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Jesus Radicals Blog 2005-2017
Join Christians all over the United States September 25th to October 2nd for a week of taking action and encouraging the Church to bring an end to police violence. These 7 days will be filled with Jesus followers encouraging the Church to speak out against the racial injustice that the black and brown community is enduring at the hands of police. As seen in the Gospel narrative, Jesus calls the Church to practice a radical form of love that is fueled by justice and mercy, particularly centered around defending the poor, marginalized, and oppressed. However, the North American Church today has largely been silent about systemic violence affecting black and brown communities, particularly widespread police violence. This overwhelming silence and passivity as Christians not only deeply fails our neighbor, but fails our call to bring justice to a hurting world. On the night of September 16th, an unarmed black man named Terence Crutcher was shot by police after someone called in his abandoned vehicle. On his way back from attending a class at his local community college in Tulsa, Terence’s car began to experience mechanical issues. Scared the car may explode, he got out of his car to ensure his safety. Within minutes of arriving to the scene, Terence was killed by police. More: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/20/us/video-released-in-terence-crutchers-killing-by-tulsa-police.html?_r=0 Only days later on September 20th, police shot and killed Keith Lamont Scott - a disabled black man in Charlotte, North Carolina while he was reading in his car, waiting for his child to get off the bus. These are only two incidences of hundreds, where innocent lives were taken without . Many of these include black and brown women, children and members of the LGBT community. These incidents are only two of hundreds of others that have shown the merciless abuse of power by police that people of color continue to fear. It is time for us to take action to stop this violence, and encourage the Church to move towards building just and merciful cities that better reflect a vision of Beloved Community.
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9/21/2016 Comments A Blog Commentary on Luke’s Gospel, written for Settlers in the Occupied Territories called Canada (Part 2)
Note: Originally published on Dan's blog, On Journeying with Those in Exile Luke 1.1-4: Friends of God Jesus was an Indian and God is Red. Red like love and rage. Red like the earth that constitutes our bodies. Red like the waters that flow from the mothers who birth us. Red like Grandfather Sun whose warmth and light and love is given unconditionally to all. Red like the fire the Story Keepers and the Old Ones (Kehteyak in Cree) say will destroy the world of the whites. And red like ochre and the scalps of the Beothuk. The Beothuk, it is well known, were hunted for sport by European settlers, their scalps collected by those who came to bring civilization to the savages. So much civilization was brought to them, that the Beothuk are no more. This is often referred to as the “Beothuk extinction,” but that seems to suggest that the Beothuk were a species of animals — perhaps prehistoric, like the Mammoth or the Giant Sloth. But the Beothuk were a people, not prehistoric animals, and what happened to them was genocide. “Beothuk,” by the way, means “Red.” They were called “Red Indians” because they took red ochre and smeared it on their bodies. They were red like love and rage and blood and fire and God. 9/4/2016 Comments To the Church of the WestBy: Anonymous Editor's Note: An addendum will shortly follow which will provide some details on the background of this action as well as the dynamics of the response to it. August 21, 2016 Early this morning, we smashed out all the windows of the Starbucks housed in our church. Christianity and Capitalism cannot coincide. Jesus was the first to recognize this. Many years ago, businessmen attempted to conduct business in the house of God. Jesus forced them all out - causing them to lose their merchandise and their profit. He made a whip, driving out all who would sell anything in His house, and refused to allow anyone to even carry merchandise through the temple. We are Christians. We are also anarchists. We believe that Christianity necessitates anarchism, and that both are defined by freedom and by struggle – against oppression, against Capitalism, and against our Enemy. As of late, some churches have allowed Capitalism to seep into our places of worship. We follow Jesus, and cannot allow this in His house any more than He did. For this reason, in the early hours of Sunday morning, we went to our church before our brothers and sisters would arrive for worship. Following Jesus' example, we attacked the place made for buying and selling in our Father's house – smashing out all its windows. We left hundreds of copies of a letter we wrote to the church. The letter admonishes them and explains to them the spirit in which we acted. It outlines the Christian position against Starbucks, against business, and, greater still, against Capitalism. However, our letter was truly intended for the larger body, as we recognize that the church in America at large has fallen into this acceptance of buying and selling in our Father's houses. So, we address our letter, and thus our action, simply to the Church of the West. 8/25/2016 Comments A Blog Commentary on Luke's Gospel, Written for Settlers in the Occupied Territories Called Canada (Part, 1)By: Dan Oudshoorn Note: Originally published on Dan's blog, On Journeying with Those in Exile Jesus was an Indian. If you don’t understand that, you won’t understand any of the rest of it, so you’ve got to get this first. Let me try to be clear about this. By saying that “Jesus was an Indian,” I don’t mean that Jesus was from India. India didn’t even exist back in his day, given that what we call India was actually a number of different kingdoms or empires rooted in people