Inter-Culturalism

Beyond Single-Issue Organizing

By |

Affordable housing, increased funding for public transportation, healthcare for all, gay marriage — we all have our pet issues, but many of us work on our issues because we see them as part of a larger systemic transformation. We are hungry for an alternative way of doing life, a way characterized by mutuality, deep relationships, love for all forms of life, joy, honesty and wonder. In other words, we are hungry for a way of living outside the systems of empire characterized by domination, exploitation, oppression, hoarding, defensiveness, and extreme self-interest. By focusing on individual pieces of this larger transformation, we miss the interconnections among them. As Pastor Lynice Pinkard likes to say, we are pulling at the individual bootstraps of the boot of imperial domination.

Gender and Sexuality

The Radical Potential of Being Queer

By |

We are coming into Pride weekend here in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I know that many other celebrations of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer pride are happening at the same time around the country. Given that, Seminary of the Street board member Rev. Lynice Pinkard and I wanted to take a few minutes, as lesbians, to reflect on what there is to be proud of. In other words, what is the transgressive potential of being gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or otherwise queer? At its heart, we believe that the radical potential of being queer is the way that it demonstrates that anyone can love everyone. As lovers who challenge conventional notions of who may love whom, queer people have the potential to show forth in a particularly vivid way the Spirit-given capacity, given to all people, to love in spite of all obstacles – in spite of homophobia, in spite of state sanctions, in spite of family expectations, in spite of workplace discrimination, in spite of rejection from our religious communities, in spite of all of the accumulated wounds incurred by being people who do not conform to cultural norms. The radical notion embodied in this kind of queerness is the notion that we can get up out of the shame that the culture tells us is our due, that we can get up out of that swamp of shame and love anyway.