Religion

After The Harvest: Learning To Leave The Planet Gracefully

June 20, 2014 Robert Jensen, www.wagingnonviolence.org Create! Energy, Environment, History, Religion

Every time I read the latest bad-and-getting-worse news about the health of the ecosphere, such as last month’s report that the melting of some giant glaciers had passed the point of no return, I think back to a conversation 25 years ago that helps me put such news in perspective. In a Minneapolis bakery where my new friend Jim Koplin and I had settled into a Friday morning coffee session to analyze the world, and gossip a bit, Koplin told me that he thought the most important task for human beings — as a species, not just as individuals — was “learning to leave the planet gracefully.” Why would human beings need to learn to leave the planet gracefully? The answer — so painfully obvious today, as the evidence about ecological crises piles up, readily available to anyone who chooses to know — was clear to Koplin more than 25 years ago. Although he wasn’t prone to quoting scripture, I am, so let me offer a “why” in the words of Jeremiah from the Hebrew Bible: “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” (Jeremiah 8:20)

Divestment Passes GA Committee

June 18, 2014 Rev. Dr. Jeffrey DeYoe, www.israelpalestinemissionnetwork.org Resist! Divestment, Israel, Palestine, Presbyterian Church, Religion

The Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (USA) is pleased to announce that an overture endorsing selective divestment from three US companies that profit from Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands has been passed by a vote of 45-20 by the Middle East Issues Committee of the 221st General Assembly. Following a passionate discussion of divestment featuring voices in support and opposed, a majority of committee members supported the overture, calling for the church to divest its holdings from Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard, and Motorola Solutions for their involvement in sustaining Israeli human rights abuses and non-peaceful pursuits. This decision was part of a larger action crafted to express ongoing support to both the Israeli and Palestinian people and the ongoing conversation for peace, security, and justice.

The Final Tar Sands Healing Walk

June 17, 2014 Jonathan, www.onerivernews.ca Resist! Healing Walk, Indigenous Rights, Protest, Religion, Tar Sands

The fifth and final Healing Walk represents a milestone for local communities affected by Oilsands development. The final Healing Walk does not mean the problems faced have been solved, rather organizers say they have achieved the goals set out from the original Healing Walk, and it is time to move forward. The Healing Walk has successfully let local communities know they have support in facing the rapid industrialization of their home territories, as well as raised local and international awareness, and brought people together to pray for the land. Organizers feel it is time to support communities both in and now beyond the Athabasca. The Healing Walk this year will help move discussions forward and will include planning for events in new communities next summer, and planning on how to support more communities. Co-organizers R.A.V.E.N trust say, “While this may be the final Healing Walk in Fort McMurray, it is the beginning of the next stage of the journey.” They ask that as many people as possible please come and join help plan for the future.

United Methodist Church Divests From US Security Company

June 13, 2014 United Methodist Kairos Response, www.kairosresponse.org Resist! Divestment, Methodists, Palestine, Religion, Social Justice

The General Board of Pension and Health Benefits (GBPHB) of The United Methodist Church, which manages an investment portfolio of over $20 billion, has instructed its investment manager to sell immediately all shares in G4S, due in part to concerns about the company's involvement in human rights violations in the Israeli prison system and the military occupation of Palestinian territories.   According to David Wildman, United Methodist Executive Secretary for Human Rights and Racial Justice at the General Board of Global Ministries, "This is the first time that a United Methodist general agency has included human rights violations related to Israel's illegal settlements and military occupation in a decision to divest from a company. We celebrate this strong human rights message both to G4S specifically and to other companies whose business operations support longstanding human rights abuses against Palestinians."   In addition, the church agency has placed a moratorium on any future purchases of G4S, the world's largest security company with operations in over 120 countries, until a new investment screen is implemented that addresses human rights violations such as those by the Israeli Defense Forces against Palestinians.   

The Glorious New Brunswick Shale Gas Rebellion Of 2013

June 7, 2014 Kairos, www.ht.ly Resist! Canada, Gas, Indigenous Rights, Protest, Religion

The harsh, violent and public denial of the right of Mi'kmaq peoples in New Brunswick to free prior and informed consent (FPIC) to shale gas developments on their lands made it to the news and table discussions everywhere. And it is still providing global citizens with an insight into a shocking, inspiring and historic movement of allied peoples in Canada who are under extreme threat and who are demanding to know who ordered the increasingly brutal assaults against peaceful land, water and human rights protectors in Canada in 2013, and why. The answers to questions about who is involved and why reveal the sinister continuance of a set of despicable, centuries-old, but only quietly spoken of, genocidal laws, policies and practices intended to completely eliminate Aboriginal rights in Canada. An examination of the answers reveals that New Brunswick is attempting to justify repression and brutality and that Canada is ignoring constitutional and international law including laws that protect human, civil and Aboriginal rights. Canada proceeds as if it has the right to subjugate, control and assimilate Aboriginal peoples as well as eliminate Aboriginal rights! Ironically, the same legislative trends also suppress some of the fundamental rights of settler peoples. The Glorious New Brunswick Shale Gas Rebellion has exposed tyranny and genocide and in so doing has become a model for communities seeking to eliminate unjust laws.

