RT @nick_routledge: @alastairmci Perhaps those African portraits land so hard because they reveal something most of us in the West suffer from, which is religion that's mostly mood management and moral branding circling a secure, privatized salvation project, and calling it good. There's clearly work to be done.
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19/ From such breath, history turns. Revolution, then, is a spiritual metabolism of history; political emancipation, divine unfolding made flesh—the cosmos evolving through justice enacted. Messianism meets ecology when each soul midwives the Real through radical neighborliness. 20/ The Kingdom, then, doesn’t arrive fully formed. It takes form—through us. It isn't bestowed. It is built. Not in doctrine, nor by elites, but by making it Real in the labor of loving. Kabir wove. Nund Rishi farmed. Christ worked with wood. No castes, no courts, no careerists. 4/ One of the more astute takedowns of the entire fallacy issues from the S. Asian prophet contemplative, Kabir, who never shied from declaring such "throwing of intensity forward" precisely the root incoherence affording religious and secular powers their credence and authority. 21/ Hence Nund Rishi, a farmer himself, called for action, not abstraction. Sahaja was incarnation, the eschaton practiced at ground level. Social concerns trumped religious preoccupations. Paradise was practiced in the vernacular of addressing hunger. Justice was handmade. 22/33 Paradise begins where breath meets labor. This is not metaphor. Jesus' parable, Nund Rishi's shruk, Kabir's doha—they were all the word as tools, not just symbol. Compressed acts of construction, a vision of revolutionary tenderness revealed in sawdust, loom, and furrow. 23/ “If you dream of Paradise, you must work for it,” Nund Rishi averred. The Kingdom isn't a theory. It's a method. Jesus the carpenter, Kabir the weaver, Nund Rishi the farmer. Their theology came with calluses. The praxis of the poor—one loaf, one coat, one sapling at a time.
Open original document@RichardRohrOFM @brianmclaren MLK’s letter reads less like warning than autopsy. Let's be honest: precisely as the world polycrisis demands love, truth and solidarity, Abrahamic religion, by and large, reads captured and spent—credible only to its own tribes and even there, imploding. A migration is in order.
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Image of Rebbe Abraham Joshua Heschel and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., taken from tweet here: Tweet thread: CHALLENGE: Before sharing another quote from my father or asserting what he would stand for or against today, read #LetterFromBirminghamJail and comment on this tweet with something you learned. Letter: africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html "If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century." He was right. A fresh 21stC. start, then? "Jesus was calling for a radical disruption of his religion, a great spiritual migration. A similar disruption and migration are needed no less today in the religion that names itself after Him. - McLaren [From tweet here, responding to the Letter from Birmingham Jail, color inverted for graphic fit: Of edited tweet originally here: Tweet: Same on the streets, never mind in the Academy. Let's be honest. It's time for a fresh start. "From time to time, the image of God has to die so not to become an idol. It has to become transparent to transcendence to be renewed." ~ Joseph Campbell Richard Rohr Let’s be honest: religion has probably never had such a bad name. Christianity is now seen as “irrelevant” by some, “toxic” by many, and often as a large part of the problem rather than any kind of solution. It’s time to rebuild from the bottom up.
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