A Life Update!

I'm starting a PhD in Theology this fall 😲 And, there's power in a union...

Dear friends,

Where to begin?

Let’s go with the back corner table at La Baguette Cafe, Colorado Spring, CO, circa 2012.

Bill and I would meet for eggs, toast, fruit, a coffee and water at 6:30am each week. Bill was in his late sixties or early seventies. I was in my early twenties, struggling to figure out how to be a “professional,” much less an adult, in ill fitting roles for the longings quaking in my gut.

“Life is a series of projects,” he said.

It was the sort of zen aphorism that made sense coming from a home builder and construction worker with a philosopher’s soul. At the time it was a revelation and a relief for a young man who was already convincing himself he was a failure. Perhaps, Bill seemed to suggest, this is just one of those projects where you learn to measure twice and cut once next time. Where you start to figure out the projects you like and have a knack for.

Over time, as the projects stacked, it became something more than a way to get over my feelings of failure. It became a way to think about being a human on a journey. Life is the constant. Projects come and go. But the projects are what make up a life. It’s in being present to the projects that life acquires its meaning. It’s in retaining some detachment from them that we cultivate a self who exercises agency by acting on the world and not just acted upon. It’s through pouring that self back out into the projects life hands us that we become more than a bounded self through relationships of love. Project by project, life becomes our own life oriented for life as a part of Life.

For the past four and a half years—since that one week stretch in November 2019 when I finished my last day at the Interfaith Alliance of Colorado, found out Libbey was pregnant, and started the long drive from Denver to Boston—I’ve been focused on two projects: my family and the Community Purchasing Alliance of Massachusetts.

Family life has been hard. Joy-filled (you always have to say this part—it’s true, but its also the kind of thing you say that can easily be a fake gloss) but really hard. Two babies. Two horrible pregnancies for my wife. Pandemics. Moving. Moving again. Unexpectedly buying a needy 130 year old house after our old landlords told us they were selling our apartment. A revolving door of illnesses—my kids, my own, and now most severely, my father’s. The endless mundanities of keeping house and feeding ourselves and doing all. the. tasks. Struggling to find community and a sense of home in Boston. Depression. Holding a marriage in the midst. And, shot through it all, a constant onslaught of crises and injustices and political absurdities rocking our worlds, stealing emotions, stealing time, stealing lives. I don’t want to sound hyperbolic, but it has been the hardest four years of my life. It seems like most people I know under 45 are saying the same thing.

Founding and growing the Community Purchasing Alliance of Massachusetts has been my other project. My day job. My small way of trying to add something to the world that makes it easier to love, that solves some practical problems for some people, redresses some wrongs and attempts to model a different way of belonging to one another inclusive of our many beautiful differences.

Here’s how I put it in my official transition announcement letter:

We began with an audacious and multi-level vision. We needed a business that could become self-sufficient through its own revenue. It needed to offer concrete value to community organizations: save you money, improve your operations, relieve administrative burdens, solve information gaps, and, bottom-line, consistently deliver excellent services. We also believed it must be more than a traditional private business. We wanted to build a new kind of institution rooted in community ownership and democratic decision-making. We had to figure out how to design a cooperative that you could take ownership of so that it would serve you, serve workers, and serve our community. Foundationally, we knew that anything built in the 2020s must be anti-racist. It must weave racial equity and justice into its own DNA and it must pursue a powerful strategy, following the leadership of BIPOC community members and organizations, for closing the racial wealth gap in our cities and state. We took inspiration from the long legacy of Black-led cooperatives in the past and present. And we set this course based on conversation after conversation with all of you.

In more personal conversations with people who get this kind of language, I’ve said, quixotically, that CPA MA has been my small attempt to foster a society that reflects the kind of relationships we discover in the gift of communion. It’s been my project in this season of life through which to manifest a little shalom.

Building a cooperative from the inside that could contribute to the Solidarity Economy movement has been a dream of mine come true. It’s been full of its own contradictions and struggles, which I will reflect on more in time. But I truly am proud of what we’ve built. Well over 50 organizations are now purchasing with CPA MA. We will manage well over a million dollars of contracts for them this year. We will shift around $300,000 to BIPOC-owned businesses this year. We were part of creating a cooperative federation called the CPA Network with other CPAs in three states, led by our big sister in Washington D.C—the OG that showed us how its done and helped make all of this possible. We practice genuine workplace democracy, and, after some patient internal organizing, we are adding a worker-ownership class to step deeper into our power-sharing values. All of this is amazing to me.

But. I always knew this wasn’t a long-term fit for me. It has been the project of this season. I’m not a small business manager and sales work burns me out. I’m an organizer and, honestly, a pretty darn good radical institution-builder. I’m also a contemplative, I’m pastoral, I’m a writer, I’m a public faith-rooted leader, someone who wants space to fight for broader structural change. I’ve called myself a “wannabe academic” for a while. Those other parts of me were yearning to be expressed and grow too.

