i haven’t met too many folks who know about the catholic worker movement. in my attempts to explain my work at trinity house in albuquerque, i leave a lot out and tend to confuse people further. robert ludlow does a better job of being concise without sacrificing the radical message.

above image: labor cross by fritz eichenberg

kirsten is here! we’ve now had a chance to do a little exploring. we hung out by the rio grande, checked out the coffee scene, and stared at the sandia mountains for hours from the lawn of university of nm. our days at the house have been spent turning a very rank compost pile, serving during hospitality hours, hanging out with the cats (all named after nuclear test explosions) and learning how to not totally butcher the canticles.

love it! epicenter and the folks who make it possible are wonderful. you know you need this print.

epicenter:

“Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.” - Horace Greeley, 1865

One of the most commonly quoted sayings from the nineteenth century is still inspiring us today. These hand-set type posters were letterpressed in our own little corner of the West in a traveling letterpress workshop - a truck, a press and an artist working their way across America!

These posters are for sale on our Etsy store for $20 (plus S/H). Each print is beautifully unique; no two look the same! Please specify if you have a color preference - either blue, rust or a surprise mix of the two!

so the journey begins!

monday night, a strange car arrived at the albuquerque airport to shuttle me to my new home. veggie oil (which really does make the car smell like french fries) powered us back to trinity house.

tuesday morning we all headed to los alamos nuclear lab for a vigil to remember our japanese friends who suffered through the nagasaki nuclear atrocity on august 9th 1945. los alamos is a strange place. the town’s superficial serenity acts as a well-constructed distraction from the horrors the lab still creates and nurtures. at 20,000 employees, the lab is almost a town unto its self.

wednesday is the first day of service for the week. trinity house provides laundry service, showers, and breakfast for about a dozen folks a day, 4 times a week. the numbers were low today but i got a feel for the rhythm of things and met some regulars.

good times. good times.

yesterday, i got back from the jesus radicals conference in minneapolis. the weekend was packed with information and conversations that were urgent and mind-bending. amaryah, who rode up from atlanta with kirsten and i, co-led a session at the event called sexuality, spirituality and christian-radicalism. her take on the intersections of orthodoxy and queerness blew folks out of the water. ched myers (if you haven’t read this guy’s work you’re cheating yourself) spoke on watershed discipleship and our obligation to save spaces we love. other sessions explored the topics of anarchy, the prison industrial complex, education, bio-regionalism, surveillance, and the ever-expanding problem of robotic weaponry. these topics are always interesting but they take on a new dimension when considered through the lens of the gospels. in light of the current national discussion about who deserves government services and who should have to pay taxes, it was refreshing to hear christians say unequivocally that democracy and capitalism aren’t and can’t be christian institutions.

on monday, kirsten flew from minneapolis to boston to spend time with her parents and her grandmother, nancy smith, who just completed a six month sentence for crossing the line at the school of the americas protest last year. nancy is the jam! may we all be stirred to the kind of subversive action this woman dared to engage in at the age of seventy-eight.

(i can’t find any information about the above image so i don’t know who to credit  for this absurd and very popular nationalistic revisioning of jesus)

i’m moving to the land of enchantment august 8th. see you in the desert, friend.

starsinthesky18:

New Mexico Sunrise

(via new-mexico)

kirsten and i will be heading to jesus radical’s beyond a brave new world conference in minneapolis on the 27th. expect a full report! to learn more about the conference or to read theological writing that’ll make you say “hell yeah!”, check out their website:http://www.jesusradicals.com/

police sgt. john brock thinks queer people are more violent than their heterosexual counterparts. in fact, he said “they’re very violent” and “when they get mad, they get really mad”. i bring up brock’s comments about the queer community not just because they are unsettling and unfair stereotypes but because they are part of the reason given for why an atlanta gay bar was raided in 2009.

the eagle was raided in september of 2009 by a vice squad that was known as the red dog unit. this unit, founded in the 1980s to deal with drug crime, was notorious for illegal searches and aggressive tactics. partly due to the unlawful nature of the eagle raid and the lawsuit the city faced as a result, red dog was disbanded in february. but just because the unit was no more did not mean that the investigation of the raid and the involved officers ended. the final report, of what has aptly been viewed by the queer community as an antiquated, stonewall-esque bust, was finally released just days ago.

going through every minor detail of the raid is not really of interest to me. the synopsis of the what happened in september goes like this: dressed in black fatigues, cops busted into the bar; kicked down doors; handcuffed patrons and made them lay face-down on the floor; illegally searched and falsely imprisoned people from the bar; and yelled anti-gay slurs.

in the 349 page report, there are certainly highlights. the comments about violence don’t stop with brock, the raid leader, but are complimented by a statement made by a participating officer who said he felt for a “man [to] have sex with another man” was “very violent”. these comments were made to investigators after the raid. but during the affair, cops asked patrons to admit to being in the military so they could “call your sergeant and tell him where you’re at” (this is before the repeal of don’t ask, don’t tell). cops also revealed that their cultural insensitivity went beyond the targeted minority of the moment saying within ear-shot of patrons “this is more fun than raiding n***ers with crack”.

the red dog unit was bad news, and for the people they beat, imprisoned, and humiliated for nearly thirty years this statement is most certainly not past tense. however, the problem of policing, particularly that of the queer community, is a pervasive and expanding issue. the percentage of queer identified people behind bars is disproportionately high and the number of transgender people who come forward with reports of police brutality is staggering. as angela davis put it so well, “the prison functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities…”

in this story, queer people are written off as violent. there are important questions to be asked of this situation. how is the media supporting this labeling of queer people as anti-social and aggressive? is the general public buying into this stereotype or is it just an idea that is taking hold with law enforcement? will this label further domesticate the queer community, making folks cower and keep quiet in hopes of not being lumped in with “the angry ones”? or will queer people learn that being mad, really mad is valuable when there is an injustice to be angry about?

[artwork by qteam collective entitled queers don’t make friends with the state]

on june 28th, undocumented college students will speak out against georgia’s heinous new immigration law. stand in solidarity with them inside the georgia state capitol building at 1:30pm. defy the law! defy the racist, death-dealing system!

“with the passage of hb87 into law, as undocumented youth, we refuse to remain silent. we are tired of hiding. we have grown up in georgia for most of our lives and we refuse to let racist legislators run our families out.” - dulce guerrero, 18, brought to georgia at the age of 2