Issue-oriented and thematic papers for PfL’s advocacy work, including statements, campaign materials, articles and updates on developing issues; and links to related resources and information
World Alliance of Reformed Churches, World Council of Churches, Council for World Mission
INTERFAITH WORKSHOP ON
“SPIRITUALITY OF RESISTANCE, LIBERATION AND TRANSFORMATION”
2008 May 15-20 | Matanzas, Cuba
PRESENTATION
Justice Movements and Spirituality: A View from Cuba
by MARK LEWIS TAYLOR
INTRODUCTION – Justice Movements and Empire Today
As a U.S. citizen I do not take lightly the hospitality shown to me by the Christian communities and other peoples of conscience in Cuba. I am especially impressed by the grace of Cubans in their receiving a citizen whose country has imposed so cruel an embargo and blockade against Cuban peoples and one which also has exacted so heavy a toll over some five decades of suffering.1 I thus cannot presume the grace of Cuba’s reception. I am deeply grateful for it.
All this does not mean I harbor some sweeping indictment of all my own country’s peoples. Indeed, many of my own land have long stood in resistance to the kind of imperial posturing and practice by which the U.S. has exerted its presence throughout the world, especially over Latin America.2 Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the U.S. to status of unrivaled superpower, theorists of both the right and left now refer forthrightly to the U.S. as global “empire,” and it must be resisted as such.3 The debates still rage about whether “the empire” today is to be identified with the policies and power of only the U.S., or whether “empire” more properly names what theorists Hardt and Negri name a “networking power” of transnational powers of globalization, in which the U.S. is the most powerful player, because of its hegemony over use of military force, but not the only power constituting empire today. Hardt and Negri stress that European, North Asian and other elite sectors of a transnational infrastructure create a nexus of control and exploitation. On this reading, even much of the U.S. is rendered subordinate to empire.
This debate about empire may seem all too academic for many. From the perspective of the world’s majority poor populations, the grinding and repressive imperial powers come with both a transnational and a U.S. face. Whether the imperial power that comes from without and gets within various localities is named American, or transnational, can seem to miss the point, the suffers’ plight.
Nevertheless, the practice of resisting imperial power requires some careful thinking, and so the matter is not purely academic. Are we committed to a practice of resisting the U.S., or of resisting some transnational conglomerate that is inclusive of but more comprehensive than U.S. national power? In this essay, when referring to empire, I will try to take from both sides of the debate. By “empire,” I will mean the complex and dynamic international regime of power anchored by and largely serving the United States military policies and its “Neo-liberal,” dollar-based market strategies of globalization. This regime of power is an assemblage4 of these military and economic powers, and also includes racist and patriarchal ideologies that define the ways those loyal to imperial powers relate to the world’s peoples and to the land.5 While “empire,” then, is a very complex, transnational regime of power, a nation like Cuba (and many other nations as well) experience that empire as the flexing of U.S. national might.
I long had wanted to visit Cuba because of all I have heard about its revolutionary struggle, not only in the United States and its activist communities, but also as a result of my travels to other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. My most extensive living and research in those areas has been in south Mexico and Guatemala. This has meant research and writing on Maya and Protestant spiritualities especially as they have shaped and grown from political struggle.6
I have also been instructed by the faithful witness of Christians and others elsewhere, as I have for various periods of time, visited or worked at such sites as a conference for families of the disappeared in Lima, Peru (1989), in Maya struggles for land, justice and life in the highlands of Guatemala, (1989-1993), in comparative research seminars in El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Costa Rica (1990-1992), in Maya Zapatista communities of Polhó and Acteal in Chiapas, Mexico (1994-2000), as an international electoral observer for Mexican presidential elections (1994), in Haiti as observer with Witness for Peace in the wake of the U.S. military effort to re-instate Bertrand Aristide (1998), among border communities in Nogales, Mx/Tucson, AZ and Juarez, Mx/El Paso, Tx (2000), and while lecturing to Christian thinkers and indigenous volunteers with World Vision in Lima, Peru (2005).7
At all these sites, and frequently, Cuba stood forth as a bold experiment, a beacon of hope for many who dreamed of freedom from the centuries of U.S. imposed policies with which all of Latin America has had to struggle.8 Cuba has also stood with great resiliency, enduring ten U.S. presidencies’ imposition of the embargo, all the while extending services to its own people, such as universal health care, while providing also for untold numbers of other nations’ sufferer of disaster and poor health.9
This respect for Cuba’s witness can include acknowledgment that all is not perfect in Cuba, and that its revolutionary government, impressive and inspiring though it has been, is not free from defect. Thus, I do lament its curtailment of the democratic practices that could have been embraced as part of its socialist vision, and I reject, too, its justifications for surveillance of its citizens and political imprisonment, its recent embrace of the death penalty, and its ongoing limits to free expression by confiscating personal libraries.10 But whatever the trail of injustice that has dotted the landscape of revolutionary Cuba, it is meager in comparison to the structural assault and world-wide train of injustice that the U.S. government has powered globally. Just the last eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency, complete with its fabricated war agendas, rationalization of torture, and curtailment of civil liberties in the U.S., makes me even more mindful of how reticent any U.S. citizen should be in directing critique to Cuba, its people and its revolutionary leaders.
The bottom-line, then, is that I welcomed the chance to be with an inter-religious community in Cuba, together with other varied peoples of conscience, to think about what spirituality might be, or might become, in relation to peoples’ movements for justice. Cuba is an excellent site for such reflection, not only because its revolutionary struggle has been a movement toward and in search of justice, but also because its spiritual communities are so diverse. In just a short visit to Cuba in May of 2008, I encountered people working for justice alongside Protestants, Catholics, with some descended from indigenous peoples, others of African religious practice (especially Santería), as well as those who work from a more secular vantage point as people of conscience.
What might we say of the connection between justice movements and spirituality in such a context as this? This is the burden of the present essay. I stress that this reflection as a “view from Cuba” is not a reflection on the spiritualities or political situation of Cuba. Rather it is a proposal prompted by Cuba’s inspiring struggle, seeking to ask how spirituality might be related to justice movements wherever we encounter them.
I will begin, in a first section, “Justice Movements and Spirituality,” by proposing three models for considering the relationship of spirituality to justice movements. A second section, “Dimensions in a Spirituality of Justice Movements,” identifies some general traits that spirituality tends to take on if we take our cues from what spirituality looks like within justice movements. Then finally, with a view to Christian readers, I consider in a third section, “A Christian Spirituality of Justice Movements in an Age of Empire,” those features of spirituality that Christians might contribute from their Christian texts and traditions for justice movement work in our current age of empire.
I. JUSTICE MOVEMENTS AND SPIRITUALITY – THREE MODELS
How one conceptualizes the relationship of spirituality to movements for justice will be shaped by larger questions such as the relation between the spiritual and the material, or between religious beliefs and material practice. In Christian theology, other broad issues will be in play, such as those concerning the relation between Christian discipleship and political action, or even more broadly, between God and world. Here, I largely abstain from those wider debates, and seek to limit my comments to the notions of spirituality and justice movements. I will be setting forth in this section three models of how these notions might be related.
