Summer-Fall Schedule for BCM Webinars

Here is a schedule of our monthly webinars for the rest of the year.  We will be taking June off because we're on the road most of the month.  Hope you'll join us, especially now that we have an upgraded platform!  (Photo above: The late Ladon Sheats, at left, whose life and legacy will be the subject of our August webinar.)

Ted Lyddon-Hatten and Rich Reid: Recent Art and Film Collaborators with BCM

Our artist-theologian friend Ted Lyddon-Hatten will be at the Wild Goose Festival this summer sharing his amazing "ephemeral art" (see my previous blog about our last collaboration).  Above is a drawing he did last summer with myrhh on our patio table, which we left there for six months.  Check out Ted's amazing artwork here, here,  here and here, and I urge you to  catch him at the Festival, June 21-24 in Shakori Hills, NC.

Meanwhile we recently received our "Ocean Friendly Gardens" certificate from the local Surfrider Foundation for the way in which our yard models both native landscaping and the philosophy of "slowing, spreading and sinking" surface water.  Even cooler, our neighbor Rich Reid, who is an accomplished National Geographic photographer, is doing a documentary about this program.  He's been doing time-lapse photography in our yard, where our native plants are at the height of springtime beauty.  

If you want to help us keep improving our yard project as a demonstration site, come participate in our Bartimaeus Summer Work Institute, July 1-6: details and registration here.  

Webinar on Pentecost and Cultural Diversity Employs New Platform

Pentecost is coming up on Sunday, May 27th.  To help prepare, Ched held a 90 min. webinar on May 15th about some of the themes evoked by this Feast Day.  First we looked at Genesis 11 and the Tower of Babel, which is often portrayed as the antithesis of Pentecost, whereas in fact the story portrays divine "centrifugality" as the antidote to imperial "centripetality."  Then we learned about the roots of Pentecost in Shavuot, a Sabbath Economics feast of redistribution. Finally we saw how that vision is translated in Acts 2 into a theology of multiculturalism. 

We used a new platform, Adobe Connect, for the first time, and had enthusiastic reviews from the more than 25 participants (including group viewings in Pasadena and Minneapolis).  We'll continue to develope and improve this way of doing our educational work.

Above picture: "Pentecost,” El Greco, 1596-1600.

A Positive Review of Our God is Undocumented

I'm passing on a recent positive review that appeared in the Englewood Review of Books: 

A Promise Even Greater than that of Lady Liberty

A Featured Review of

Our God is Undocumented: Biblical Faith and Immigrant Justice.

Ched Myers and Matthew Colwell

Reviewed by Jonathan Felton

A Church without Borders

One could be forgiven for expecting this book to be a rehash of liberal arguments about immigration policy, anchored by a smattering of bible verses. It isn’t. Ched Myers and Matthew Colwell have something else in mind, and their short book contributes some big ideas to discussions of “biblical faith and immigrant justice “

The authors acknowledge that the reflections in their book are “unapologetically theological and ecclesial.”  This is a book about God and the church. They are more concerned with conveying “a faith-rooted ethic regarding the sojourner in our midst than with the current debates over U.S. immigration and naturalization policies.” Acceptance of their thesis does have implications for our attitude toward those policies. The authors hope we will approach them with a revised sense of loyalty, and therefore with a renewed set of priorities.

The authors urge their readers to realize “a church without borders,” a conviction which “arises from our own experience with immigrants as well as from our study of scripture. Both teach us that God has a special relationship with those marginalized by social and political systems and therefore that the church should as well.”

Join in the Global Climate Change Actions on Saturday, May 5th!

I'm passing on this urgent message from Bill McKibben about Saturday's Climate change actions (I'll be attending a Ojai Meadows Restoration event):

In less then 48 hours, the sun will rise in the far Pacific, and one of the last best chances to educate our civilization about climate change will be underway.  On 5/5, all around the world, we’ll be Connecting the Dots on climate change. The day will begin in the Marshall Islands, where our friends are taking their cameras underwater for a rally against the backdrop of their endangered coral reef. And we need you to join in — the images we collect in the next hours will be the bank on which we draw as we continue to wage the political fight to cut carbon emissions. 

If you don't yet know which local event you're joining, click here to get involved: www.climatedots.org.  We desperately need to put real human faces on climate change — to make sure that people understand it’s not an abstraction and a future threat, but a very present and very real crisis.