like the Satavahanas, or the Indo-Scythian Sakas, or the Mahameghavahanas, to name just three of about a dozen different options. So I’m not saying Jesus was a proto-Indian, as though he came from that region. Furthermore, although a fringe group of people like to say Jesus went to India to study and learn in the years we hear nothing about in the canonical Gospels (for example, in an universally discredited book claiming to offer “irrefutable evidence” and entitled Jesus Lived in India, Holger Kersten argues Jesus lived in India when he was young, where he became a spiritual master in Buddhism, and then returned there to grow old and die after he rose from the dead), that’s not what I’m saying. No, Jesus was an Indian in the same sense that the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabeg, the ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐤ, the Wet’suwet’en, the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, the Tlicho, and the more than 630 First Nations in Canada are Indians. And Jesus is an Indian in exactly the same way that members of all of these nations are Indians. Because what does it mean to say that the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island are “Indians”? Well, to begin with, it means that they are a people who have been colonized by a foreign power who gives them names not of their choosing. This applies as much to people as it does to the land. Hence, Turtle Island is no longer known as Turtle Island. It is called North America, and Canada, and the United States of America are the nations that are said to be present there (I’ll stick to Canada in what follows, as that is the land my people have colonized). And in Canada, for most of its history, the original peoples – the Onkwehonwe to use the Kanien’kehá:ka word – were not known by the names they had received from the land but by the names given by those who colonized both them and the land (although it is wrong to imply that the people and land can be separated and thought of as two distinct entities). They became Indians because that was the name given to them by the settlers who wielded power over Life and Death and who gave out the latter far more than the former. By: Jesus Radicals The organizers of Jesus Radicals support the Stone Camp resistance movement in its struggle to defend the waters of Standing Rock, to protect their tribal land, and to ensure the health of their communities and millions of others. This weekend the residents at Sacred Stone Camp in Cannonball, ND are coordinating a water resistance effort. "Resistance to the Dakota Access pipeline is blossoming and hundreds are coming from all 4 directions to stand with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to defend the land and water. Please stand with us on the front lines! This pipeline threatens the longest river on Turtle Island and the drinking water of many millions of people." The resistance will continue until there is victory. The Spirit Camp community formed on April 1, 2016 along the pathway for the proposed pipeline. According to their website:
"This Spirit Camp is called Iŋyaŋ Wakháŋagapi Othí, translated as Sacred Rock, the original name of the Cannonball area. The Spirit Camp is dedicated to stopping and raising awareness the Dakota Access pipeline, the dangers associated with pipeline spills and the necessity to protect the water resources of the Missouri river. We reject the appropriation of the name “Dakota” in a project that is in violation of aboriginal and treaty lands. The word Dakota means “the People” in the Dakota/Lakota/Nakota language and was never intended to be used in a project which violates traditional ceremonial areas." Learn more and get involved by visiting their website. We encourage you to share their story widely. By: Fr. Paul Dordal The Sky Pilot I am convicted. I have been a poser. I am repenting. I am a pacifist. As I was struggling with a moral injury suffered, in large part, because of my service in Iraq as an Army Chaplain, a friend suggested in early 2015 that I read Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You. The first few pages affected me deeply. Tolstoy said, “Among the many points in which [the Institutional Church’s] doctrine falls short of the doctrine of Christ I pointed out as the principal one the absence of any commandment of non-resistance to evil by force. The perversion of Christ’s teaching by the teaching of the Church is more clearly apparent in this than in any other point of difference.” 1 As I read Tolstoy I could hear again the words of Eric Burdon song’s Sky Pilot. I realized then that in order for me to live more authentically as a Syro-Chaldean Catholic priest, a Veterans Affairs Hospital Chaplain, but more poignantly as a former US Army Chaplain and veteran of the war in Iraq, I was going to have to change: He blesses the boys as they stand in line/ 7/21/2016 Comments Outside the Gated Community: The Reality of Police Violence Towards our Sisters and Brothers of ColorBy: Jarrod Cochran My heart hangs heavy over the events of the past few weeks in my nation, the United States. I speak, of course, to the continued murders of black men and women at the hands of law enforcement. With the advent of modern technology, nearly anyone can record video of events from their cell phone. This technology has helped pull the veil open on police brutality against citizens—especially people of color. These public videos of the murders of countless black men and women have been uncomfortable for many to see. But I think it has been the worst in White, Middle-Class America. For the most part, White Americans have been in denial of what is really happening to our sisters and brothers of color (despite their continued cries for justice). Most of us had convinced ourselves that racism was over and that all of the ideals and dreams that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had worked for had been accomplished. We would tell ourselves that, "Sure, there are more blacks incarcerated per capita than whites, but