Tag Archives: corporate power

Stringfellow: The Powers in the Midst of Creation

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Readers of my books will know that my theology of the powers has been strongly influenced by the works of William Stringfellow. On April 21-23, I will be co-facilitating this upcoming conference on “The Powers in the Midst of Creation” with Bill Wylie-Kellerman, a foremost scholar of Stringfellow who has written extensively on the powers. This retreat marks the 50th anniversary of  Stringfellow’s groundbreaking book, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land. It will take place at Kirkridge Retreat Center outside Bangor, Pennsylvania. Register here.

In Bill Wylie-Kellerman’s words: “I don’t know how he (Stringfellow) did it, but what he writes is always right on time. Prophetic even in the sense of prescience. We hope for a conversation discerning the times.”

Dates: Friday, April 21 at 4pm to Sunday, April 23 at 1pm

Facilitators: Bill Wylie-Kellermann and Sharon Delgado

Cost: $350  The cost includes the programming, overnight accommodations, and meals Friday dinner through Sunday lunch.

“The work of the demonic powers in the Fall is the undoing of Creation.” – William Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land,

This year marks the 50th anniversary of William Stringfellow’s An Ethic for Christians, his most important and influential book. Stringfellow, theologian, attorney, and regular Kirkridge leader of biblical retreats, wrote to and from a particular moment, so this book served as a primer for protest and resistance to militarism and nuclear weapons in the 70’s and 80’s. It also was a seminal theological work in bringing the “principalities and powers” back into the arena of Christian social ethics. His was a reading which brought them down to earth from spiritual outer space, presaging and setting in motion so much further biblical work of recent decades.

Led by Bill Wylie-Kellermann and Sharon Delgado, two pastors whose lives and ministries have been deeply discerned and formed by Bill Stringfellow’s witness, our common conversation will likewise implicate our lives and work. We will gather in the week of his birth (April 26, 1928) but also auspiciously on Earth Day weekend. Within our query of where Stringfellow’s insights lead us in our present moment, we will include the question of how the powers figure into the assault upon Earth, and how they may be engaged.

Facilitators Bios:

Bill Wylie-Kellermann is a nonviolent community activist, writer, and United Methodist pastor living in Wawiatanong/Detroit. He is also is part of the Community at Kirkridge. Bill was a friend of William Stringfellow’s and has done several books on him, including A Keeper of the Word: Selected Writings of William Stringfellow (Eerdmans, 1994), William Stringfellow: Essential Writings, (Orbis, 2013), Principalities in Particular: A Practical Theology of the Powers that Be (Fortress, 2017). He was married to Denise Griebler on Advent’s Joy Sunday, 2013. They have five grandchildren.

Sharon Delgado is a retired United Methodist pastor, author, and longtime activist, whose introduction to William Stringfellow’s writings in the 1980s shaped her theology and ministry deeply. Sharon addresses spiritual communities and secular audiences on issues related to corporate globalization, climate change, economic and environmental justice, and peacemaking, while pointing in the direction of hope in action. She has had many articles published on these themes and is author of The Cross in the Midst of Creation (2022), Shaking the Gates of Hell (Second Edition, 2020), and Love in a Time of Climate Change. Sharon lives in rural Northern California with her husband Guarionex Delgado, near their children and grandchildren.

Registration deadline April 10.  Register here.

Climate Change and Faithful Banking

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By Sharon Delgado

This year the World Council of Churches put forth the initiative, “Climate-Responsible Finance: A Moral Imperative towards Children,” which links the deadly impacts of climate change on the world’s children with the strategy of engagement with banks that are invested in fossil fuels. At the launch of this initiative in May 2022, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, “It is now time for financial service providers to accelerate the shift to renewables. They have the power – and the responsibility. The scientific and moral imperative is clear: there must be no new investment in fossil fuel expansion, including production, infrastructure, and exploration.” 

Clearly, the climate impacts of our investments are linked to ethical decisions about our money. Here in the United States, an organization called Third Act, which is geared toward elders, is taking this connection to heart. Formed by seasoned climate organizer (and United Methodist) Bill McKibben, Third Act promotes both democracy and effective climate action.  Right now the organization is promoting their Banking on Our Future Campaign, which focuses on the four top  banks that fund fossil fuel projects: Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and Citibank. This “money pipeline” from banks enables fossil fuel companies to build new extraction, transportation, processing, sales, and export infrastructure that lock us into increasing fossil fuel use and accelerating global heating for decades–decades that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says we don’t have. Without the money pipeline, fossil fuel producers would have to stop funding new infrastructure, stop engaging in climate change denial, and make good on their promises to transition to renewable forms of energy.