Commentary: Why I Marched On McDonald’s

June 5, 2014 William J. Barber, www.washingtonpost.com Resist! Civil Rights, McDonald's, Moral Mondays, Protest, Religion

Recently, I marched with McDonald’s workers from three dozen cities to the company’s corporate headquarters outside of Chicago. After they refused to leave the corporate campus of the fast-food giant with its $5.6 billion in profits last year, 101 workers were arrested. I knew I had to come when the workers invited me to share some of the lessons we have been learning in North Carolina about civil disobedience — and moral support. I watched my new friends sit down. I watched the police gather. I prayed with the McDonald’s workers as the police looked on and then slapped plastic handcuffs on more than 100 of the workers and arrested them. I could not help but think of the historic arc of the civil rights movement. For all the gains we have been making, the treatment of low-paid workers by some of the most profitable corporations in the world ranks high in the more significant causes of the growing inequalities in the U.S. I have helped lead the fight against backward laws passed by an extremist group of legislators that, three years ago, took power in North Carolina. Last year, national media discovered us, calling us the Moral Monday protesters.

Patriarchy and Religion: Built to Oppress Women

May 19, 2014 Dennis Trainor Jr, www.PopularResistance.org Resistance Report Abortion, Birth control, Church, Church on abortion, Dennis Trainor Jr, Katie Klabusich, Katie Speak, Kelly Carlin, Patriarchy, pro life, Pro-choice, Religion, Stop Patriarchy

In the United Sates, one out of every three women has had an abortion. If you are a women living in Texas, and a growing number of states, access to this basis, simple and safe procedure has been severely restricted with the passage of Hundreds of new laws in the last several years that strip a women's right to privacy, limit access to abortion and shame women into thinking that their choice about what to do with their bodies is wrong. It’s been over 40 years since the Supreme Court decided, in Roe V Wade, that women had a constitutional right to abortion. The legal argument was based around the concept that women had a right to privacy under the due process clause of the 14^th Amendment, and that right extended to their right to have an abortion. Perhaps no time in the 40 years since Roe v Wade have female reproductive rights been so under attack. From Texas to Alabama to Congressmen saying that women can’t get pregnant when raped because their bodies have a way of shutting that down, men, usually white conservative men with ties to patriarchal religious institutions are working their balls off trying to control women; specifically a woman access to birth control and abortion

U.S. Religious Progressivism “Way of the Future”

May 5, 2014 Michelle Tullo, www.ipsnews.net Strategize! Organizing, Religion

The future of religion in U.S. politics lies not with conservatives but rather with religious progressives, social scientists here are suggesting, with a faith-based movement potentially able to provide momentum to a new movement for social justice. According to a new report from the Brookings Institute, a think tank here, the current religious social justice movement can be compared to the period of civil rights activism in the mid-20th century. “There really is an opening now for a religious movement for social justice that is similar in many ways to the civil rights movement. We see it around issues of minimum wage, budget cuts, and immigration,” E.J. Dionne, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and one of the authors of the report, told IPS. “On social justice issues, religion has long been a progressive force, and Pope Francis is challenging people’s assumptions that religion is an automatically conservative force … After years of paying lots of attention to religious conservatives, religion by no means lives on the right.” The United States has a strong history of religious groups in social justice movements, including in pushing for the abolition of slavery and the institutionalisation of civil rights, as well as the social welfare programmes put in place a half-century ago. Yet today, religion and progressivism are often seen as being at odds.

Churches And Unions Join To Organize In Mississippi

March 31, 2014 Alana Semuels, www.latimes.com Organize! Religion, Worker Rights and Jobs

As his voice rings out, blessing the community and the oppressed, the congregation affirming each line, he names a new group that he says deserves God's attention. "We pray for the employees who are working at Nissan," Miller says, and the dozens of women and men in the pews say amen to that, too. "We pray you wake up the conscience of those that are oppressing them," he says. It is just more than a month since the United Automobile Workers suffered a bruising defeat at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, with workers voting not to join a union in an election widely seen as a test of whether labor unions will gain a foothold in the rapidly growing auto factories of the South. Attention is turning now to the more than 5,000-worker Nissan plant in Canton, Miss., where another union effort is gaining steam.

