Love in a Dangerous Time

I hope you heard last week’s episode, number 38, and I also hope you went back to number 30. The subject is the earliest days of the Selma voter registration drive, in 1963. My guest, Colia Clark, and her then-husband, Bernard Lafayette started it all when they went to Selma to organize for SNCC, The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. So I talked with Colia in episode 30. In last week’s episode we were joined by Charles Bonner, the first teenager recruited, and today we continue on with Colia and Charles. In this episode, Charles asks most of the questions as he is researching a book on that period.

The three episodes together actually are an incredible window into that incredibly important part of our past, when

some of the most important work for justice was being done.

So, if you haven’t heard the other episodes (numbers 30 & 38), my recommendation is that you go back and play them. Get your friends to listen to them. Maybe even watch the movie, “Selma” together. And then sit down over dinner and talk about this history. Think about what it all means. Do we still have full voting rights? What is nonviolent resistance all about? What are the lessons for the fight for justice today? Is nonviolence the only Christian response to injustice? You could go on all night. (And isn’t it true that those all night discussions are the best ones?)

Love in a Dangerous Time is mostly about issues of Church community in times when the Church as we know it seems to morphing around us. OK, so these episodes aren’t precisely about those issues. But can you imagine true faith communities of the future that have not made some effort to restore the strong heart for justice that is so elusive today? We need to learn from Kairos* Moments, like the Civil Rights Movement, in order to create the “Church 2B.”

So let’s listen. Colia Clark (the organizer) is a life-long activist and educator, now living in New York City. Charles Bonner (the first teenage recruit) has gone on to become one of our country’s leading Civil Rights lawyers. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

* Kairos (καιρός) is an ancient Greek word meaning the right or opportune moment (the supreme moment). The ancient Greeks had two words for time, chronos and kairos. While the former refers to chronological or sequential time, the latter signifies a time lapse, a moment of indeterminate time in which everything happens. In the Christian world, a ‘kairos moment’ is a moment in time when the Holy Spirit draws near to do a special work in and through a person or group.  The Holy Spirit creates and orchestrates ‘kairos moments.’

 

Useful links:

Charles Bonner:  www.bonnerlaw.com/theattorneys.html

Coilia Clark: Field Report of SNCC organizing activities, by Colia LaFayette, April 6, 1963

 

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You’ll remember back in May I interviewed Colia Clark (episode LDT030) who, with her then-husband, Bernard LaFayette, opened the voter registration drive in Selma, Alabama in 1963. This was the movement building that laid the groundwork for the famous march from Selma to Montgomery, which was instrumental in the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

A little later in May, I had the opportunity to discuss that important period with Colia again along with Charles Bonner, the first teenager to be recruited into this fierce nonviolent struggle. Today’s episode is Part 1 of this interview, with Part 2 coming next week.

Charles is now a Civil Rights attorney living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was in New York to participate in a panel, organized by Colia, about the Civil Rights movement which was presented at The Left Forum, an annual event in New York.

We’ll here about how Charles was invited in by Bernard LaFayette, and the training he and his friends received from both Colia and Bernard.  He’ll talk about the first action of the young nonviolent fighters and their reaction to the violence that ensued. Charles and Colia will talk about the structure they built so that the young fighters could stay organized.

In the next episode (episode LDT039), Charles will do more of the asking of questions for his upcoming book on the Civil Rights movement.

Please let us know how you respond to these interviews. These were the people who were doing the work, back in the day. Are you as psyched as I am to hear these stories?

Useful links:

Charles Bonner:  www.bonnerlaw.com/theattorneys.html

Coilia Clark: Field Report of SNCC organizing activities, by Colia LaFayette, April 6, 1963

 

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I’m really looking forward to your reaction to today’s program. It’s a slightly different topic than you’d expect, but it’s very interesting and it is very related to what the Church will become in the next period in history. We’re going to talk with my friend, Ed Rosenfeld, about artificial intelligence. We’ll go from “Gee Whiz” to “Oh My God” in just a few short minutes.