that has to do with upbringing and culture. These people that are crying 'foul' are just people wanting more privileges and to free-load off of the system. After all, Bill Cosby said as much in his 'get tough talks', and he's black." This and similar critiques would be our narratives on black society, all the while ignorant of the inherent racism in our own thought processes. The murders of innocent black men and women at the hands of cops have given rise to a beautiful movement known as Black Lives Matter. These women and men have forced us to look closely at what is going on between the black community and police departments. Furthermore, it has caused us to look deeply at our understanding of race and the systems that perpetuate it. In our day and age, it is impossible to not be inundated with information on any particular subject. In no known time has so much information been so freely available and, at the same time, ignorance run so rampant. With these resources at our disposal, we residents of White America have had two options set before us: accept the reality that people of color are being targeted by police departments or double-down on our desire to remain comfortable with the status quo. 7/9/2016 Comments A Litany of LamentBy: Joanna Shenk
This post was originally written as a message to First Mennonite Church of San Francisco on Friday, July 8, 2016. Preface (not included in original message): I condemn the loss of life of any person, whether uniformed or civilian. What happened in Dallas is a tragedy which must be mourned. And in this mourning, the violence of a sniper must not be equated with the systemic state violence against Black bodies for hundreds of years in this country. Dear First Mennonite Church of San Francisco, It is with great sadness that I send this message. In the last few days the lives of two Black men have been lost to police shootings, Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. Their deaths have catalyzed many to protest and respond, including here in the Bay Area. In Dallas the lives of five police officers were taken, as violence begets violence. While these recent events—the ongoing killing of Black men by police and a sniper’s response—are unfathomable in one regard, we also must hold these situations in the light of our nation’s history. These systems of oppression are not new. The rage in communities of color, and among their allies, is not new. Our response as a community of faith is not new. We are called to comfort those who mourn and rage with those who rage at injustice. 7/9/2016 Comments Dear AmeriklansBy: Nekeisha Alayna Alexis Y’all just can’t front on us niggas no more At this crucial time in our lives when everything is so desperate, when every day is a matter of survival I don’t think you can help but be involved…We will shape and mold this country or it will not be molded and shaped at all anymore. So I don’t think you have a choice. – Nina Simone Written on July 7, 2016 Dear Americans, I am writing from a place of intense anguish and rage. I am naming this sentiment clearly, lest there be any confusion. Today is the day the police killing of Philando Castile has made the headlines, which is the day after the police killing of Alton Sterling rose to national attention. Reeling from another round of blows against we who are darker than blue, I am convinced that there needs to be new language—new terms to describe the tumultuous emotional landscape that erupts for so many Black persons when another one of our slaughtered bodies bleeds out in our streets or in our cars or on our couches or in our beds or on our playgrounds or in the halls of our apartment buildings or hangs lifelessly from a garbage bag in a jail cell. There is no single word that I know of to describe the simultaneous unsurprised surprise, the "angrief," the hopeless defiance, the wounded wrath that floods one’s entire being when unmitigated, virulent, state-sanctioned, White supremacist power and violence shows itself in another public execution. The visceral response to these acts of systemic annihilation, to this structured hatred, defies categorization. The emotion is a mystery, like trying to speak to the totality of God or the character of love in a single utterance. Yet I feel it in my body as I write to the White Majority upon whom this nation’s Klan Culture relies and through whom the plague of Black death continues. 7/4/2016 Comments The Violence of NormalBy: Regina Shands Stoltzfus Note: this article was originally published on Sojourners. As a professor of peace, justice, and conflict studies at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest, I spend a lot of time talking about violence. Early in the semester, I have my students complete a group exercise: They are given 21 sheets of paper, each sheet with an action on it, and instructions to create a continuum of these actions that span from least violent to most. These actions include kicking, starting rumors, leering, shooting someone, stabbing someone, writing graffiti, name-calling. Typically, the exercise begins easily enough—shooting and stabbing quickly make their way to the “most violent” end of the continuum. But from there, the more diverse the identities and life experiences of the students, the more difficult the exercise becomes. With that, a conversation emerges that carries over into the rest of the semester, as students each identify an aspect of violence that they will research. The question that undergirds their research, and the course itself, is, “What is the societal permission for this kind of violence?” As a nation, we expressed horror at the vile act of violence in Orlando, Fla., nearly coinciding with the one-year anniversary of more violence in Charleston, S.C. We mourn and debate stricter gun laws. Yet we ignore steps on the continuum to violence that has made such shootings almost routine. |
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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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