In addition to my role as coordinator of the California-Nevada Annual Conference Climate Justice Ministries Task Force,  I am the United Methodist liaison on the board of Third Act Faith,  a working group of Third Act. One of my jobs is to interpret the good work of Third Act to the United Methodist Church and its members, to explain how participating in their Banking on Our Future Campaign is an act of faith, to share practical ways that United Methodists can be involved at every level of church life, and to encourage participation. A tall order! But when I break it down, I realize that all I have to do is interpret, explain, share, and encourage action. Perhaps some of you who read this will carry this work further, and God, “who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Eph. 3), will take it from there.

Interpreting the work of Third Act to the United Methodist Church, especially to retired clergy and laity, has been made easy by Bill McKibben and others who have explained it clearly. To understand Banking on Our Future’s rationale read Your Money Is Your Carbon and Want to Address Climate Change?  Change Your Bank. Why focus on elders?  People over sixty own seventy percent of the wealth in this country. There are 70 million of us, most of us vote, many of us have grandchildren or other children whom we love, and we hope to leave them a  planet  with abundant life that we have enjoyed. (See the PBS News Hour’s special with McKibben’s “brief but spectacular take” on Third Act and fighting for the climate and our democracy).

Likewise, explaining to United Methodists how participating in Third Act’s Banking on Our Future Campaign is an act of faith involves highlighting points that the World Council of Churches and others have made about the morality of our money in this time of climate emergency, and framing such points in Wesleyan terms:  social holiness, the value of God’s creation, the world as our parish, and so on. Remember, John Wesley was a social reformer who saw the connections between personal finance and injustice. A staunch abolitionist, he wrote, “Better no trade than trade procured by villainy…Better is honest poverty than all the tears, and sweat, and blood, of our fellow creatures.” (Thoughts Upon Slavery, 45-46).  Bringing it back to the climate emergency in our time, others have expressed a similar sentiment in simple terms: “It’s wrong to profit by wrecking the planet.”

In practical terms, this campaign offers suggestions, action opportunities, and resources at varied levels of commitment, including writing letters to the big banks, pledging to divest if your bank continues funding fossil fuels, engaging with bank managers, or participating in public demonstrations. By participating, we join with many other groups offering resources and taking similar actions, including Stop the Money Pipeline and Customers for Climate Justice. On March 21, 2023, there will be a big day of action, with people publicly divesting: 32123! Big Banks are Driving the Climate Crisis So We’re Pushing Back.

Finally, I encourage you to rise to the challenge that the climate emergency presents to us in our time, as United Methodists and as people of faith and conscience. Taking steps toward “faithful banking” is one way to take action. Join the Third Act email list. Join a Working Group– the Faith working group and/or a local working group.  Find out how  you can  Take Action Today.

For questions, contact me at climatejustice@cnumc.org.

Follow Sharon’s blog post by signing up at the “Follow” link to the right. Share with the Social Media buttons below. Read other blog posts related to climate change here. Check out Sharon’s books.  Contact Sharon to request a presentation or to order discounted bulk copies of her books.  Discussion guides and video introductions of her books are also available.

 

The Wood is Dry

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Progressive Christian Social Action

The Wood is Dry

“Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children…  For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” Luke 23:31

This morning the tears finally came. Friends, the wood is dry.  People are getting sick and dying from the pandemic, which is just getting started. In some places, like New York, the hospitals are beginning to get overrun.  Healthcare workers are overwhelmed and risking exposure every day, often without enough supplies, respirators, or protective equipment. Schools and businesses are closing, and people are being laid off faster than during the Great Depression. We are beginning to see shortages of food. Racial violence and domestic violence are increasing. Economic insecurity, anxiety, fear, and tensions are on the rise.

Yesterday, a two-trillion-dollar stimulus bill was signed into law. It will take some of the economic pressure off at least some of the people but will provide many times more money to bail out the industries that keep the current economic system going. This system is called a free-market economy, but everyone knows that the government always (so far) can find enough money to wage war or to bail out the banks or to subsidize favorite industries that “pay to play” in order to elect and lobby the very leaders who make the decisions about policies that end up siphoning even more of society’s wealth up to the top. This is an example of the Shock Doctrine at its worst—taking advantage of a crisis to install policies that transfer wealth to the already wealthy. While the bill offers money for medical necessities in for dealing with Covid 19, loans to small businesses, and grants and expanded unemployment insurance to people are suffering, it also offers much more in bailouts for big corporations. The Trump Administration’s Treasury Department will be able to leverage the $500 billion dollars many times over, to the tune of $4.5 trillion or more, far more than the amount given to the people in this hour of extreme need. It has even been called a “corporate coup.” (See article below)

I not only grieve for what our people are facing now. I am also furious that our lawmakers don’t take this opportunity to create a system that is not based on the God of money, a system with the purpose of caring for people and protecting our earth.