1. Preliminary Definitions. Some definitions, first, are in order. The notion of “justice movements,” in particular, requires attention.
By movements I will mean intentionally organized and sustained groups of people focused on and working on a particular field of concern, and which have as their telos, or goal, the increase of justice relevant to that field of concern.11 As an example, we might think of a group of mothers who intentionally organize and sustain their focus and work on a particular field of concern, the vulnerability of their school children to drunk drivers on town roads. They constitute a “movement” in so far as their group organizes and sustains action that has as its telos the increase of justice for the children by freeing them from the destructive effects of drunk drivers daily careening through their town streets.
What, though, do we mean by justice? Ethicists and moral philosophers have labored long over such a question. Here, by justice I will presuppose what many theorists have understood by it according to a “restorative” approach. Justice does not mean, as in common parlance, simply struggling for a political program. Still less does it mean, as others presume, a mere retaliatory action of exacting retribution. The restorative approach to justice, as I use it here, has three components.
There is first a liberatory component. In other words there is a movement out of some state of limitation felt to be destructive or life-debilitating. Children vulnerable to drunk drivers are in a state from which they need liberating. This is a first component of a restorative approach to justice.
Second, it is redressive. Correction or reparation is included in the justice-making act. The one confirmed as perpetrating injustice must make reparation or restitution. A drunk driver who kills a child, for example, may be asked to provide for the child’s family, for other children’s needs, or make some other kind of stipulated restitution. In the field of criminal justice in the U.S., when restorative models are used, offenders are expected to make various forms of restitution.12 With respect to injustices experienced by indigenous peoples or by formerly enslaved peoples, this redressive component of restorative justice can require land return and reparations for slavery, respectively.
Third, after the liberatory and redressive acts, there is a reconciliatory component, a restoration of union, across the boundaries of alienated human groups (or across the boundary between human groups and natural habitat). A drunk driver, to return to our simple example one more time, who makes redress or restitution, might be reunited, reconciled to the larger town community in which he and his kind posed a threat and from which town children have required continual liberation.
With these three components, restorative justice, of course, remains a great ideal. It is usually more something envisioned, worked and hoped for, than it is something realized. Yet, it gives shape to, and names, what we mean when we say we aim at justice, and thus the ideal can help orient human action. If, now, we put this restorative approach to justice together with our previous definition of movements, we can say, in sum, that justice movements are “organized and sustained groups of humans that focus and work at a particular field of concern so as to increase restorative justice in that field, seeking to create greater experiences of liberation, redress and reconciliation.”
What, now, of spirituality? This term tends to have so many meanings in the present religious and theological climate, that it warrants especially careful reflection. I will keep the term quite close to an etymological understanding of “spirit,” most forms of which in their languages of origin have roots that designate “breath.” This is especially true of the Hebrew, ruah.13 As related to breath, spirit concerns the animating and vital rhythms of living things. “Spirit is the power of animation itself and not a part added to the organic system.”14 Spirit is that which gives not only energy to material being, but as Ivone Gebara emphasizes, also offers “nutrition” or strength to material being. There always remains something mysterious about the energy and nutrition of spirit’s breath, its coming and going, its regularities and irregularities, its ecstasies and its routines, but it has its mysterious locus in the material. It pervades all of being.
Note an especially important trait of this understanding of spirit: it, along with the spiritual, and “spirituality” as what concerns spirit, is no mere opposite to matter. The spiritual and the material belong to one another as breath does to body, as nutritional strengthening does to physical exercise.15 Certainly, various religious traditions can, and have, developed further interpretations of this life-giving breath, and they tend to relate spirit and matter in various ways. Christianity is known, for example, for presenting the things of spirit in such a way that spirit opposes matter. Those who are spiritual, on this reading, need to subdue and/or control matter.16 This Christian legacy is not only destructive, depreciating the worlds of bodies, nature and other material being, it is also very unbiblical, overlooking the ruah that brings breath and nutrition to bodies.
With this cluster of definitions set forth, let us turn to examine how we might think further, to relate justice movements and spirituality. It is here that I suggest we consider three models.
2. The three models. These models are those that I know to be found among many justice movements - whether religious, secular or some combination thereof—whose members consider spirituality to be in some form of relation to their movements. I am here thinking not only of movements for justice that I know and have participated in Latin America (particularly Central America) but especially in those I work within and organize in the United States, which pertain to fields of concern such as U.S. political prisoners, the death penalty, prison reform and abolition, anti-war and anti-imperial struggle.17 Among such as these, let us consider three models.
First, there is The Grounding/Nurture Model. On this model, spirituality is understood as the ground, the soil, in which justice movements need to be rooted. If justice movements are to have spirit or a spirituality—have breath and nutrition—they will have to be rooted, so this model holds, in a spirituality as a kind of ground, a soil.
This is a powerful image and model, especially for religious groups. In fact, this model was at work among those who issued the invitation to Cuba to reflect on spirituality and justice movements. The invitation came from an ecumenical group named “Oikotree,” emanating from the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, the World Council of Churches and the Christian World Mission. Oikotree announced as its overall intention a need “to put justice at the heart of faith.” Conference invitees were challenged to take up the task of giving justice movements their ground or basis in spirituality. From such a spirituality the justice movements were to be nourished.
The advantage of this model is that the notions of ground and nurture link spirituality to justice movements in a very powerful way, one that emphasizes nature’s nurturing power. Spirit’s energizing and nutrition-giving functions are stressed by turning movements toward their rootedness in “soil,” where they are to get their strength and nurture. This can work in a productive way to challenge the kind of distance that has often existed between material practice and spiritual practice. Here, justice movements need spirituality, just as much as a plant needs its rootedness in soil.
The drawback of the model is that it maintains what I think is a problematic assumption about justice movements, i.e. that there are these justice movements out there—working on political issues like economic disparity, imperial aggression, poverty, environmental degradation, and the like—which lack sufficient relation to spirit and thus must be planted into the soil of a spirituality that is other to them.
The problematic feature here is that justice movements are viewed as without having spirituality within themselves. If justice movements are as we have defined them, movements for restorative justice with liberatory, redressive and reconciliatory components within them, then, I argue, they often already have spirit and spirituality at work within them.
It is often unfortunate that religious groups press to ground or nurture justice movements by thinking about spirituality apart from justice movement, rather than looking within exemplary justice movements for the spirituality already pulsing in the energy and nutrition-giving dimensions of their workings. The failure to do so, and the insistence of many religious groups that “we need to ground these movements in a spirituality” is all too often a surreptitious way of defining or redefining a functioning and effective justice movement in religious terms that are more comfortable to groups outside those justice movements. In the process, the life-blood of the justice movement is often diminished. The often never-ending insistence on giving “grounding” to justice movements can also function as a way for religious groups to avoid participating in effective, already existing justice movements.
Because of this weakness in the first model, I will be working largely out of a third model that I propose below. But first a second model, one which I also find deficient, needs to be considered.
