The Power of Creative Resistance
“And I think this is what creative resistance wants. It wants to win the oppressor, to change what we call repentance in our theology, so that normal relations can again be there.”—Dr. Mitri Raheb on the Freedom Road Podcast and Inverse Podcast special episode “The Cross, the Resurrection, and Gaza”
In this Newsletter
Gaza Ceasefire Pilgrimages
This Holy Week, many cities are engaging in creative resistance and non-violent solidarity with those suffering in Gaza. In Philidelphia, Lisa Sharon Harper and Shane Claiborne are leading a group of people throughout the week from the Liberty Bell to Lockheed Martin, the main manufacturer of the weapons the United States has been selling to Israel to continue bombarding Gaza. You can follow along their journey on Instagram:
Learn more about the Gaza Ceasefire Pilgrimages and participate in a city near you! Some cities are extending beyond Lent, at least Lent for the west, as the Eastern Orthodox celebrate Easter May 6th this year.
Lent at the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas
In the spirit of the Black Church, which has begun to rise up and call for a ceasefire in Gaza, St. Thomas’s 17th rector, The Very Rev. Canon Martini Shaw and his team decided to focus the church’s Lenten season on understanding what’s going on in Gaza.
Listen to video portions from the Freedom Road Podcast that formed the basis for the Lenten series at AECST:
Then Lisa facilitated a powerful live fishbowl conversation featuring two cofounders of the Prayers for Peace Network in Philadelphia. Samuel Kuttab is a Palestinian American Christian living in the Philadelphia area for 40 years. Semi-retired and full time advocate for the Prayers for Peace Alliance movement.
Emilia Feldman is a Jewish Colombian-American trauma therapist and community organizer with If Not Now and the Prayers for Peace Alliance. The Alliance between Palestinian and Jewish Philadelphians came together after October 7.
It was a profound time of connection as Samuel and Emilia shared their stories and entered into conversation with parishioners.
Lisa shared this week:
For the past five weeks of Lent I’ve collaborated with my rector, The Very Rev. Canon @shawmartini, Rector of the Historic African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas (founded by Absolom Jones in 1792) to wade into three critical questions regarding #gaza:
1) What’s going on?
2) What does our faith require of us in light of what’s going on?
3) What action can we take in light of what our faith requires of us?
We considered the history.
We considered the scriptures.
We listened to and dialogued with Palestinian and Jewish neighbors.
And this week we came together in a powerful time of prayerful solidarity for Gaza.
The @aecst1792 community prayed for God to move our leaders to call for a ceasefire now. In the end, we wrote our prayers on cans of food like the ones being turned away in aid trucks on Gaza’s southern border right now.
In this picture, we lift our prayers to God and to the world.
Holy Week with Gaza
Tuesday:
Wednesday:
Watch the Freedom Road Instagram for the rest of the reflections this week.
On the Freedom Road Substack and Podcast
This episode comes to you in partnership with Inverse Podcast. The diverse InVerse podcast community explores how the Scriptures can turn the world upside down, or be weaponized to uphold the status quo. So, this episode we’re going to talk the “T” word—theology. Theology is simply how we understand God and our relationship with God. Christian social ethics teaches that our understanding of God forms the basis for everything we do in the world. It impacts everything.
This will we be a very special deep dive into the theo-ethical questions rising in the context of the genocide in Gaza. We will talk with three leading Palestinian Christian theologians as they approach Good Friday and Easter Sunday in the context of genocide.
Rev. Dr Mitri Raheb is Founder and President of Dar al-Kalima University in Bethlehem. The most widely published Palestinian theologian to date, Dr. Raheb is the author and editor of 50 books including: Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, The People, The Bible; In the Eye of the Storm: Middle Eastern Christians in an Age of Empire and Faith in the Face of Empire: The Bible through Palestinian Eyes—among many, many others.
Rev. Dr. Muther Isaac is Pastor of the Christmas Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bethlehem and Dean of Bethlehem Bible College. Rev. Dr. Munther is the author of The Other Side of the Wall: A Palestinian Christian Narrative of Lament and Hope.
Omar Haramy, is an Arab, Palestinian, Jerusalemite, Christian, and Greek Orthodox. Since 2017, Omar has served as the director of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center. Sabeel is a Palestinian ecumenical grassroots liberation theology movement that deepens the faith of Palestinian Christians, promotes unity among them, and guides them to engage for justice and peace. Omar also serves on the Kairos Palestine steering committee.