Commemorating the L.A. Uprising

This weekend folk around southern California will be commemorating the 20th anniversary of the 1992 L.A. Uprising.  We did that in our April 24th webinar entitled "No Justice, No Peace: Reflections on Jesus' Lament over Jerusalem and the 20th Anniversary of the L.A. Uprising."  It went well, with 25 participants.  I first reflected on my experience last month on Land Day and Palm Sunday in Jerusalem; then looked at Luke’s unique narrative of Jesus' weeping over Jerusalem (Lk 19:39-44); and concluded with a look back on the largest urban riots in U.S. history (April 29-May 2, 1992). 

Holy Land Journal. Sunday: “If only you knew the things that make for peace.”

I enjoyed a relaxing lunch with Omar, his mother and Bo Forsberg, one of the organizers of last week’s Swedish Diakonia/Sabeel conference.  We also met up with Sarah Thompson from Elkhart, IN, who I have known through Jesus Radicals.  She is working this year from Sabeel, but had just returned late the night before from a Christian Peacemaker Team board meeting in Colombia.  We all then found a perch on the road heading up from Gethsemene toward the Old City, from which we could watch the Palm Sunday pilgrims coming down from the Mt. of Olives. 

There are many ironies to this procession.  For one, it takes place under the watchful eye of security forces looking out for nationalist protests, not unlike the first Palm Sunday.  For another, Jerusalem is still in some ways an “occupied” city, especially if you are Palestinian; indeed, many Christians cannot even come here though they live close by, because they cannot get a permit.  And for me, the mayhem of Friday’s Land Day demonstration up the road at Damascus Gate seemed much more akin to the energy of the original “triumphal entry into Jerusalem” by the Galilean dissident Jesus than did the pious processions today.

[Above:  Palm Sunday 2011; photo by Ryan Beiler.  For more, read on.  Note: You can hear Ched reflect on Jesus' lament over Jerusalem, Palm Sunday and the 20th anniversary of the Los Angeles uprising in the next BCM monthly webinar on April 24th; register here.] 

Saturday: A Sabeel into the Future

Yesterday's post was long; this will be short.  This morning was recuperation up here at Ryan and Ingrid's place on the Mt. of Olives, catching up on blogging and other work.   Mid-afternoon I walked down the hill, across the Gihon Valley and up toward the Temple Mount, then through the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem to St. George's Cathedral to meet Maha Ateek.  It was a long, hot march, but I welcomed the exercise and enjoyed strolling through the vibrant life of the back streets.  

Pictured above: Anglican priest Rev. Dr. Ateek.  For more about him and Sabeel, read on.

Friday: Reality Check on Land Day

This will be a longer post, as today brought not only the Daylight Savings time change here, but a reality check about political change as well.  In planning this brief, 10 day trip to Palestine I’d assumed that it would be instructive to stay in Jerusalem for Palm Sunday.  What I didn’t count on was the fact that today was “Land Day,” an annual commemoration that sees huge demonstrations for Palestinian self determination.   This year saw protests not only throughout the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, but also around the world under the banner “Global March to Jerusalem.”  The potential parallels with our studies of the Palm Sunday text in Luke 19 this week persuaded Omar and I to go check out the “action” in east Jerusalem.

Above: Sabeel staff member Omar Harami being kicked by an Israeli riot policeman in yesterday's Land Day demonstration in Jerusalem; photo by Mahmoud Illean.  For the story, read on. 

Thursday: "Part of me wants to sing about the Light, and part of me wants to cry, cry, cry"

The slate of presentations at a Sabeel conference tends to be rather relentless; after all, there are so many pieces to the puzzle of this Occupation.  But the last one on the docket turned out to be most poignant, moving even veterans of this conflict: the plight of Palestinian children in Israeli detention.  Gerard Horton of Defence for Children International Palestine Section presented his recently completed report entitled Bound, Blindfolded and Convicted: Children Held in Military Detention.  Horton related how almost every night of the year somewhere on the West Bank a house will be raided in the dead of night and a pre-teen male arrested; this child will then be subject to beatings, harsh interrogation, forced confessions and often solitary confinement, all without representation or parental accompaniment.  With a quarter of all Palestinians having been arrested during the course of the Occupation, an entire generation has been scarred by military detention, with thousands of children traumatized—which cannot bode well for a peaceful future.  An executive summary of this sobering report can be found on the DCIPS site.

Picture above: members of the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music.   For more about the day, read on.