This second model is The Spirit Marginalization Model. On this model the intimate connection between movement work and spirituality is broken. The spirit, with its accompanying spirituality, is hardly seen as intrinsic to movements for justice at all. Among some, as in the ready example of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA,18 all notions of spirit, religion and God tend to be seen as enemies of revolutionary justice movement work. But even among less strident groups, this model persists whenever spirituality is seen as merely a trait that some members with religious inclinations might bring to the justice movement. On this view, spirituality might have occasional and instrumental value to the justice movement, but this spirituality is not seen as something crucial to the movement for justice.
As an example of the instrumental marginalization of spirit here, I recall many a planning meeting in movement work where someone suggests, “We need to pull in the churches and other religious organizations.” This is suggested often for largely instrumental reasons: they will swell the numerical ranks of the movement, or better, perhaps, bring into the movement a most welcome fleet of church school buses for transport of masses of people needed for demonstrations (seriously, I have witnessed this logic more than once!).
There is an advantage to this model. It tends to defuse many of the conflicts that religious groups often bring to justice movement work by reason of the different convictions they have about spirituality and the application of religious beliefs. By jettisoning, marginalizing or instrumentalizing spiritual vision, justice movement leaders keep these religious conflicts away from the center of the movement, thus enabling it to keep unifying focus on the major field of concern, i.e. the injustices and oppression that define the movement’s primary task.
The major drawback of this model is that it risks emptying justice movements of the energizing vitality they often need. They become political in the more mechanistic and procedural senses that all too often create “burnout” for its members. They are left lacking spirit’s penchant for feeling, being, play and artful ceremony. The language of spirit and spirituality is needed, I would argue, to guard against a kind of “vulgar materialism” that does not acknowledge the depth of justice movement work, a vitalistic, breathing, nutritional dimension that is intrinsic to all successful justice movements. It is precisely this drawback in the second model that leads me to propose a third.
This third model I will term The Synergistic Model. It accents the working together (syn-with, -ergon, working) of spirituality and justice movements. It assumes that if one really has the presence of the one, say justice movements, one will have the other. They are that closely related. Most definitions of “synergism” stress that elements working together, in synergy, produce a combined effect that is greater than the sum of their distinctive, individual contributions. Also their distinctive contributions are made greater in themselves by their working together in interaction.19
So it is, I suggest, with justice movements and spirituality. If one really can experience the one, there is experience of the other. Of course, much depends on my language here of “if one really” experiences. The notion of the “really” is set by how I have defined justice movements above, and also spirituality. If justice movements exist, as I have defined them above—as sustaining organized action for a restorative justice that is liberating, redressive and reconciling—then there will tend to be found there a vital spirituality.
The disadvantage of this model is that it tends to strip the terms “justice movement” and “spirituality” down to carefully defined, and somewhat abstract formulations. This glosses the real world experience in which particular kinds of religious spiritualities often fail to “work with,” synergistically, justice movements. Instead, they are often in conflict with those movements, or, also distort those movements in ways that bend them toward injustice, as say when German Christians lent their “spiritual’ vision to support Nazi political movements.
But the advantages of this model are significant. First, and this does not need much discussion, the disadvantages of the first two models are avoided. In other words, we avoid the assumption of the first model that justice movements have to be grounded in a spirituality before they can be known as “spiritual.” The synergistic model stresses that justice movements are already alive with spirit. We also avoid the tendency of the second model, which marginalizes or instrumentalizes spirit, because this synergistic model accents the mutual co-working, indeed mutual belongingness, of spirituality and justice movements to one another.
But the most significant advantage of this synergistic model concerns how it might guide us, in a creative manner, to rethink the connections between spirituality and justice movements. In other words, if there are justice movements in the world today, which are challenging injustice and particularly the injustices of empire, then we might learn something about spirituality by looking at those justice movements. How are they alive? What keeps them alive, if and when they are living and dynamic? What makes them pulse and thrive?
In other words, with this third synergistic model, justice movements might be viewed as themselves exemplary of spirituality, practical domains of social struggle from which religious traditions, whose members often think they have a corner on things of spirit, might learn something new about spirituality—especially as it bears upon justice-making work.
What might we learn about spirituality, then, if we look into justice-movements themselves? This is the concern of the next section.
II. DIMENSIONS IN A SPIRITUALITY OF JUSTICE MOVEMENTS
I suggest that three dimensions of justice movement spirituality can be identified. These three dimensions are not found alone, but in the kind of movements for restorative justice about which I have been speaking, all three interplay and mutually support one another.
1. Rage and Mourning. This is to accent, first, the important dimension of feeling that is needed by any vital and strong justice movement. With rage, there is a sense of being wronged, of being treated unfairly, not receiving one’s due. With mourning, or expressions of grief, there is the feeling of loss, of regret, sadness and pathos fostered by a sense of diminishment. Both the rage and the mourning are crucial for powering individuals and groups toward the pursuit of justice that is restorative—liberating them from that which enrages and causes mourning, redressing them for wrongs suffered, reconciling them, if possible, across the alienation of peoples created.
Rage and mourning are not mere precursors to justice movement work, they are integral to those movements’ ongoing activity. The challenge of leaders in successful justice movement work is to check mere reactionary expression and action born of these feelings, and then to harness and focus them so that they are productive and sustaining of the labor that movements require. Often the arts, which I will discuss more below, are crucial here. They express, shape and sustain those feelings, not only making them more manageable through the aesthetic styling given by the arts, but also more forceful when pointed at powers of injustice.
Thus, this first dimension of spirituality involves the spiraling of rage and mourning into artistic form, so as to coil outward as force of resistance for justice, which usually then recoils back into the powerful emotions of rage and mourning, before coiling outward again—and so on continuously. The movement breathes and is nourished by this kind of interplay of feeling and action.
The arts, especially the visible arts of street theater and puppetry, have in recent years been used to great effect in international movements protesting Neoliberal globalization. In these anti-globalization movements, activists have been inventive in tapping into the rage and mourning of those on the underside of empire by releasing those emotions into playful, colorful dancing images in the streets.20 So effective are these efforts in street theater, so capturing of public imagination are these artful figurations, so arousing of indignation in the powerful are these ventures in puppetry, that repressive powers have often made special target of artistic leaders in social justice movements. In Philadelphia of 2000, for example, at a city wide demonstration against globalization and the George W. Bush agenda, the Philadelphia police made a preemptive strike on a warehouse where street theater puppets were being assembled (a place called “Puppetganda”), and, at the demo itself, they aimed to arrest especially those who worked as puppeteers, one of whom had bail set at one million dollars.21
When rage and mourning body forth in the arts of the people, they work together in justice movement spirituality to become productive specters, threatening the powerful, but also making hope for those seeking restorative justice.
2. Discernment of Rogue Power. By a power that is “rogue,” I mean a form of power that one senses to come at one in especially degenerate, callous, uncaring, retrograde, violative forms (as in “rogue cop”), or as particularly savage and destructive in impact (as is sometimes said of an deranged and out of control “rogue elephant”). The effects of rogue power may be known in many small ways, amid the steady grind and drudge of a day, in the daily struggle of those who live out extreme poverty, as well as in more dramatic encounters such as a lethal encounter of police brutality. But even in the more daily and mundane cases, if there is discernment at work, there is often a sense of being up against something mammoth and cruel, savage and grotesque. This is a discernment of rogue power.