Hi, Lovers – I want to welcome to season two of Love In A Dangerous Time. I know it’s been a long time since my last episode, and I never put out a “see you after the summer” kind of an announcement. My apologies. I’ll never do it again. This summer turned out to be super busy for me, so I needed to take a little hiatus, to take care of business, and get more episodes lined up for season two. Among other things, I did a little traveling, had a wonderful reunion with my three grown kids and my 12-year-old granddaughter, Eve Rose. But the big thing that kept me occupied, at least for the first couple of months of summer, was the Wild Goose Festival. As some of you may know, for the last five festivals (There have been six. I missed the first one, but I did go to Wild Goose West in 2012) I’ve been the stage manager of the main stage. This is what I’ve done professionally for about thirty years, and I really enjoy being able to contribute my skill and experience to The Goose. But it’s very time consuming to prepare for the show and exhausting to actually do the event. So my time off has, I think, been spent wisely.

Speaking of using time wisely, I hope that while you were being starved for new episodes of Love in A Dangerous Time you went to the website (that’s Love in a dangerous time dot net) and listened to some of the great stuff in the archive. We’ve got Matthew Fox, John Dear, Jeff Hood, Lisa Sharon Harper, Jacqui Lewis, Alexia Salvatiera, Robin Meyers, Wes Howard-Brook…. The list goes on. Some great stuff.

I’ve got some really interesting things lined up for Season 2. I’ve decided to feature more music in Love In A Dangerous Time. There are some really great musicians and songwriters out there who are truly inspiring and down to earth at the same time. So you’ll hear some of them as the year goes on. I have a list from The Goose that should keep me busy for a while. I’ll be looking at Carnival de Resistance, a great prison ministry called Timothy’s Gift, hopefully Mark Sandlin & David Henson of the “Moonshine Jesus” podcast, and in the early fall, my guest will be Brian McLaren. Most importantly, we’ll continue the series-within-a-series of “Church2B”, open ended discussions with folks who have something to say about the future of the Church and the future of the Gospel (two separate topics). So subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, or Android One-Click, so you won’t miss any episodes. And join the conversation by leaving comments on the website (www  dot  Love In A Dangerous Time  dot net) or record your comments and questions on the Speak Pipe you see on the right hand side of the website. You can also go to www  dot  facebook  dot  com  slash  love in D time, and interact with lovers from all over the world.

And now, for today’s show:

You’ve heard Phil Madeira on the radio before. He’s the killer guitarist on albums by Alison Krauss, Elvis Costello, Amy Grant, Gath Brooks, Toby Keith, and many more. He currently lives in Nashville and is a member of Emmylou Harris’ band, The Red Dirt Boys, and even more exciting for all of us Lovers, he’s the producer/creator of the wonderful 2012 compilation album, Mercyland: Hymns for the Rest of Us. Well, lucky us, because in October, Phil will release Volume 2, which is just as full of great life-affirming songs as the first one was and with some outstanding contributors.

Phil has become a constant part of the community of the Wild Goose Festival, whether performing on stage or not. He’s someone who takes his faith seriously and brings his prodigious musical talents and artful production skills to the table of the Beloved Community.

 

You can get Mercyland 1 and Phil’s book, God on the Rocks from his website:  philmadeira.net

Mercyland 2 will come out in October of 2015, and you can get it then at the website too.

 

 

Summer is here and it’s almost time for the Wild Goose Festival. Just in case you Lovers haven’t heard, Wild Goose will be Thursday, July 9 to Sunday, July 12. It takes place in the beautiful Appalachian town of Hot Springs, North Carolina.

I often describe Wild Goose as a cross between Church Camp and Burning Man. It’s a weekend of intense discussion of theology, art, music, justice, and the Church. But it’s also a great party with progressive folks like all the Lovers, who find that their faith is what propels them in the business of changing the world.

About a month ago I talked with Wild Goose executive director, Rosa Lee Harden about the overall wonderfulness of The Goose and about the incredible music that is scheduled for this year. Today, is a sequel to that one and we’re going to talk about the incredible array of speaker at this year’s event.

After you listen to the podcast, please check out the Wild Goose website (wild goose festival dot org) to get more info and the I hope you’ll get your tickets.

I want to meet all the Lovers at the Goose.

