itself: a terminal matrix of artificializing control that aims to mutate the very essence of humanity and Creation into a demonic counterfeit reality, a “transhuman” and “post-biological” era. In the perilous extreme of the System’s power and overextension lies the opportunity for strategic spiritual resistance to sustain a living remnant for our grandchildren, and the possibility of healing renewal.
Speaker: Peter Lumsdaine

9 pm – Joyful Noise
Concert at Walker Church featuring Insomniac Folklore and others.

SATURDAY

8 a.m. – Breakfast

9:15 – 10:45 am
Resisting the Prison Industrial Complex
This session will examine factors contributing to the rise and expansion of the prison industrial complex (PIC). The United States currently has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Over 2.4 million persons are in state or federal prisons and jails — a rate of 751 out of every 100,000. Another 5 million are under some sort of correctional supervision such as probation or parole The proliferation of the prison as the primary means of punishment has far-reaching implications for communities of color and the poor in particular, but it affects everyone, impacting employment opportunities, school policy, the political landscape and the delivery of professional services to current and former inmates, their families and communities. Special attention will be paid to actions we can take to dismantle the PIC.
Speaker: Nancy Heitzeg

Sexuality, Spirituality and Christian-Radicalism
Chelsea Collonge will be giving an overview of challenges in sexual health and justice facing our intentional Christian communities and broader social justice movements, as well as recent progressive and radical Christian approaches to sexual health and justice.
Speakers: Amaryah Armstrong, Chelsea Collogne and Sarah Thompson

11 am – 12:30 pm
Emerging Beyond Systems of Oppression:
An Examination of the Early Teachings in Social/Historical Context
Christianity emerged from the desert periphery of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire’s growth necessitated centuries of imperial conquest, stratification and extensive resource extraction. The result was widespread state oppression, social injustice and environmental instability. Christianity responded to the Roman Empire’s oppression and domination through political mobilization, social transformation and ecological restoration. A knowledge that taught ecocentrism, communalism, and material simplicity is revealed in the oral and written tradition of first-century Christianity. To practice Christianity in accordance with the teachings of Jesus was to be inherently opposed to conquest and expansion. In resistance to the imperial lifestyle of the Roman Empire, the early Christian communities sought balance between humans beings, and between human and non-human beings.
Speaker: Amanda Barker

Whose new world are we creating anyways?
Moving beyond our analysis towards a decolonized praxis
Over the years, Christian Anarchists from the United States have developed and sharpened their analysis—redefining what it means to be a Christian living in empire and in the civilization project. However, we cannot stay in the theoretical. Jesus was a practitioner. How do we put this analysis into practice in a globalized context? Communities all over the world have been resisting empire for generations How do enter into partnerships with them, learn from them, and become allies in a global struggle for liberation? When does our analysis reinforce practices based on privilege and power and when does it help us enter into ally-ship for mutual liberation? This session is rooted in two years experience on the ground in Colombia with Christian Peacemaker Teams and their journey of decolonized praxis in nonviolent resistance.
Speaker: Christopher Knestrick

12:30 p.m. – Lunch

1:45 – 3:15
Toward Watershed Discipleship: Re-inhabitory Theology and Practices
This talk will offer some biblical, personal and political reflections on the journey Gary Snyder calls “coming into the watershed” as a lifestyle of both resistance and renewal.
Speaker: Ched Myers

3:30 – 5:00 p.m.
Open Forum
The open forum allows people to gather for conversation based on shared interests. At the start of the time, attendees are given the space to suggest ideas for topics they would like to facilitate discussion around. Then people indicate their desire to participate in the discussion with a show of hands, and the small groups disperse for conversation. The open forum will also include time for attendees to engage speakers who are interested in taking additional questions and comments.

Workshops

• Asking the right questions: Negotiating interactions between our values and new technologies: We will begin our session by focusing on understanding what our values are, and how they intersect with technology, before moving into a disambiguation session, teasing apart the multiple ideas caught up in words such as “security” or “privacy”. Building on this then, we will discuss the tensions between individual values and societal values, and then explore some of the leading issues at hand, including the implications of large sets of data, of algorithms that are not understood, of information warfare and leaked data from governments and organizations. Content will be aimed at a general, non-specialist level, but resources will be provided to enable those interested to dig deeper into each topic. A limited supply of resources (books, CDs) will be available, free of charge, to participants. (Jordan Peacock)

• Bioregionalism and Anarcho-Primitivism: A Conversation. Exploring the suggestion that full-spectrum engagement at the level of watersheds can resolve the perceived dichotomy between radical and “reformist” Christian anarchist politics. (Ched Myers)

• Radical Parenting Roundtable: Carolyn Griffeth mother of two adopted boys, one with special needs, will facilitate a discussion on parenting.  Topics will include: the decision to have kids or not or to adopt, the particular forms of oppression parents face, raising children in intentional community, and the challenges of raising children in this time. Parents are welcome to join this circle of support. Non-parents are welcome to share their dreams and questions. (Carolyn Griffeth)

• Sexuality, Spirituality and Christian-Radicalism: A meditative and interactive workshop on sexuality and spirituality that invites participants to reflect on their own sexual story and journey in community in a sacred, confidential, voluntary space. (Amaryah Armstrong, Chelsea Collogne, Sarah Thompson)

• The Historical Black Christian Church in America as an Anarchical Community: The American Civil Right Movement is viewed by some as embodying anarchical social and philosophical characteristics.  The American Civil Rights Movement was a critique on the city, state and federal political structure of segregation. One of the “back-bones” or the physical structure of this movement of transformation was The Black Christian Church. The workshop will discussion the origins of The Black Church in American,  the church relationship and structure and how The Black Church solidified community in a hostile social and political environment of segregation. The workshop will explore what community structure we need to build to have a stable foundation “to live as anarchists and radical followers of Jesus” (Jocelyn Perry)

If you are definitely coming to the conference (as in, you have registered, your travel plans are made and your bags are packed) and you have an idea for and the supplies to lead a workshop, send an e-mail to conference [at] jesusradicals [dot] com for consideration.

5:30 p.m. – Dinner

7 – 8:30 p.m.
Recipes for the Beloved Community: Creating Structures to Help Radical Christian Communities Thrive
Description forthcoming…
Speakers: Carolyn Griffeth