Novelist John Edgar Wideman signaled this sensibility regarding rogue power when describing a community’s sense of injustice in the face of police brutality and repression in urban Philadelphia: “We are all trapped in the terrible jaws of something shaking the life out of us.”22
I stress that this dimension of spirituality involves “discernment” when speaking of “rogue power.” To discern rogue power is not simply to react with sweeping charges about roguish enemies. Instead, this discernment often thrives, for example in the open-eyed and learned analysis that mothers of hungry children in Bolivia have. They understand how “structural adjustment plans” of the International Monetary Fund pose special obstacles for securing the family wages on which they can, or cannot, feed their children.23 This slower, life-taught grasp can also be the means through which rogue power is discerned. They sense the sheer internationality of the mandates of the IMF against a higher minimum wage for their small country, the repeated accommodation to this by Bolivian governments (before Evo Morales’ attempts to craft a socialist Bolivia), the military that represses social protest of the mandates and accommodations—all this, constitutes the roguishness of power that grows in one’s sensibility of spirit, as discernment of it grows.
Justice movements that are able to sustain their resistance and their progress toward realizing restorative justice, do so by cultivating this dimension of spirit in their work, ever deepening discernment through multiple perspectives on the rogue power that seems to “shake the life out of them,” ever embracing, at their best, better theory as spiritual practice for more exacting analyses of rogue power and for more effective resistance to injustices at hand.
3. Observance of Earthpower. I cannot claim that all justice movements feature this dimension of spirituality, what I term the “observance of Earthpower,” but movements for restorative justice that are particularly resilient and effective tend to manifest some of the features I describe here. Many of these features are learned by justice movements from the vision and practice of indigenous peoples, who on nearly all the world’s continents have had to take up struggles against different forms of colonization, imperialism and displacement. This observance of Earthpower entails recognition of the earth as a resource for powerful change, as a source of energizing and nurture for people’s justice movement work. I write it as “Earthpower” (one word, without space or hyphen) to signal the sense that earth itself is power, has power, and I capitalize it to highlight the sacredness that this power is often seen to possess. This Earthpower involves three kinds of sensibility.
First, there is a confidence that earth can withstand what human destructiveness and injustice do to it. Puebla-Laguna novelist and essayist, Leslie Marmon Silko, writes, “you may bomb it, blast it with nuclear force, mine it, carve it and desecrate it, yet the earth, in some relation to the cosmos, will outlive its violators.”24 The earth is felt to have an enduring presence. This enduring quality of earth “grounds,” we might say quite literally, the ability to hold in the present those who have died upon it in the past. Especially, for indigenous peoples, the memories of the ancestors are sustained not simply through the tracing of human lineage, but also by the entwining of those lineages with the natural order, with designations that invoke nature’s animals, plants, natural landscape, and planetary movement. Memory, here, is earth-based.
Those who have passed on to become ancestors live through the earth’s endurance and the traditions of memory enlivened by earth’s ancestors. Some justice movements harness earth-grounded memory of the dead, especially of those victimized by centuries of genocidal practice, in their ceremonies of political demonstration. When an activist passed on recently, for example, who long had worked for political prisoners in U.S. prisons, internet emails circulated, announcing what indigenous of Latin America, using Spanish, have often affirmed about their dead: “Presente!” “Presente!” (“She is present!” “He is here!”). Similarly, when each November activists in the U.S. march on Fort Benning, GA, in remembrance of the many Latin American dead lost because of U.S.-trained military throughout the Americas, the chant, with crosses being carried, is “Presente!”25 In other words, the earth endures, and those buried within it who are diversely returned to the earth’s basic elements, remain near and nurture movements for justice.
A second sensibility is even more important. This is Earthpower’s sensibility that the earth, the land is itself an agent of historical change for justice. Here, the notion is not simply that the earth endures, but that it is, in the words of Silko, again, “a protagonist in history.”26 This is often at variance with many Western and Marxist visions of land and activism. For many Western radicals, land is the plane on which human action for justice is played out, or it is the ambience within which humans wage their struggle for justice. With Earthpower, however, the sensibility is that the land and earth are themselves involved in the putting right of things, in the restoration of justice.
For indigenous and First Nations peoples, the ceremonies and stories are calibrated with features of the land, with cycles of nature, and these have to be implicated in the planning of social action(s) for justice. If not rightly balanced with nature, an indigenous community might not even recognize a revolutionary act for justice as justice. Among the Maya of Guatemala for example, as Maya activist Antonio Otzoy once informed me, one of the reasons that liberation theology did not really take root among the Maya, among whom experiences of poverty, repression and yearning for liberation were very strong, is that liberationist priests and workers came largely with the justice categories of class and politics. They said very little about nature, and the restoration of people to a relation with habitat and nature system.27 As I wrote in an essay summarizing Otzoy’s Maya views on political revolution, the political changes dreamed and worked for must be a part of “the revolution of the sun.”28
A justice movement spirituality that manifests this sensibility that the land is a protagonist of history, then, will calibrate its actions in terms of nature’s seasons, the weather, the movement of wind through rocky glens and along hills and mountains. It will wait for the telling of stories and formation of ceremonies that link story to land and to a remembrance of the past that the land’s scars preserve, and to a future that the land’s endurance foreshadows.
Again, to the Western mind, this is often hard to fathom. And yet one of the most successful movements against the West’s neoliberal globalization was launched with this kind of spiritual discourse by the Mayas’ Zapatista Army in Chiapas, Mexico, in January of 1994. The uprising of the Maya in that year, on the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was to go into effect, threw much of Mexico and key elements of U.S. corporate structure into tumult.29 The Zapatistas’ own discourse of resistance is disclosive of the profound trust to a political revolution riding nature’s winds:
[W]ind is the fruit of the earth, and it has its own season, and matures in the breasts of those who have nothing more than their dignity and their will to rebel... This hidden wind is content for now to blow through the mountains and the glades, without yet going down into the valleys where money commands and lies govern. This wind, born below the trees, will come down from the mountains; it whispers of a new world, so new that it is but an intuition in the collective heart.30
By calibrating human actions for justice with land and nature, justice movement spirituality effects a more comprehensive and sustaining impact. Here the political appeal invokes the cosmos and earth that encompasses all being. This has had much to do with the indigenous Zapatista movement being able to capture and win the support of much of Mexico and the world, in a way that many other movements for justice had not. Moreover, the movement of the Zapatistas conveyed some of this sensibility to youth and others who went on to oppose unjust structures of Neoliberalism in anti-globalization protests.31
The land’s ability to be seen as “protagonist of history” can also be explained in another way. The land is protagonist by reason of its contributing the arts for human use and celebration. The arts, so important for focusing and harnessing rage and mourning, as we saw above, are not just the work of human imagination. They are also gifted by the natural order, which offers up to the imagination the colors, shapes, textures, and the changing configurations of spacing and lighting that are intrinsic to our places on the land. The paintings of Georgia O’Keefe are but one dramatic reminder of the conduits running from land to artist’s imagination, and of the power of land and light to body forth, as it were, into the worlds of human action and vision. When justice movements respect this gifting quality of the land rendered to and for the human arts, and when they wed these arts to their struggles for justice, then Earthpower comes forth as a particularly strong and powerful “protagonist of history.” We have already commented on the power of the aesthetic reflex in movements of resistance for justice. Recognizing the arts of resistance as rooted in Earthpower gives still more power and strength to those movements.
