Breaking a window is violence?

Hitting someone with a club is violence. Funding projects that destroy local economies and ecosystems is violence. Displacing millions of people in order to ravage the countryside to extract resources and build useless consumer products is violence. Denying refugees right of return and bombing their villages when they defy the injustice is violence. Creating social [...]

The Bush II and Obama administrations and the transition from American hegemony to the “Post-American world”

This past weekend the Common Root conference was held in Minneapolis. Tom and Christine Sine of Mustard Seed Associates led the first plenary session, and my friend Jordan Peacock wrote the following as a summary statement of one of their points:
The Pax Americana is not necessarily the strongest ‘empire’. It stands together with global capitalism, [...]

Glen Ford on Obama and MLK

Glen Ford is the executive editor of Black Agenda Report. This article hits on a number of points I’ve had swirling about in my head the past several days, which I hope to be able to collect coherently and post soon.
Yes, the article is from Al-Jazeera’s English site. If people can get over that fact [...]

Obama and Ayers

Ok, I don’t really care all that much about the Presidential election, to be honest. I strongly believe that it makes very little difference which of the two major-party candidates ends up being awarded the office.
That being said, I can’t believe the ridiculous crap people will believe about Obama. He’s a Muslim. He’s a terrorist [...]

Ellsworth replies

I stopped by for a quick check of my inbox today to see that Congressman Ellsworth did in fact send a reply to my email. Ok, so it was probably a staffer sending a canned response, but it’s something. Unfortunately, he did very little to address my actual concerns or engage my proposed action – [...]

Letter to my Congressman on the bailout

I’m not usually a big believer in the governmental process as an agent of change, truth, justice, or whatever, and the current issue with the proposed Wall Street and bank bailout plans is no exception. I have very little expectation that my letter will actually in any way influence the decision of the representative for [...]

US Army unit to be deployed for domestic operations

From Democracy Now!:
Beginning in October, the Army plans to station an active unit inside the United States for the first time to serve as an on-call federal response in times of emergency. The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent thirty-five of the last sixty months in Iraq, but now the unit is [...]

Journalists arrested at RNC include Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman

We all expected the cops to use excessive force and utilize the tactic of questionable mass arrests in St. Paul. That’s no surprise, that has been a tactic for squelching public dissent since time immemorial. What is perhaps even more alarming about the tactics used in St. Paul is the arrest of several journalists who [...]

FYI: 2012 Convention Information

I take all the blame for this one.

A brief musing on Paul

We now can say from studies in all related fields, including epigraphy and archaeology, that the cult of Caesar the divine ruler was not merely one among other religious choices available to denizens of the ancient Roman empire. Instead, we should see it as largely the glue that held the empire together on multiple levels [...]

Empire Remixed: To Hell With Romans 13

I’ve added the Empire Remixed site to my blogroll under the “Christarchy” category. Check it out, there is a lot of good stuff there. Empire Remixed is a project that had its birth in the “Wine Before Breakfast” gatherings in Brian Walsh’s office at the University of Toronto. I’ve written a bit about Walsh and [...]

More quotes

This time from Robert Brimlow’s What About Hitler? Wrestling with Jesus’ Call to Nonviolence in an Evil World.
“The main difficulty in accepting the implications of our call to be peacemakers is our fear of death and dying, born of a weakness of faith.”
and:
“The gospel is clear and simple, and I know what the response to [...]

Notes from my Cornerstone seminar

I promised these over a week ago when I was still in Chicago, and haven’t yet got around to it – so here they are, the notes from my seminar, “Sacred Anarchy: The Image of God and Political (Dis)Order”, given on Saturday at Cornerstone.
Sacred Anarchy: The Image of God and Political (Dis)Order
The section on Genesis [...]

Cornerstone seminar

The Cornerstone seminar went really well. The title of my session was “Sacred Anarchy: The Image of God and Political (Dis)Order”. I focused on Wink’s formulation of the Myth of Redemptive Violence, focused on Genesis as subversive to the Myth, and then took a trip through modern political philosophy to demonstrate how the modern state [...]

my sister shares her story about the I-69 tree sit

This past weekend a tree sit protesting I-69 was “evicted” by DNR, the Indiana State Police, and other “law enforcement” agencies. My sister was right in the middle of (some of) the action, and she’s shared her story on her blog.

Training for war

“Military planners operate on the basis of military expediency, and individual soldiers are trained to operate on the basis of unquestioning obedience to their military superiors…In the realm of copybook distinctions it may be a simple matter to divide the bombing of a city into separate acts of willed destruction of a war production plant [...]

Early morning, April 4, a shot rings out in the Memphis sky…

As you’re probably aware, on this day 40 years ago Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.
Fewer people are aware of this speech he gave 41 years ago, today.
Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
April 4, 1967
I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no [...]

“Green energy” and Amazon rain forests

People need to to read things like this before they ignorantly ramble about how great biofuels are.
At the bottom of page one it talks about the possibility of the Amazon rain forest turning into something like a savannah or even a desert. It wouldn’t be the first time human deforestation has caused a vital and [...]

Let’s hear it for the democratic process

Depending on which study one considers credible either 70% or 90+% of people in Indiana are opposed to construction of a new-terrain extension of I-69 from Indianapolis through southwestern Indiana. The major pocket of support is among business interests in the Evansville area.
This project is highly problematic for numerous reasons, including but not limited to [...]

IDEM hearing on “fine particle matter”

You know, the kind that gets in your lungs and doesn’t come back out, that contributes heavily to cancer, emphysema, and other fun things. They want to make it easier for industrial pollution in the area to increase so we can breathe more of it – in an area that already compares with Los Angeles [...]