 

 

WildGooseFestival.com

@WildGooseFest

www.facebook.com/wildgoosefestival

Special 2015 Wild Goose page

Article about Phyllis Tickle

Phyllis’ books on the Divine Hours (Click to Amazon and support Love In A Dangerous Time)

Lovers who will appear at Wild Goose:

Rev. Yolanda – LDT022

Alexia Salvatierra – LDT021

Mickey Scott-Bey Jones – LDT012

Foster Pinkney – LDT010

John Dear – LDT008

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First let’s talk about some housekeeping issues. I think it’s time that we start using Love In A Dangerous Time’s facebook page to keep our discussions going between episodes. I know that lots of you have some pretty strong reactions to, both positive and negative, to these programs. They’re dealing with some really important questions facing all people of faith, particularly Christians, in these “Dangerous Times.”  It’s really important that we all participate in the conversation. So please go to www.facebook.com/LoveInDTime and speak your mind on the episodes. If you want to specifically contribute to the discussion of #Church2B conversation, please use the hashtag. In fact, use the hashtag on Twitter as well.

And now for today’s episode:

Three books are very much at the root of why I started Love In A Dangerous Time. They are all written by my guest today, Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The books are:

* Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus (2009)

   ·  The Underground Church: Reclaiming the Subversive Way of Jesus  (2012)

                                                         and

   ·  Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance, which just came out a couple of months ago, in April of 2015

Robin Meyers believes that the Church – the Gospel, if you will – should make a real difference in the world. He’s impatient with models of Church community that are all about the comfort and certainty of community members. He’s fed up with insistence on a checklist of intellectual statements you must affirm to call yourself a Christian. The whole idea of “cutting a deal with God (usually by claiming to believe certain statements) in order to get your individual soul a good deal in the after-life makes him angry. Instead, he sees Church community as a place that trains people to resist anything and everything that undermines Jesus’ stance of the Sermon on the Mount.

These are all issues that loom very important in these days of Church decline. How will we (or will we?) move past this period of transition into some new and more impactful model of Church for the next 500 years? This episode is part of the sub-series, #Church2B.

For thirty years, Dr. Meyers been the pastor of Mayflower Congregational UCC Church, in Oklahoma City, which tries to follow Jesus, rather than worship Christ. He is also a tenured full professor of rhetoric in the philosophy department at Oklahoma City University. His most recent book, Spiritual Defiance (listed above) is based on his Lyman Beecher Lectures, given at Yale in 2013.

Amazon Bio:

Rev. Dr. Robin R. Meyers is a nationally known UCC pastor, professor, peace activist, and the author of seven books about progressive Christianity and American society. He has been the senior minister of Mayflower Congregational UCC church, Oklahoma City, for 30 years. He is also a tenured full professor of rhetoric in the philosophy department at Oklahoma City University. Dr. Meyers lectures and gives workshops on church renewal around the country, and is an award-winning commentator for NPR. His teaching and preaching offer a non-literal, non-dogmatic approach to Christianity, and his politics are neither left nor right, but rather subversive for the cause of love. He seeks to build, not a collection of “believers,” but a Beloved Community devoted to embodying peace and justice in a broke...

 

Back in the day, I had the honor of producing a radio program, on KPFA in Berkeley, California, featuring the former Catholic theologian, Matthew Fox. I had read several of his books and I was very excited to be collaborating with such an important voice in contemporary theology. Well, Matt is my guest today and we’re going to have a very interesting discussion

Over the last forty years or so, Matthew Fox’s books have been shaking people out of slumber and into a more vital faith. Aside from being the go-to scholar for study of the Christian mystics, Fox has called people away from dogma and into an understanding of a Cosmic Christ. His books on Creation Spirituality are complimented by many others addressing problems and issues of our time, including education, worship, the reinvention of work, the spirituality of men, creativity and he even founded a university and wrote a book calling for A New Reformation.

And he doesn’t just write books. At every stage he’s been actively working to implement everything he writes about.

But the main reasons I invited him to come on Love in a Dangerous Time were two. First to discuss his recent article in Tikkun magazine called, Love is Stronger than Stewardship: A Cosmic Christ Path to Planetary Survival, where he calls for the formation of a new, spiritual but not religious, order tasked with saving Mother Earth.

And secondly to share with us his breakthrough work on new ways of worship – The Cosmic Mass. The Cosmic Mass is a rave-like event that moves worshipers with music, dance, poetry, and teaching. I’ve attended a few of these, in Oakland, California, and they are pretty amazing.

I’ll have lots of links in the show notes at Love in a Dangerous Time dot net     to Matthew Fox’s books and related websites as well as to the archives of that 2004 radio program I mentioned.

 

The vows of the new order:

I promise to be the best mystic and warrior I can be,

by doing inner work and putting my skills into practice

to battle climate change.