There is, though, a third sensibility that is intrinsic to Earthpower: its capacity to create unity among humans as they seek coalitions of movement initiatives, as they build networks of regional and transnational networks. Earthpower not only creates confidence by stressing the earth’s endurance, and not only by emphasizing land as protagonist of history, it also has a function of grounding human unity. Material earth and cosmos provide a unity of planetary being, a sense of “planetarity,” as it has been called by various thinkers.32 The earth’s grounding unity should not gloss the differences existing between humans (national, cultural, sexual, gendered, ethnic, personal, and so on), and it is indispensable that we attend to them. But the earth’s material unity invokes an equally necessary sense of “the common.”33 Ultimately—and we cannot here trace all the lineaments of the common—this means that Earthpower is important to justice movements in its birthing and sustaining of love, a love that serves justice and, as its telos, guides justice. This is especially true if love, appropriately and significantly, can be understood as sustained union, partnership or alliance that works across/amid/through our differences. If love produces this kind of unity in difference, then it is especially important for also grounding the kind of love that socialism is, a social being-with that is no mere alliance of humans one to another, but a human being-with that is made possible by being-with-and-in-world-as-earth. This kind of discourse is found in the language of the Zapatistas, where earth, human revolutionary collectivity and love are all mutually implicated in one another. Che Guevara earlier had drawn out the revolutionary logic of love: “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.”34
The unity of justice movements, thus, is rooted not just in agreements, oral or written, but in the sense of shared material embodiment in planetary living with earth and cosmos. There is here no romanticizing of “Mother Earth spirituality” as expressed in some white Indian-wannabe cultures, but there is a serious learning from those indigenous traditions that know and teach that the unity of peoples, which creates both love and justice, is birthed by respecting the earth’s life-giving, yes maternal, power. The earth as mater—matter, maternal, and matrix—is increasingly being seen as resource for the kind of coalitional and comprehensive revolutionary contexts that justice movements need if they are to be exercises in truly restorative justice.
III. CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY OF JUSTICE MOVEMENTS IN AN AGE OF EMPIRE
Christians who may prefer to bring their spirituality to justice movements so as to ground them, rather than look within them for already operative spiritualities, may be put off by the dimensions identified in the previous section. How can those dimensions be a part of a spirituality that is distinctively and recognizably Christian? Especially those Christians steeped in more traditional or evangelical strains of Christianity may dismiss the discussions of the previous section as just so much accommodation to “paganism,” “materialism” or “political reductionism.”
Actually, each of the three dimensions mentioned above could be developed within more traditional categories of Christian tradition. Rage and mourning, for example, are rendered powerfully and passionately throughout the Psalms, the Lamentations and in the prophetic discourse of Hebrew scriptures. These emotions are there and could be brought into closer relation with the rage and mourning I argued was part of most justice movement spirituality.
Similarly, the discernment of rogue power could easily be accommodated within Christian discourse, recalling New Testament references to the “powers and principalities” that referred to structural oppression, the symbols and stories of “the demonic,” and various treatments of evil that have been stock in trade for many theologians. The challenge for Christians would be to rework these resources on “corporate evil”35 so that they serve the discernment of rogue power that is at work in many justice movements.
Earthpower, even though several of its sensibilities may vibrate for many Christians with a specter of “animism” and “paganism”—even these sensibilities, I suggest, might be accommodated and articulated in relation to Christian belief. Christian teachings on God as Creator, for example, and about the earth as an expression of the Creator, could be developed so that they resonate with and support those outside Christian traditions who respond to Earthpower. Both Hebrew scriptures (recall “the heavens are telling the glory of God”) and the New Testament (recall Jesus taking teachings and lessons from the lilies and the flowers of the field, and from the growing of seeds) are not so far removed from the Earthpower sensibilities explored above.
In this final section, however, I turn in another direction. Beyond the possibilities of understanding the previously articulated justice movement spirituality in Christian terms, I want to suggest here that a Christian spirituality, especially in the way it speaks about Jesus, might offer something additional to contemporary justice movements. I am not saying that this offering is essential to inter-religious and secular justice movements today, but for Christians who may want to make a distinctively Christian contribution to justice movements in an age of war and empire, the following may be instructive. Here, I propose that Christian spirituality can be understood as offering three other important features for justice movements. These do not correspond with the three dimensions of justice movement spirituality considered in the previous section. They are additional, distinctive ones. Let us consider each in turn.
1. A Counter-Imperial Faith. In the Manila statement on empire by the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC), “An Ecumenical Faith Stance against Global Empire (2006)” we find these words:
The Jesus of Galilee lived out a gospel of the “reign of God” amid and against the Pax Romana, the imperial domination of his day. Against imperial domination he brought new life, healing souls and bodies wounded by empire, proclaiming and building peace on earth, anticipating the restoration of all creation. To follow Jesus means many things but it surely means nothing less than resisting empire and creating new communities of life amidst it.36
Such a statement is confirmed by a growing literature in biblical and theological research which reads the gospel accounts of Jesus’ life, teachings, death and resurrection against the backdrop of Roman imperial formation in Jesus’ day. One of the reasons many Christians still do not view the gospel in this way is because so much previous scholarship screened out political issues from their theological readings of scriptures.37 Greater attention to the history of empire and the pressures posed by imperial formation today have led many scholars to make amends for this.