This grief and fury must have been what Jesus felt at times, when he challenged the religious and political leaders who supported from and benefited from the unjust Roman system of domination and occupation at the expense of the people.  They targeted him as a subversive and put him to death because the popular movement he led pointed to a new way of living, demonstrated an inclusive and egalitarian community based on compassion, and challenged the status quo. Jesus could see that if the Domination System targeted him at that time, when the Spirit of God was so active and apparent among him and his followers, it would continue to do so long after he was gone.

In Luke 23:26-31, we read that as Jesus made his way toward his crucifixion a great multitude of people “bewailed and lamented him.”  But he turned and addressed them saying: “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never gave suck!’ Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us’; and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’  For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?”

The wood is dry.  But I’m encouraged because I see green shoots all around: in the people who reach out to each other in this time of pandemic, in health care workers and others who risk themselves and give their all for the common good, in those who care for the children, deliver food to elders, facilitate online connection, and try to raise people’s spirits, and in those who continue to strive for social, economic, and environmental justice and systemic change.

The seeds of resurrection are already planted.  With prayer, dedication to each other, and courage, we rise.

See the March 31, 2020 article by Jake Johnson on Common Dreams, “No More Spending’: After Securing $4.5 Trillion Corporate Bailout, Trump White House and GOP Cast Doubt on New Stimulus: ‘Trillions for big business. Bare minimum for you.’”

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Resisting Banks that Fund Climate Change

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Progressive Christian Social Action

 

Resisting Banks that Fund Climate Change

Re-posted here on United Methodist Insight e-magazine.

On September 25, 2019, during the week of the Global Climate Strike, I participated in an action in San Francisco that focused on big banks, in solidarity with the millions of children, young people, and their allies who are calling for emergency action on climate change. Since the Paris Climate Agreement’s adoption in 2016, 33 global banks have poured $1.9 trillion into financing fossil-fuel projects that emit greenhouse gases that induce climate change.  In our San Francisco action, I was one of about 500 people who gathered at the financial district, blocking the doors to banks that invest most heavily in finance fossil fuel projects, primarily the top four banks: JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citi and Bank of America, all based in the U.S. We also  created a two-block long series of murals that portrayed the world that we want to see. The action included song, dance, chanting, signs and banners, walking a labyrinth (one of the murals), clowning, and street theater.

These actions of creative imagining and resistance to the financial powers highlighted the systemic changes that need to be made if we are to effectively address the climate crisis, changes that go far beyond reducing our individual carbon footprints, investing in renewable energy, trying to convince others that climate change is real, or contacting our elected representatives and voting every four years. For instance, if we follow the money, we will see that there are powerful (embodied) forces at work that are invested in continuing the fossil fuel party until the last reserves of oil, gas, and coal are used up, even though this would result in absolute climate catastrophe and extinguish hope for an abundant future of life on earth.

These embodied institutional forces include fossil fuel companies, which have sown doubt about the reality of climate change despite knowing since the 1970s that their products warm the planet. They include transnational banks and other dominant financial institutions, which invest in fossil fuel projects and lobby government officials who are beholden to them to prevent strong climate action. They include the governments of the world, which (according to the IMF) subsidize fossil fuels at the rate of $10 million per minute.

In my book Shaking the Gates of Hell: Faith-Led Resistance to Corporate Globalization, I write, “The system is designed for the results it is getting, and it is paying off handsomely for those for whom the system is designed.” Published in 2007, with a revised version coming in January 2020, this is still true today.

Of course, we need to go through normal political channels to work for the changes that need to be made.  But there comes a point when we the people need to exercise more political muscle than is possible through so-called “normal” channels.  It becomes imperative for us to call for change in more dramatic ways, in ways that will shake the gates of hell and make a more hopeful future possible.  We must fully face the extremity of our situation. Creative nonviolent direct actions highlight the profound changes that will need to be made if we are to faithfully respond to the cries of the children and to the call of God in this time of climate emergency.

For more information:

See more photos of murals, close up:  San Francisco Climate Strike Street Murals Take Over Wall Street West.

See the report, Banking on Climate Change, which names the banks that have played the biggest role in funding fossil fuel projects. A half-dozen environmental groups — Rainforest Action Network, BankTrack, Sierra Club, Oil Change International, Indigenous Environmental Network, and Honor the Earth — authored the 2019 report, which was endorsed by 160 organizations worldwide. It tracked the financing for 1,800 companies involved in extracting, transporting, burning, or storing fossil fuels or fossil-generated electricity and examined the roles played by banks worldwide.

