Check out a WNBC (New York City) video report on my anarchist Catholic bud Sander Hicks‘ Publish Yourself and Vox Pop shops in Brooklyn.
A couple years ago, Sander and I started an email conversation/interview to share on CatholicAnarchy.org, but we never got around to finishing it. Maybe this summer we can start that back up again and update you on some of the amazing things he’s doing in NYC.
Robyn Blumner of the Salt Lake Tribune contributes a great piece on religious intolerance in the u.s. military, namely the harassment of atheist soldiers by Christian ones:
[Army Spc. Jeremy]Hall, 23, served two combat tours in Iraq, winning the Combat Action Badge. But he’s now stationed at Fort Riley, Kan., having been returned stateside early because the Army couldn’t ensure his safety.
There is something deeply amiss when we send soldiers on a mission to engender peaceful coexistence between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, yet our military doesn’t seem able to offer religious tolerance to its own.
Hall recounts the events that led to his marginalization in a federal lawsuit he filed in Kansas in March. He is joined by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a group devoted to assisting members of the military who object to the pervasive and coercive Christian proselytizing in our armed forces.
Hall’s atheism became an issue soon after it became known. On Thanksgiving 2006 while stationed outside Tikrit, Hall politely declined to join in a Christian prayer before the holiday meal. The result was a dressing down by a staff sergeant who told him that as an atheist he needed to sit somewhere else.
In another episode, after Hall’s gun turret took a bullet that almost found an opening, the first thing a superior wanted to know was whether Hall believed in Jesus now, not whether he was OK.
Then, in July, while still in Iraq, Hall organized a meeting of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers. According to Hall, after things began, Maj. Freddy Welborn disrupted the meeting with threats, saying he might bring charges against Hall for conduct detrimental to good order and discipline, and that Hall was disgracing the Constitution. (Er, I think the major has that backward.)
[…]
This is nothing new to Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and a former Air Force judge advocate general who also served in the Rea-gan administration. Weinstein says that he has collected nearly 8,000 complaints, mostly from Christian members of the military tired of being force-fed a narrow brand of evangelical fundamentalism.
Weinstein, who co-wrote the book With God on Our Side: One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military, has documented how the ranks of our military have been infiltrated by members of the Officers’ Christian Fellowship and other similar organizations. On its Web site, the OCF makes no secret of its mission, which is to ”raise up a godly military” by enlisting ”ambassadors for Christ in uniform.”
Of course, for the first few centuries of its existence, Christians were not permitted to join the military. After Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire, one could not join the military unless one was a Christian. How far we’ve come from the originating impulse of the first Christians, and how far away we remain.
“Does war alter our ‘grammar of assent’?
In times of peace, do we see ourselves as Christians (a solid, sure noun) who happen to be American (adjective, of secondary import)? Which is to suggest: we could be Christians who ‘happen to be’ Afghan or Iraqi. An alteration in our self-understanding, to be sure: but the center and pivot, “Christian,” would stand firm, the task and blessing accorded to peacemakers. And this, whether we live amid victims or victimizers: small matter, same vocation.
Wartime. And we are subtly or overtly urged: Alter the sense of who you are in the world. Lines are drawn; the culture of war exerts a huge, central claim. The cultural enlistment is a curse; we are urged to ignore the central teaching and example of Christ. ‘For the duration,’ we are to be Americans first and foremost — Americans who happen to be Christians.”
(Daniel Berrigan, The Kings and Their Gods: The Pathology of Power [Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008])
Another World is Nececssary: Anarchism, Christianity and the Race from the White House
August 15-16, 2007
Columbus, Ohio
As election fever rises throughout the United States and the contest for the White House becomes more fierce, the masses will clamor for a new Commander in Chief to assume the seat of American power. This year, it seems as if the game has changed as a female candidate appears to fulfill feminist dreams and a viable Black candidate raises hopes for Black freedom and signals the weakening of racism. But is this really the case? For those who follow the One who confronted the powers and embrace the One who came as a Suffering Servant, these changes are not enough to leave this political system unchallenged. For those who envision an egalitarian world in which order and organization do not rely on the ever-present threat of state violence, bowing before the ballot box will not be an option.
Join us for this year’s Anarchism and Christianity conference as we explore alternatives to mainstream approaches to key issues raised in the current election, dream beyond the political options of our present system and imagine the other world we want to create. Get detailed info, and register to attend at http://conference.jesusradicals.com
NPR ran a pretty good segment on All Things Considered about lobbyists from Appalachia working to fight environmental injustice in their communities:
Lobbyists are everywhere on Capitol Hill. But it’s not always high-priced professionals that get lawmakers’ attention. A cadre of Appalachian residents has come to lobby for environmental protections from coal-mining waste. For many, it was their first trip to Washington, D.C.
Listen to it here.
A couple weeks ago I turned in the final version of the index for Brian Walsh and Steven Bouma-Prediger’s new book, Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement. Compiling an index for a book is tough work, but one of the benefits, of course, is that you get to read the book several times before anyone else gets to. I know several of my readers know Brian Walsh’s work very well, and you won’t be disappointed with this one. Rumor has it that he and Sylvia Keesmaat are working on a book on Paul’s letter to the Romans, similar in style to their popular Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire.
Here is the description of Beyond Homelessness from the Eerdman’s website:
This book goes far beyond covering the subject of homelessness as the social problem we all recognize in our cities. Mass emigrations, displaced families, and human alienation from the earth all mark our times. In critiquing contemporary North American culture, Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian Walsh discuss various forms of homelessness — socioeconomic, ecological, and psycho-spiritual — and creatively show how biblical attentiveness and Christian faith can heal the profound dislocations in our society.
Ending each of their chapters with a moving biblical meditation, the authors also interact throughout with characters and themes from current literature and popular culture — from Salman Rushdie to Barbara Kingsolver, from the Wizard of Oz to Bruce Cockburn.
Appalachia was on the radar of participants of the Theology in the Americas conference in Detroit in the summer of 1975, just months after the promulgation of the Appalachian pastoral letter This Land is Home to Me, and was included in those discussions as one of many particularized theologies in the U.S. that need to be in dialogue with one another. And while impressive grassroots activity was inspired by the pastoral letter, in recent years the excitement and sense of Appalachian identity has dwindled, and with few exceptions, very little theology has been done from an Appalachian perspective. A theology which takes Appalachia seriously would pose a challenge for theology in the United States, even for U.S. liberation theologians, as well as the Church in general.
Theology in the U.S. largely remains locked in a Western mode which is detached from reality. One bit of personal evidence for this is the fact that some fellow theology students were puzzled that I would bother attending a conference like the Appalachian Studies Association conference which met this past month. Much work is left to be done to encourage theologies that are incarnate, that make the “option for realiy” in Leonardo Boff’s terms. In particular, attention to Appalachia would challenge conceptions of Catholic social teaching which rely on abstract principles such as the “common good,” which have been used to justify destructive practices like mountaintop removal mining and assumptions about the role of the state as the “keeper of the common good.” William Cavanaugh has critiqued the way Catholics think about the nation-state, arguing that its main function is not the promotion of the common good, but for the benefit of elites. Eve Weinbaum’s ethnographic research on Appalachian politics in the book To Move a Mountain: Fighting the Global Economy in Appalachia confirms this is the case.
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