When the gospels are re-read through a lens that attends to empire, there arises a new understanding of Christian faith, as counter-imperial faith. This faith in the God of Jesus Christ was lived as an alternative to the ways of empire. The very Greek term, euangelion, used for translating the “gospel” or “good news” of Jesus was not a Christian invention. It was extracted from the discourse of empire, being a term frequently used by returning imperial generals bringing, hopefully, “good news” and “glad tidings” of Rome’s victory in battle or defense of the empire. When Christians took over this term, and applied it to the teachings and kerygma of Jesus, this could not help but be seen as a religio-political challenge to empire.38
Similarly, as historian and archaeologist Richard A. Horsley shows, when the infancy narratives of Luke declare that a “savior” (sōtēr) had been born among shepherd folk outside of Bethlehem, use of that title for Jesus’ birth was again a challenge to empire. This was so because sōtēr was the widespread term of respect for the emperor of that time, Augustus Caesar. The birth of Jesus was an inauguration of a movement that offered an alternative to empire and posed the possibility of resistance.39
There are many more examples of scholars reading early Jesus movement literature through the historical lens of empire. The Apostle Paul’s key terminology, such as pistis as “faith,” kyrios as “Lord”, or eirēnēi as “peace,” were terms that had imperial meanings in Roman culture, but that when transferred to Christian discourse, as by Paul, took on counter-imperial force.40 Matthean scholars, as well as others, have argued that the basileia tou theos in the gospels could be viewed, and often was viewed, as a reference to “God’s empire,” and hence another challenge to Rome’s empire.41 Mark’s gospel especially—as when it shows Jesus casting out a demon named “Legion” (most likely a reference to a Roman occupying force and its socio-personal effects)—can be seen as a set of teachings for a spirituality and practice of alternative living to empire.42 Recently New Testament scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan have presented the passion week narrative of Mark’s gospel in ways that highlight the contrast between the established powers of Rome and the counter-imperial, rival powers of Jesus’ gospel.43 Both Crossan and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, for all their differences, write of Jesus’ death and its meanings, as an “execution,” not an event of salvation history abstracted from the history of empire.44
This literature raises a host of new and old questions about how Christians are to relate to political power, but it is particularly clear that insofar as Christians are informed by the teachings of Paul and Jesus, they are called to be participants in ways alternative to empire, not, primarily, to be supportive of it. Crossan draws out the challenge followers of Jesus faced then amid Pax Romana and develops it as a challenge for followers today who face empire today, a Pax Americana.45
The gospel of Jesus, thus, may be viewed as seeding a counter-imperial faith, a praxis of resistance to empire that is no political add-on to the gospel. To the contrary, it is intrinsic to Christian spiritual practice to be living out alternatives to empire, carving out paths of resistance to it. Such a counter-imperial faith is rarely preached in the churches of the U.S., but for those who continue to follow in the way of Jesus, this counter-imperial faith is a resource provided by Christian spirituality.
2. Dramatic and Creative Action. Christian spirituality also reinforces a distinctive type of resistance to empire. More specifically, it accents the role of dramatic and creative actions. The emphasis on drama and creativity means that Christianity strengthens the penchant for arts and for an aesthetic and imaginative dimension to spirituality which, in the previous section, we saw as so crucial for justice movements. But how do we see this support for drama and creativity as a Christian effect?
Again, many of the new commentators on the gospel of Jesus are important here. Both Myers and Borg/Crossan stress Jesus’ awareness of the importance of something like “street theater,” the use of the dramatic gesture when engaging imperial formations with an alternative message. The entry of Jesus on the ass from one side of the city of Jerusalem, in contrast to the entry of a general on the other side of the city the same day, is one such example.46 There are also Jesus’ use of gestures in healing, his penchant for accepting the gifts of nature (the flowers, the fields, the seed in the soil) as resources for his teaching by story and parable. These creative gestures gave a special drama to his teachings about counter-imperial faith.
Even Jesus’ action of going to the cross, as often rendered in the gospel narratives, is an affirmation of the importance of creative and dramatic action. In the first place, there is the mere fact of Jesus’ journey into the hotbed environment of Passover celebrations in Jerusalem, by which he placed himself in a setting of near political carnival, where acting up, and telling, re-telling, enacting hopes for religio-political liberation from Rome, were both covertly and overtly embraced by many. Rome’s officials were often as nervous at these times as are many officials today when anti-globalization protestors act up outside IMF headquarters. Jesus’ positioning himself in such settings can be seen as his embrace of dramatic and creative action as the environment for his witness and teaching.
Moreover, it was in that environment that the gospels portray Jesus as working, by his death, a significant event of dramatic contrast. The contrast emerges from his story as one who taught as a prophet of justice and of radically inclusive love for all, yet also as one exposed to torture and imperial execution as a threat to all. The contrast here, between his life of justice and peace for all, on the one hand, and his torture and execution for being a threat to all, on the other hand, was the kind of high drama that could also become one of the most creative, life-engendering and provocative contrasts in the history of humankind.47 It has not only generated elaborate speculations about God being at work to save humankind by an action on the cross by “his son,” as much traditional Christianity has taught, but more importantly, it has inspired generations of activists and resisters to take up non-violent, but militant and effective, forms of counter-imperial resistance.
Walter Wink, in his Engaging the Powers,48 has charted the effects upon history of Jesus’ creative drama of the cross by tracing it through the history of non-violent civil disobedience. Scores of its practitioners are without fame, but some are especially renown: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chávez, Oscar Romero, and more.
Christian spirituality is not the only source of this tradition. Nevertheless, the narratives we have of the story of Jesus’ creative drama on the cross is powerful. It was creative in its time because, among other things, the Jesus movement was itself a creative effect of the cross’s drama. It grew up in the wake of the cross and soon, quite literally, rivaled and subverted the powers of Roman empire. It remains a creative story for our time, because it funds creative and dramatic action today.
3. Faith Practice as Coalition-Forming Movement. In many churches of the United States, when Christians participate in justice movements, or propose doing so, this is often worked out through special committees in the congregation, say, a “Religion and Society Committee” or “Social Action Taskforce.” These, however, are not usually seen as the primary sites for living Christian faith. The major practice of faith vis-ŕ-vis God is thought more to occur along a “vertical axis” (between believer and God in worship or personal prayer life), and then along a “horizontal axis” (between believers and earth, society and neighbor) there is the outflowing of faith into work through these committees for social engagement.
This understanding, however, misses the more integral bond that Christian spirituality, at its best, sees between faith practice and justice movements. At least if we take our cues from the early Jesus movements, the justice-making actions of Christians, especially under the pressures of Pax Romana, were more like reflex-actions of faith. Faith was itself already imbued with social action, before you could ask how to relate faith to action. Christian communities, today, also display this integral, near-reflex relation between faith and justice movements, when and if their members are facing daily the grinding injustices of empire that work against them. Thus, in churches of poorer communities and among populations routinely repressed, one often finds faith practice at work as social action for justice.
Such a Christian spirituality is, in fact, to live out the prophetic faith that both New Testament and Hebrew scriptures portray in some of their more arresting passages. In the parable of the last judgment (Matthew 25:31-46), for example, being in active relation with Jesus is not merely a matter of the believer knowing Jesus, or confessing him as Lord in a “personal relationship,” as so much U.S. evangelicalism preaches; it is a matter of “doing unto the least of these:” the hungry, the thirsty, the imprisoned, the naked, the homeless. In this doing, within the active engagement of those in need, there is a “doing unto Jesus.” Faith practice vis-ŕ-vis Jesus, and the actions that meet need, make up one dynamic act. In that dynamic act, moreover, the doing will almost always entail a social challenge to structures, not just a charitable act. Satisfying the thirsty today, then, will require not just handing out single cups of cold water, but also taking on, for example, the Bechtel Corporation for privatizing water in Bolivia.49
This prophetic Christian spirituality of the New Testament is deeply embedded in the similarly integral understanding of faith and action in Hebrew prophetic literature. There are the striking words of Jeremiah (Jeremiah 22:15b-16) when he upbraids a wayward King, Shallum, for not pursuing the ways of his more justly acting father, Josiah. “He [the father] upheld the cause of the lowly and poor; then it was well with him.” And then Jeremiah adds, “Is this not to know me, says the Lord” Once again, the very knowing of God, “the Lord,” is integrally bound up with the active upholding of “the lowly and the poor.”