Act now:

  • Close your bank accounts in protest if you bank in any of the banks named in “Banking on Climate Change.” Transfer your money and business to a local bank or community credit union.
  • Speak to a manager and ask them to call their main branch to demand that they stop investing in fossil fuel projects and instead invest in clean solutions. You can take this action privately or do it publicly as part of a demonstration after contacting the media and organizing a support rally.
  • Demand that banks divest from fossil fuels.

See article by Sharon Kelly, Global Banks, Led by JPMorgan Chase, Invested $1.9 Trillion in Fossil Fuels Since Paris Climate Pact.

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Other blog postings about climate change can be found here.  

 

The Spirituality of Resistance

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Progressive Christian Social Action

The Spirituality of Resistance

Sharon Delgado’s article, The Spirituality of Resistance, appears in the May 2018 issue of Sojourners Magazine.   It is a book review of Principalities in Particular:  A Practical Theology of the Powers that Be by Bill Wylie-Kellerman.   

For decades, pastor, activist, and scholar Bill Wylie-Kellermann has kept alive and furthered a theology of the biblical “powers and principalities” (Romans 8:38; Colossians 1:16; Ephesians 6:12), in the tradition of William Stringfellow and Walter Wink. Principalities in Particular is a compilation of his essays, rooted in applied struggle and practice, on these invisible but embodied forces that shape and often dominate human life.

Through stories of engaging specific principalities over time, Wylie-Kellermann brings an abstract concept to life. He explores racism, nuclear weapons, sports, family systems, corporate globalization, slavery, the drug powers, war, the Trump presidency, the global economy, and other principalities, immersing readers in a worldview that perceives not only their outer manifestations, but their inner realities as well.  One example is the corporate-friendly system of emergency management that has replaced democracy in controlling the author’s home city of Detroit and other black-majority cities in Michigan.

Wylie-Kellermann portrays local community struggles as fighting (nonviolently) for the soul of the city. He describes a statue called “The Spirit of Detroit,” which stands near City Hall, providing a focus and gathering place for community activists. In a similar vein, he tells of an interfaith group that drafted letters to “The Angel of Detroit,” calling the city back to its better nature and true vocation in service of life.

Wylie-Kellermann claims that “half of any struggle is a spiritual battle.” What is at stake is not simply a specific desired outcome, but also human healing and liberation. “We are complicit in our own captivity. … The healing of the planet and the healing of ourselves, inside and out, are one.”  Wylie-Kellermann challenges readers to stay awake, resist dehumanization by the principalities, work for liberation, and live in freedom.

Principalities in Particular inspires and equips readers to rise to this challenge. The author invites readers into a process of inquiry, especially related to principalities in one’s own neighborhood, and to engagement that may lead to both personal and social transformation: “The struggle before us remains necessarily two-handed or two-edged, fusing social analysis and institutional reconstruction with discernment, prayer, and worship-based action.” Such activism calls for discipline and creativity: “Prayer and fasting and public worship and singing and signs of imagination are among the tactics of any movement that knows it wrestles not merely with flesh and blood.” This book illustrates the difficulties, but also the triumphs, of such engagement.

One of Wylie-Kellermann’s insights is that we humans fall into the trap of seeking justification through the powers, rather than by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:8). For example, Christians may find identity and worth through their participation in and loyalty to a church. But as the author points out, the church itself is a principality, as prone as any other to seeking its own survival by enlisting human beings in its service. Consequently, churches may endorse belief systems, practices, or policies that further “the powers of empire.” On the other hand, “to be church as exemplary power in this present moment is to be freed of white supremacy, patriarchy, idolatrous patriotism, heterocentrism, mammon, militarism, consumer materialism, all the divisions and ideologies of domination.”

Particularly dangerous, warns Wylie-Kellermann, is justification offered through “the devotion of national populism,” currently exemplified by the presidency of Donald Trump. “Trump’s theology frames justification, mediated by the nation and its leader, as conferred upon ‘the patriotic people’… This justification … goes hand in hand with the unleashing of the dominating spirit. Notably, it is the offer of salvation without repentance.”

The motivation to refuse complicity and resist the powers is a spiritual effect of reading this book. Wylie-Kellermann challenges readers to stay awake, resist dehumanization by the principalities, work for liberation, and live in freedom: “Death appears to reign. But it is undone. Live in the freedom of the resurrection. In short, dear friends: Be not awed by anything but the God who raised Christ Jesus from the dead.”

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