Word & World Call to Kindred Practitioners of Spirited Action.
We live in an hour of urgency. The collapse of recent economic “bubbles” and the shift of vast financial resources from public to private control is a sign of the times. Corporatization threatens to roll over democracy like an unstoppable train. Privatization extends to the soil, the water, the genome. The gridlock of political oversight signals a systemic bankruptcy. It is time for people of spirit and action to return to the roots and begin anew. It is a time to ask, yet again, “What does it mean to be human?” “How shall we envision and build economy if there is to be a future at all?” “What now, on a globe of disappearing creatures and cultures, is sustainable?” “How do we bring faith and spirit to bear in practical struggle and rebuilding when apocalypse impends?”
The United States Social Forum
This summer, June 22-26, the United States Social Forum will convene for the second time – this time in Detroit. It is a regional expression of the World Social Forum that since 2001, has offered a people’s alternative to the yearly gathering of elites in Davos, Switzerland, at the so-called World Economic Forum. The USSF will draw 20,000 people to Detroit – grass roots-led, labor-wise, color-loving and beautiful, gender-bending, movement-experienced activists – who are pushing back against war, neo-liberal policy and predatory capital; fighting prison-growth and mountain-beheading. People who stand fiercely against extinctions and warmings and habitat plunder, building another world from the ground up because we know another world is possible. The purpose of the USSF is to create open space for renewed consciousness, sharpened strategy, networked struggle, enhanced energy, celebration, lament and laughter writ large to resist the powers decimating possibilities across the planet. A week of workshops and cultural encounter that ring like a block party in an abandoned neighborhood.
Word & World Initiative
Word and World will be there. We are an ecumenical and inclusive organization, a group of socially-conscious Christians and other people of faith and we offer a particular call. For ten years we have been providing radical popular education for activists grounded in faith and committed to the work of social transformation. We seek to build capacity for movements of faith-based witness and to join together the seminary, the sanctuary and the street.
Detroit as Ground Zero
Detroit is the focus of the hour. Auto company fortunes have been depleted by the realities of peak oil, climate change, and economic collapse. Cracked open in an impossible dream, Motown is now mirror and crucible. Detroit is both symbol and embodiment of post-industrial demise and possibility. “This way lies the fate of the country,” it shouts from a thousand emptied homes and shops. But this way also lies a new humanity, schooled in hard streets, creating beauty and vitality like chicory from broken concrete or hip-hop outside the big label. The city has become home to community urban gardening rebirthing entire blocks, tech-savvy youth with stealth visions of free media, art growing wondrously from garbage, neighborhood peace zones crafted in sweat and straight speech from histories of gun violence and loss. This is the deep text of Detroit! It is rising again, from the ground up, outside big plans and players. It citizens keep their ear to the earth, hearing revolution from green roots, knowing evolution takes time and care, even love, in the mix of radical change.
Word & World Call
Word and World will be in Detroit because we believe that the story unfolding there holds promise for the rest of our country. We will focus on spiritual resources as a foundation for an alternative economic vision in response to the developing crisis. Our plan is to use the ancient biblical vision of “Sabbath Economics,” as a lens through which we can read and re-imagine another world possible and see another Detroit happening. The Sabbath/Jubilee practice of rest and “release” – of slaves, of debt, of labor and land, of consolidated capital – holds out the gift of an old new way of being. An economy of grace. Communal recovery of these radical practices will be the subject of an opening celebration, a cluster of educational workshops, and a collective action interrupting foreclosures and the predatory holding of banks.
The time is ripe for faith and spirit. We invite you to join us in Detroit as we seek to reunite critical reflection, biblical literacy and social praxis.
Another world is truly possible. Another United States is surely necessary. Another Detroit is indeed happening. We believe and see. Please join us for all or part of this offering!
If you plan to attend, please RSVP to Lydia Wylie-Kellermann lydiaiwk@gmail.com or (313)595-1967.