The faith practice of Christian spirituality is an integrally social, movement-forming one. Centuries of Christian practice and power have, of course, hidden and violated this the very spiritual well-spring of Jesus’ and the prophets’ life practices. But the sociality of faith, that is, faith’s penchant for reflex action with and for neighbors, nature and society, is evident in the many teachings of Jesus about relationships between humans, about what love means, with examples drawn, again, from the natural world. Ultimately, this Christian spirituality emanates from a message about a relational domain termed “kingdom” (Basileus), about “God’s empire” as alternative to the Pax Romana of Jesus’ era. By extension, this spirituality of movement against empire has endured on the underside of official Christendoms of past and present, as a source of resistance to the Pax Britannicas and Pax Americanas of subsequent imperial eras. Sociologist of religion, Rodney Stark, argues that early Jesus and Christian movements flourished because of the liberating practices Christians displayed in society, notably in times of plague when Christians organized and ministered to the sick, especially when they were abandoned by the empire’s physicians and authorities.50
Christian spirituality displays this integral bond between faith action and justice movement especially when its liturgical acts become street theater for justice. An example of this can be seen in the occasional observance on Good Friday, when Christians remember Jesus’ way of the cross not with solemn assemblies in their church buildings, but with pilgrimages through their communities, stopping at sites where people have been victimized in one way or another, or have suffered repression and reprisal from authorities and from other powerful figures who wield force against them.
In Chicago, I have walked with churches that have commemorated Good Friday by moving their bodies to places where an elderly person was assaulted and robbed, or where an African-American youth had been the victim—yet again—of police brutality. In Guatemala City, I have processed on Good Friday with Christians through neighborhoods, stopping at places where members of that community suffered disappearance, hunger, and social neglect within repressive systems. In Palestine, I have taken the “contemporary way of the cross” with the Palestinian Christians there who guide visitors through key traumatized sites of Palestinian lands now occupied by Israel.51 All this is exemplary of the movement quality of Christian faith, the social kinesis of Christian spirituality.
Christian spirituality brings to justice movements, then, this integral fusion of faith and action for justice. This is a way to strengthen the other two aspects of Christian spirituality treated in this section: counter-imperial faith and dramatic and creative action.
CONCLUSION – Toward a Spirituality of Restorative Justice
In this essay, justice movements and spirituality have been approached, and related one to another, in terms of what I termed a “Synergistic Model.” This is a model that denies, on the one hand, that justice movements need to be grounded in or nurtured by an independently existing spirituality, and that also denies, on the other hand, that justice movements are merely political, lacking in animating, vital spiritualities. The synergistic model is one that sees contemporary justice movements as being so intensely alive with spirit that one can, in fact, look within them to discern what spirituality is, how spirituality is functioning in justice work today.
Some may object that there are, in fact, justice movements that lack spiritual depth and dimension. Indeed, we all know justice movements that are nothing but political enterprises, institutional clearing-houses, as it were, for orchestrating social agendas and ideological causes of many stripes. I would, however, deny to such groups the status of “justice movement.” As I have defined my terms in this essay, particularly of “justice” and “movements” in the first section, such groups do not qualify as the kind of justice movements within which one can discern a synergetic spirituality at work, however important may be the functions served by those groups. A movement that is a justice movement, in which we can see and learn something about spirituality, is one marked especially by its commitment to “restorative justice,” with its liberating, redressive and reconciliatory components.
Justice movements that embody that complex kind of commitment to restorative justice, albeit always imperfectly, are alive at many sites in the world today, in our neighborhoods, nations, regions and transnational structures. I hesitate to name any, because readers, I know, have examples ready to hand from their own contexts, where workers for justice feature a resilient drive, and are alive with spirit in at least some of the ways I have described in this essay. If I were pressed to give examples, however, I would turn most readily to groups today like the following: Witness Against Torture: A Campaign to Shutdown Guantánamo,52 the Inter-religious Foundation for Community Organizing,53 United for Peace and Justice,54 the Black Radical Congress,55 the Maria Elena Cuadra Movement of Working and Unemployed Women,56 FEDEFAM (Federation of Associations for Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared in Latin America),57 Critical Resistance (to abolish the U.S. prison industrial complex),58 Win Without War,59 KIN—Katrina Information Network,60 Mexico Solidarity Network,61 and more.
I know of so many more examples of such movements, and I know, too, that there are many other movements of which I have little or no knowledge. Oft times the justice movement that features the spiritualities portrayed in this essay do not have much of a visible institutional face, though they usually engage institutional powers in key ways.
It is in these movements, whether religious or secular, that we will find the spiritualities of rage and mourning, a discernment of rogue power, the experience of Earthpower. Then, Christians who choose to step into those movements, and seek to work in a spirit of open dialogue with them might bring additional resources from their own Jesus-movement spiritualities: a counter-imperial faith, dramatic and creative action, and faith practice as kinetic, coalition-forming movement. May such spiritualities of the world’s justice movements grow stronger, and the forces of today’s global empire more powerfully subverted.
NOTES:
1 On the suffering imposed by the embargo and UN condemnation of it, see Gordon Corry, “It’s a Consensus: World Condemns U.S. Embargo,” www.medicc.org/publications/medicc_review/1104/pages/top_story.html (accessed: March 30, 2008). On the failure of the embargo even to effect the political changes wished by U.S. apologists for it, see “Four Decades of Failure: The U.S. Trade Embargo Against Cuba,” by Dan Griswold www.freetrade.org/node/433 (accessed: March 30, 2008).
2 Inter-Religious Foundation of Community Organizing/Pastors for Peace at www.ifconews.org (accessed: June 5, 2006).
3 For a more conservative defense of the alleged value of the U.S. acting as empire, see Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York: Penquin Press, 2004). A more critical approach, one which I would support, is offered by former military expert, Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Press, 2004).
4 On the notion of “assemblage” from Gilles Deleuze, see Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
5 On race, sex and gender in colonialist empire, see Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race and Sex in the Imperial Contest (New York: Routledge, 2002).
6 Mark Lewis Taylor, “Toward a Revolution of the Sun: Protestant Mayan Resistance in Guatemala,” in Revolution of Spirit: Ecumenical Theology in Global Context. Essays in Honor of Richard M. Shaull, ed. Nantawan Boonprasat Lewis (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2004), and Mark Lewis Taylor, “Votán-Zapata: Theological Discourse in Zapatista Political Struggle,” in Converging on Culture: Theologians in Dialogue with Cultural Analysis and Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 176-96.
7 Mark Lewis Taylor Evangelio, la cultura y la fe profética, Five lectures (Lima, Peru, June 20-24, 2005.
8 Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America. 2nd ed. Revised and expanded (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993).
9 “Cuba and the Global Health Workforce: Health Professionals Abroad,” www.medicc.org/ns/index.php?s=12&p=0 (accessed: March 30, 2008).