School Tries To Silence Fifth-Grader’s Speech On Religion

December 19, 2013 Mary Elizabeth Williams, http://www.salon.com Educate! Religion, Student Activism, Wars and Militarism

Zachary Golob-Drake is the kind of kid any school would be proud to have representing it. And last week, the Tampa, Fla., fifth-grader won a first place blue ribbon in a class contest for his speech about how to make the world “a better place.” He was then set to deliver that speech to his entire fourth and fifth grade, and, if he did well, go on to represent his school at the regional 4-H Tropicana Public Speech contest. Instead, the boy says the school tried to strip him of his prize and block him from sharing his speech with the school. Titled “In the Name of Religion,” Golob-Drake’s brief speech notes that “The world’s major religions all have messages about coexisting,” but “Religious differences have always sparked conflict, even leading to warfare and mass murder.” As examples, he cites the Crusades, the campaigns of Genghis Khan and the attacks on the United States of 9/11. He ends by stating, “Religion provides moral guidance for most of the seven billion people on the earth” and invoking the Golden Rule of “Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you.”

Is The Pope Getting The Catholics Ready For An Economic Revolution?

December 1, 2013 Lynn Stuart Parramore, www.alternet.org Educate! Finance and the Economy, Human Rights, Pope Francis, Religion

Tuesday, Pope Francis launched a tirade against a brutally unjust economic system — a tirade that Marx himself would have cheered: “Just as the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say 'thou shalt not' to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills….As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world's problems or, for that matter, to any problems.” Whoa! Where did that come from? To understand the answer, you need to know something about liberation theology, a movement that originated in Pope Francis’s home region of Latin America. Liberation theology, a Catholic phenomenon centered on actively fighting economic and social oppression, is the fascinating place where Karl Marx and the Catholic Church meet.

‘Radical Jesus’ Chronicles The Legacy Of A Radical Rabble-Rouser

November 27, 2013 J. Caleb Mozzocco, www.robot6.comicbookresources.com Educate! Jesus, Religion

writer/editor Paul Buhle’s triptych look at the teachings of Jesus takes for its title a similarly evocative, provocative title: Radical Jesus: A Graphic History of Faith. The album-sized graphic novel from Herald Press is split into three sections, each illustrated by a different artist in a distinctly different style, and each concerned with the ways Jesus’ words and actions challenged authority in different time periods, from Jesus’ own lifetime to the modern era. Obviously, it’s a religious book, but Buhle and the artists don’t seem to be overly concerned with preaching. Rather, the book reads like a work of history, albeit the history of a faith, and, as it enters modern times, the liberal, left-leaning reading and application of that faith. (Buhle’s previous comics works include contributions to adaptations of Studs Terkel’s Working and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the American Empire. He also collaborated with Harvey Pekar on 2009′s The Beats: A Graphic History.) The final section, “Radical Resistance,” is drawn by Nick Thorkelson, in a style highly reminiscent of the loose, urgent work of many modern political cartoonists; he even uses symbolic and labeled imagery the way many political cartoonists do, although the pages are broken up into panels, and tell stories, here a series of stories within a series of stories. In this section, then, we learn about Sojourner Truth, the Civil Rights movement, the anti-war activities of groups like Catholic Worker and Christian Peacemaker Teams from the Vietnam War to the hotspots of the Cold War to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

5 (Of Many) People Keeping The Occupy Movement Alive

November 16, 2013 Kathleen Ann Bradley, www.yesmagazine.org/a> Resist! Finance and the Economy, Health Care, Housing, Occupy, Religion

Two years ago today, when Occupy Wall Street was evicted from Zuccotti Park, many wondered what was next for the movement. Two years later, we profile five projects that got their starts in the encampments and are still making change today. It was a cold night in late January 2012. The New York subway doors opened and a tall, dark-haired, 30-ish young man dressed entirely in black—leather jacket, jeans, and boots—stepped into the car. Hanging from his backpack were an orange plastic bullhorn and a small drum; tied on top was a thin sleeping mat. He was one of the small army of Occupy Wall Streeters who had been driven from the park on November 15—two years ago today. He and some friends had been camping out in a vacant house to prevent the bank from foreclosing on it, he told us, but the winter weather had forced them to leave. After protesters like him were evicted, no one knew where the movement was going and what it was going to do next. Two years later, though, the answers to those questions are beginning to become clear. One way to get a handle on what became of the Occupy movement is to track the continuing work of its participants, five of whom we've profiled here. All of them were active in Occupy encampments . . .

Religious Left Rising

July 20, 2013 Katie McDonough, www.salon.com Organize! Religion

Close to 20 percent of Americans today are religious progressives. Religious progressives are significantly younger and more diverse than their conservative counterparts. The mean age of the religious progressive population is 44 – just under the mean age in the general population of 47 – while the mean age of religious conservatives is 53. Twenty-three percent of Millennials (ages 18-33) are religious progressives, while 17 percent are religious conservatives. Among Millennials, there are also nearly as many nonreligious (22 percent) as religious progressives.

«1 2 3 4 »

Daily movement news and resources