 

Matthew Fox’s website – www.matthewfox.org

The Cosmic Christ website – http://thecosmicmass.com/

Spirit in Action – a 2004 radio program on KPFA, Berkeley, CA – www.kpfa.org/?s=spirit+in+action

 

Books (support Love in a Dangerous Time by clicking here to buy on Amazon:

 

 

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My conversation partners are two of my favorite clergy leaders in New York.  Rev. Dr. Peter Heltzel is a professor of theology at New York Theological

Seminary and the instigator of Freedom Fellowship, a Sunday afternoon worship in a pub in Manhattan. Peter is also the director of the Micah Institute, which we talked about in episode 19. Rev. Jacqui Lewis, PhD is the senior pastor at Middle Collegiate Church in New York’s East Village. Both of them are very active leaders in social justice work here, and especially in efforts to mobilize clergy and lay people to take up the struggle for equality and justice.

In my description of the #Church2B, I have been painting a rather bleak picture of the church in these transitional time, but Peter and Jacqui are examples of how visionary leadership and powerful love, not only of God, but of the people who look to the church, can lead to very exciting successes. Our discussion has an inspiring energy to it.

This is the second in our series of open-ended conversations in the #Church2B series. Please use the hashtag #Church 2 B in social media to join the conversation and read what others are thinking. This is a new series, so use the hashtag a lot to prime the pump. Until next week, when my guest will be noted theologian, Matthew Fox.

 

 

Here are some links that may interest you:

Peter Heltzel – NYTS bio

Micah Institute website

Twitter: @PeterHeltzel

FaceBook:  www.facebook.com/peter.heltzel

Middle Collegiate Church, NYC website

This is a link to an excerpt of the Pew study that was referred to in the interview. interview. You can also get a copy of the complete document here.

 

#Church2B – The statement (.pdf)

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Today’s episode of Love in a Dangerous Time is with two of the elders of the progressive Christian community here in New York City, Rev. Dr. Donald Shriver and his wife Peggy Shriver. In the interview, I’ll share some of their accomplishments in their respective careers, but today we’re focusing on a project that has occupied much of their attention in their retirement years, the theory and practice of Restorative Justice.  In our society, where criminals are constantly being killed by the state, and the commercial prison industry houses an incredible percentage of our population, Don and Peggy are part of the world wide movement of people looking at ways to use the criminal justice system to restore community, by bringing persons who hurt others in the crimes they commit back to their families and loved ones by emphasizing recompense and restoration. There have been thousands of successful cases of healing rather than punishment over the last couple of decades that offer a much brighter future for our communities.

 

In the interview we also talk about the possibility of using the principals of Restorative Justice on an international level, to heal some mind numbingly difficult situations of oppression and post-colonial rebuilding. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa is the most well-known example of this.

 

One word on the sound quality of the program. As I’ve mentioned from time to time, New York is not a place where a podcaster is likely to have a sound proof studio. In this case, I took my equipment to the Shriver’s apartment and we recorded at their dining room table. So there are lots of trucks going by and just the normal noises of city living. I’ve used some of the digital magic that exists to make podcasts sound good, but it’s not perfect. I’m sure, however, that you’ll find the information in this interview compelling and the personal witness of these two committed seniors inspiring.

 

 

Links to books, etc. coming tomorrow

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Colia Liddell LaFayette Clark was one of the lead organizers for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1963, in Selma, Alabama. As we all saw in the recent film, Selma, it was in 1965 that Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference launched, in Selma, the campaign that would lead to the mass mobilizations that are commemorated in the movie and in several 50th anniversaries this spring, and would also culminate in the 1965 Voting Rights bill that passed Congress as a response to the marches, (and the fierce repression against marchers).

 

Today, Colia Clark (her first name is pronounced, “CO-lee”) lives in New York and is still an activist. Our discussion, on this episode of Love In A Dangerous Time, centers on those years of organizing that lead to the successful culmination of this particular struggle. Colie points out some of the important information that is left out of the movie.

 

 

Here are some useful links:

 

Colia Clark’s Wikipedia bio

Article: The Selma Voting Rights Struggle: 15 Key Points from Bottom-Up History and Why It Matters Today – By Emilye Crosby

Field Report of SNCC organizing activities, by Colia LaFayette, April 6, 1963

 

 

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