Fall 2022
Although the act of organizing can be an intensely personal imposition of order on things and ideas, there is often a sense in which organizing is something we do together. To protest wealth inequality, we gathered in city squares as part of the Occupy movement or took part in solitary acts, like investing in GameStop, that then became infused with improvisation and the power of communities.
And organizing is rarely glamorous. Conventional wisdom is that you don’t put glitzy lights around the word and make it the subject of an entire journal issue. True organizing is the slow, careful work of coalition-building, work that is forged through hours of conversation wherein parties seek common ground on which they can partner. It is an endless to-do list of emails and phone calls, door-knocking and pavement-pounding, exhausting work aimed at achieving only an approximation of an original goal or highest ideal. Organizing is the work of exchanging a faulty system for something better. It is rooted in particular places and serving particular people with particular unmet needs. It is the work of protecting people from the powerful forces that feel too big for anyone to confront on their own.
In this, the thirty-fourth issue of The Other Journal, we take up these ideas and more. For example, Daniel P. Rhodes helps us understand what organizing actually is, how it works, and why the church so desperately needs it. Claire McKeever-Burgett interviews Lindsey Krinks about her new book and her formative experiences running an interfaith homeless outreach program in Nashville, TN. Mtr. Claire Brown thinks about the relation (limits and possibilities alike) between priesthood and organizing, and Rebecca Edgren (writing in response to Julie Hembree’s photography series) calls us to see the unseeable.
These contributions—and others—tackle the theme of organizing with verve and slant, speaking to and from everything from tent camps to the Jesus Storybook Bible. They unsettle our received stories and challenge the unjust order. And I believe they will help us as we begin to build whatever messy wonder comes next.
Peter Lagerwey became the City of Seattle’s bike transportation planner in 1984, at a time when few cities had such positions. He quickly discovered that others expected his office to champion a few trophy trail projects and to leave the rest of the city’s car-centric transportation network unchanged. Achieving deeper systemic change, he realized, would […]
Nursing your baby is the way you make love to him or her, and it’s supposed to feel good to everyone concerned. Your being turned on to your baby is what makes your milk flow abundantly. Nursing is a sexual act. Alison Bartlett, Breastwork We live in a world that organizes bodies and all their […]
Jennifer Markowitz’s exhibit Fleshmap: My Unraveling Geographies is an embroidered atlas that charts her emotional cartography. The exhibit, recently on display in her Art Space studio in Raleigh, North Carolina, uses various textiles and cloth-based objects (slip dresses, bras, hosiery, pillowcases, bedsheets) to embroider tableaus from memories of her past. Markowitz storyboards both text and […]
In this interview with former TOJ editor Joel Mayward, Bretherton discusses his personal background with organizing, the pedagogical motives behind the podcast, and his hopeful insights about the role of democracy for our contemporary politics.
One year, I lived in a soup kitchen in Chicago. It happened almost by accident. As I considered masters programs near the end of my undergraduate program in Oklahoma, I felt pulled toward something completely unfamiliar to me—a full-time Catholic volunteer program at a Franciscan soup kitchen. That year became a rip in the veil […]
In the first year of the COVID pandemic, my lockdown reading included that old chestnut, Dorothy Sayers’s The Nine Tailors. An inveterate mystery reader, I craved the familiarity and comfort of a well-worn paperback, and I welcomed the wintry setting of the novel’s opening scene. Maybe you remember: Lord Peter Wimsey and his loyal butler, […]
D. L. Mayfield, Unruly Saint: Dorothy Day’s Radical Vision and Its Challenge for Our Time (Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf, 2022) When William Miller’s biography of Dorothy Day first appeared in 1982, a peculiar publishing enigma came into being: describing Dorothy Day in a single book. Miller’s book, a monumental work, suffered from the problem of trying […]
Christiane Tietz, Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict, trans. Victoria J. Barnett (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2021). Since its publication in 1975, Eberhard Busch’s Karl Barth has been the definitive biography of Karl Barth. Indeed, for many English readers, it has been the primary access point for a larger body of literature that was […]
My God, why does the bruised flower inside me cry Open? Shape-shifter birds, my daughter called skyward: flock of Holy Ghosts, can I fly with you? She’s my compass toward paradise. My human will, the only door for evil spirits to enter. Holy the purity of animals in forests and pastures, breath hymning outside my […]
Again, the plague season returns. Again, horses live, and they die. Locusts descend, devour, disperse. All ashes. I watch you in the fields, drifting in and out of hinterland mists. A brindle foal learns to stand. Three times during my second pregnancy, we thought we lost our son—once in Gettysburg’s bee-buzzed peach orchard. How does […]
That we mainline denominational Christians face a crisis in the ways we have ordered ourselves is no secret. That the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated church closures and clergy burnout is no secret. And while everyone in the mainline church has been saying for quite some time that we cannot keep doing things the way we’ve […]
Dominique Gilliard, Subversive Witness: Scripture’s Call to Leverage Privilege (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2021). Stephen Preskill, Education in Black and White: Myles Horton and the Highlander Center’s Vision for Social Justice (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021). I once asked my students at a largely white, evangelical private school whether they considered themselves privileged. […]
I killed my grandmother. At her request. “I’ve researched it,” she said. “It’s not a bad way to shuffle off.” She grinned. “As far as dying goes.” She was in her late nineties. Everything about her was old except her mind. Understanding and intimacy had skipped a generation in our family. I swapped wary circumlocutions […]
Rebecca Edgren writes poetically in response to a Julia Hembree Smith photo series.
Editor-in-Chief Zac Settle reviews the latest Christological contributions from Rowan Williams and Paul DeHart.
T. H. Yuan imagines the faith workers would place in a nuclear plant of the near future.
Andrew Lansdown ponders the creative power of God.
Heather Caliri wonders if her extreme organization is a virtue or a sign that she’s actually a mess.
Justin Phillips reflects on writing about the formative communities of his life—white, southern, evangelical—and on trying to live faithfully and speak prophetically in the context of his upbringing.
Aaron Stauffer proposes a political ecclesiology of organizing.
Claire Brown reflects on her work as a priest and on community organizing through the life of the church.
Sean Beckett asks what happened to that burning bush.
Jennifer M. Rosner argues that the Jesus Storybook Bible carries forward a historical streak of supersessionism that runs throughout Christian thought and theology.
Laurie Klein stalks the secrets of selvage.
Lindsey Krinks implores faith-adhering, justice-seeking Christians to pray with their feet on the streets and in the communities where they find themselves.
Dan Rhodes frames the act of organizing as essential for the church, describing a constellation of artful practices to help rehabilitate our political muscles and counter the fragmentation and injustice.
Brad Roth explores how the Eucharist lends a distinctive cast and character to Christian organizing for social change.
Anneli Matheson is disturbed to discover her eating habits resemble those of a red-shouldered hawk.
Mercury, Venus, the hottest ones first, then Earth, Mars, the planets’ names slipping from my lips. those nights in our cramped kitchen, while my father lit another Camel, and my mother wiped down the Formica, Jupiter the largest, Saturn with its rings, Uranus, a gaseous planet, I whispered, one of the bright stars in Sister […]
The Hoard siblings reflect on their story of eucontaminating queerness.
Joy Moore writes of loss and its quiet shifts.
