I’m looking forward to leading a 5-week series on Revelation & my book “Resting Empire.” We started this past Sunday at First Friends Meeting here in Greensboro. If you’re close by and interested in joining is, you are welcome.
We will be covering these topics:
- Quaker and Liberation ways of reading the Bible. How our social location and identities (ie. race, gender, class, sexuality and abilities) impact how we read the text and how it reads us. The social location of Revelation and the Bible and how that impacts how we understand what it is about.
- The religion of creation and the religion of empire. How Empires use scapegoats to build social cohesion and Jesus as the final scapegoat, proving once for all that “the scapegoat is innocent.”
- Imperial economics vs. how God gives a preferential option for the poor
- How liturgy is used within Empire as well as within communities of resistance and what kinds of liturgy build up our resolve and witness against empire.
- We will dig into the concept of the multitude not just as a nice “all inclusive” vision – which I think it is also that- of humanity but also how Revelation’s conception of the Multitude actually means to center all the victims of empire.
- And if there’s time: the role of the earth and animals and creation within the resistance to Empire and God’s moral imagination for what is possible.
I’m convinced that a liberatory reading of Revelation is going to be a key tool for persistence, resistance, and community building in the years to come as we see American Civil Christianity continue to grasp for imperial power and ultimately fail. I believe that Revelation is not only a text about how to resist the empire, it is what it looks like for the church to refuse “Christian supremacy.”
If you’re in town and this is of interest join us this Sunday. If not and you want to see if this reading can be of use to you and your community here is the link to my book.