Our Inverse Podcast cohost today will be Jarrod McKenna, a peace award winning Australian pastor and social change educator who has been described by American Civil Rights legend Rev. Jim Lawson as “an expert in nonviolent social change”. Jarrod is the Founding Director of “Common Grace” that represents over 65,000 Christians in Australia pursuing “Jesus and justice” and serves with Lisa as one of the co-founders of the global GazaCeasefirePilgrimage.com movement that is now found on every continent, including Antarctica, in over 150 cities around the world.
Build a Better World: A Learning Community from Freedom Road
Have you read one of Lisa Sharon Harper’s books? Or one of the books from our Global Writers’ Group authors? Have you been a part of one of Freedom Road’s Webinars either live or purchased one on demand? We have just launched a learning community on Facebook for anyone who wants to chat with like-minded people about the material they’ve been reading or watching.
Join us today and we will grow together to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly into a better world!
Join the Facebook Group
To make things easier in these difficult times where everything seems to be more expensive, we have lowered our individual pricing on all our courses to make them accessible to more people. And don’t forget there’s a couple of free offerings to get you started as well! Check out our institute page and the course archive now.
Rather read a book? Check out The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can be Made Right or Fortune: How Race Broke my Family and the World… and How to Repair it All both by Lisa Sharon Harper.
Or check out the list of books written in our Global Writers’ Group here.
2024 Subscribers’ Calls
Every quarter, Lisa sits down with our subscribers and patrons and chats about different things going on in the world.
If you are a paid subscriber to Substack or a Patreon patron at the James Farmer level or above, you are invited to participate in a quarterly call with Lisa Sharon Harper.
If you aren’t a subscriber or Patron, upgrade your subscription today, or join our Patreon!
Mark your calendars now, and you’ll get an email prompting you to register closer to the each date:
May 9, 2024 at 8pm Eastern: an exclusive webinar with Lisa on Truth Listening
August 8, 2024 at 8pm Eastern
November 14, 2024 at 8pm Eastern
Fly
Download Fly now on Apple or Amazon Music or stream on Spotify and take it with you wherever you go!
Truth-Telling is the Work of Right Now
As we find ourselves in a pivotal moment in the history of both our nation and the church, truth-telling is the call of the moment. For a limited time (now - April 2024) Lisa is offering discounted speaking rates for truth-tellers like you!
Talk Title: “Truth-Telling is the Work of Right Now”
In a world that hungers for honesty and clarity, Lisa's talk delves into the pressing need for all of us to seek, listen to and tell the truth about who we are as a nation and as the church. With intimacy, humor and power Lisa models her truth-telling process by sharing her own quest to untangle her family’s 300 year story on American soil. She addresses the urgency of this moment, emphasizing how authentic storytelling can catalyze positive change. Lisa's powerful and engaging delivery leaves a lasting impact on her audiences, inspiring paradigm shifts that catalyze change.
For more information about Lisa Sharon Harper and her impactful message, please visit her website.
If you are interested in booking Lisa for your event, please fill out the Speaking Engagement Form to get started.
Lisa's schedule is filling up quickly, so we encourage you to act soon to secure her presence at your event. This is an opportunity to empower your audience with insights that are both enlightening and transformative.
Global Writer’s Group
Since April of 2020 as the world closed down, the Global Writer’s Group has been meeting via zoom every Saturday, with time off only for Christmas and New Years. Early in our time together, Lisa Sharon Harper charged the group with the task of “writing a new world into existence” and over time we have truly seen this in action. We have taken on the task of changing the world, and of course what changed first was ourselves. We as a group have become better writers over this time, but also better people, finding true community in the sacred sharing of ourselves with each other and the world.
We accept members on a rolling basis: it’s never too late to join the community. Prepare to find your life changed for the better as you sharpen your writing skills and prepare to bring your words to the world.
Collectively, we have published six books, have several writers who’ve recently become agented and/or are under contract for upcoming books, and many, many journal articles over the past three years with several more books in the works.
The Narrative Gap, as coined by Lisa Sharon Harper, is the distance between the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves, including how we got here and what it will take to make things right. In our world today, competing narratives vie for our loyalty, dividing society and the church, therefore making justice impossible. Our mission is help communities shrink the narrative gap, by identifying core issues and building community capacity so they might work toward common solutions for a just world. Here on the Freedom Road Substack, we can converse together on ways to shrink that narrative gap and help ensure everyones’ stories are told.
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