10 Patrick Symmes, “Battle of Ideas: Searching for the opposition in post-Fidel Cuba,” Harper’s Magazine May 2008.
11 For more on theories of movements, see Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. 2nd edition. (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
12 Gerry Johnstone, Restorative Justice Reader: Texts, Sources and Contexts (London: Willan Publishers, 2003).
13 Paul Tillich, “The Meaning of Spirit as a Dimension of Life,” Systematic Theology, in three volumes (University of Chicago Press, 1951, 1957, 1963), 3:21.
14 Ibid.
15 For this emphasis on the “nutritional” import of “spirit,” I am indebted to Ivone Gebara’s paper, Matanzas, Cuba, May 16, 2008.
16 Barbara Tedlock, Time and the Highland Maya. Revised edition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992).
17 Joy James, Imprisoned Intellectuals: America’s Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation and Rebellion (Boston: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), and to view the web site for the movement I organize in as a co-coordinator in a movement for one political prisoner, see www.emajonline.com.
18 Bob Avakian, Away With All Gods: Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World. (New York: Insight Press, 2008).
19 “synergism.” Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/synergism (accessed: May 29, 2008).
20 Andrew Boyd, “Extreme Costume Ball: A New Protest Movement Hits the Streets in Style,” The Village Voice (July 25, 2000): 46-7.
21 Paul Rosenberg, “The Empire Strikes Back: Police Repression of Protest from Seattle to L.A.” pages 25-27, at http://r2klegal.org/pdf/empire-strikes.pdf (accessed: June 1, 2008).
22 John Edgar Wideman, Philadelphia Fire. A novel (New York: Henry Holt, 1990).
23 Hell To Pay. Women Make Movies: Films by and about Women, at www.wmm.com/filmCatalog/pages/c73.shtml (accessed: May 29, 2008).
24 Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead. A novel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995); and Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (New York: Simon & Schuster, 199?).
25 See the School of the Americas (SOA) Watch magazine, !Presente! at www.soaw.org/presente/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=76&Itemid=74 (accessed: June 1, 2008).
26 Leslie Marmon Silko, in Frederick Turner, “Voices out of the Land: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony,” in Turner, The Spirit of Place: The Making of the Amercian Literary Landscape (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1989), 330.
27 Mark Lewis Taylor, “Toward a Revolution of the Sun,” in Revolution of Spirit, pp. 246-69.
28 Taylor, “Toward a Revolution of the Sun,” 246.
29 For more detailed narrative of this uprising, see Taylor, “Votán-Zapata,” 178-82.
30 Frank Bardacke, ed. Shadows of Tender Fury: The Letters and Communiqués of Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (NY: Monthly Review Press, 1995), 51.
31 The Battle for Seattle: The Story Behind and Beyond the WTO Demonstrations (Fulcrum Publishing, 2000).
32 See, for example, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “World Systems and the Creole,” in Narrative, vol. 14, no. 1 (January 2006), 102-12.
33 On the notion of “the common,” see Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003) , and also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: Democracy in an Age of War and Empire (New York: Pantheon, 2004).
34 Ernesto “Che” Guevara, letter written to the editor of Marcha, an Uruguayan magazine. 1965. Complete letter available at http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/slatta/hi216/documents/chesocandman.htm (accessed: June 1, 2008).
35 On “corporate character of original sin” as setting the stage for a needed “corporate grace,” see Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith. Edited by H.R. McKintosh, Foreword (Brian Gerrish). New edition (London: T&T Clarke Publishers, 1999. Original German, 1821-22), 289.
36 WARC, “An Ecumenical Faith Stance Against Global Empire,” at http://warc.jalb.de/warcajsp/side.jsp?news_id=809&part_id=0&navi=6 (accessed: May 30, 2008).
37 On biblical scholars’ tendencies to convey “depoliticized,” and thus distorted, readings of the gospel, see Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 1-14.
38 Gerhard Kittle, editor, The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 2, s.v. “Euangelion,” trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, Mich: William B. Eerdmans, 1964), 707-37, esp. 724-25.
39 Richard A. Horsley, The Liberation of Christmas: The Infancy Narratives in Social Context (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2006).
40 Tatha Wiley, “Paul and Early Christianity,” in, Kwok, Compier, and Rieger, Empire: the Christian Tradition. New Readings of the Classical Theologians (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008), Richard A. Horsley, ed. Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity, 1997).
41 Warren Carter, Matthew and the Margins: A Socio-political and Religious Reading of Matthew (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000).
42 Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of the Gospel of Mark (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 199).
43 Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem. (New York: HarperOne, 2007).
44 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet. Critical Issues in Feminist Christology (New York: Continuum, 1994), 97-130.
45 John Dominic Crossan, God and Empire: Jesus Against Empire, Then and Now (NY: HarperOne, 2007).
46 Borg and Crossan, 1-30.
47 For more on this creative drama as a “theatric of counter-terror,” see Mark Lewis Taylor, “Toward a Christian Theatric of Counter-Terror,” in Doing Justice to Mercy: Religion, Law and Criminal Justice edited by Jonathan Rothchild, Kim, (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2007).
48 Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992), 243-57.
49 On the Bechtel Group, Inc. and water in Bolivia, see Food and Water Watch, at www.foodandwaterwatch.org/water/private-vs-public/corporations/Bechtel (accessed June 1, 2008).
50 Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force (New York: HarperPerennial, 1997).
51 This “Contemporary Way of the Cross” is provided by the organization Sabeel: The Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center. For recent examples of this way of the cross, see http://palestinianreflections.blogspot.com/2007/07/contemporary-way-of-cross.html (accessed: May 31, 2008). For the fuller work of the SABEEL center, see www.sabeel.org/ (accessed: May 31, 2008).
52 www.witnesstorture.org/ (accessed: May 31, 2008).
53 www.ifconews.org/ (accessed: May 31, 2008).
54 www.unitedforpeace.org/ (accessed; May 31, 2008).
55 www.blackradicalcongress.org/ (accessed: May 31, 2008).
56 http://elgrupo2004.com/Cuadra.html (accessed: May 31, 2008).
57 www.desaparecidos.org/fedefam/eng.html (accessed: May 31, 2008).
58 www.criticalresistance.org/index.php?name=crgoods (accessed: May 31, 2008).
59 http://winwithoutwarus.org/html/mission.html (accessed: May 31, 2008).
60 www.katrinaaction.org/node (accessed: May 31, 2008).
61 www.mexicosolidarity.org/ (accessed: May 31, 2008).
Mark Lewis Taylor is Princeton Seminary’s Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Theology and Culture. He is coordinator for Educators for Mumia Abu-Jamal. His courses focus on the theologies of Paul Tillich and Gustavo Gutierrez, on white racism as theological challenge, feminist and womanist theologies, empire and capital in theological perspective, and cultural-political hermeneutics. He is author of Religion, Politics, and the Christian Right: Post-9/11 Politics and American Empire (Fortress Press, 2005).
DOWNLOAD LINK:
- Click here to download the text in .doc format
(courtesy of the Princeton Theological Seminary website).
Related pages:
HOME
SITEMAP
TOP