Yesterday, I publicly announced (in the newsletter linked below) that I’ll be transitioning out of my director role with CPA MA at the end of July. You can read more about that here. If you or anyone you know who would think this legitimately incredible job sounds worth pursuing, please check out our job posting here!

A New Season for CPA Massachusetts

The Next Project

Much to my shock, exuberant joy, and decision-making bewilderment, I was accepted by Boston University to join their PhD in Theology program this fall where I will continue to work at the intersections of all kinds of stuff I riff on here: theories of change, movement history, the Black radical tradition, liberation theology and the relationships between spirituality and solidarity.

This wouldn’t have been possible without professors from my seminary who supported me and encouraged me in this direction: Mark Baker, Randy White, Karen Crozier, Terry Brensinger. I also don’t think I could have imagined this for myself—as a kid from Needville, Texas who was often more comfortable with cows than people—without the friends and colleagues and heroes I don’t even personally know who I’ve seen take this PhD in Theology path ahead of me. I won’t try to name them all but they too made this possible. Shoutout to parents for their constant support and belief. More than anyone though, it literally wouldn’t be possible without my partner Libbey. I’m so grateful for you, hun.

Linden, this little three year old gooberacha, helped me push the accept button! And then we ate chocolate croissants and partied like its 1989.

It’s real! I didn’t take a few moments to complete a survey, but I do appreciate the friendly welcome ;)

There’s Power in a Union

Pursuing this PhD literally would not have been possible without the courageous organizing of current graduate students at Boston University. Our family would not have been able to afford life in Boston with two kids under five between my wife’s income and the living stipend I was offered. The 3000 member strong BU Grad Workers Union, an SEIU affiliate, is now in the sixth week of their strike — and they are winning more concessions for an improved contract with a living wage by the week. The gains they’ve won so far made it feasible for our family to say, ‘yes.’

While I’m not able to become a card carrying member of the union quiet yet, I joined them in solidarity for a May Day rally this Wednesday. It was electric. Hundreds of us marching, singing, and chanting in the square in front of the church where Howard Thurman preached and prayed for two decades, just outside the building where Martin Luther King Jr. earned his doctorate. Reminding the administration that the university works because grad workers do. That schools aren’t here to be hedge funds or real estate moguls. They exist for the cultivation of human beings, the advancement of scholarship, and communities of learning that can change the world.

The solidarity shown among grad workers, faculty, and undergrad students moved me deeply. I nearly came to tears as workers linked their (our) struggle to the far more dire struggle of Palestinians—concretely shown in the insanity that administrators won’t use a $3 billion endowment to pay workers living wages but will invest that money in the war economy, and the common disregard for human life these decisions reflect.

Movement spaces truly can be foretastes of the beloved community they seek to build for all. This continues to be my inaugurated eschatology.

Rallying and marching laps. Marsh Chapel, where Howard Thurman pastored, on the right. The School of Theology is housed in the building to the left.

The undergrad student body president who delivered an absolutely stunning speech, “Without solidarity we have nothing.” “Our learning environment is your working environment.” “We don’t pay $90,000 to get feedback from ChatGPT.” Look closely in the center of the crowd and you’ll find the person with the sign: This Is What Theology Looks Like. Hell yeah.

We marched to the administrative building and shook the earth.

What Will I Be Working On?

For the nerdier among us, I thought you might be interested in what exactly it is that I want to work on during this PhD. Anyone who reads this newsletter won’t be too surprised by the themes!

Here’s what I wrote in my application essay:

I am seeking to pivot my praxis toward deeper theological study, research, and teaching on spirituality-infused models of solidarity flourishing at the social margins. A series of shifts and realignments are unfolding in movements, theories of change, our historical situation, and the integrated yearnings of social justice practitioners. Christian leaders in social change work find ourselves within a transforming consciousness and emerging way-of-being-in-movement which includes and transcends Christian bounds. The womanist theologian M. Shawn Copeland, surveying current trends and the history of Black radical faith in resistance to racial oppression, described this emergent gestalt as “mystical solidarity” (Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified, 2018). I am interested in this mode of being-in-communal-action, which might be described as an historical-materialist contemplative-prophetic praxis. I will analyze this praxis as an integrated theory of change. I seek to discover how—both in its historic instantiations, theological interiority, and contemporary expressions—it presents a radical challenge to faith-based theories of change norms, theologies, and tactics that rose to dominance under the past 50 years of racial-capitalist neoliberalism. Ultimately I pursue this study as an experimental path of formation toward selves and societies beyond the desires and dominion of whiteness.

To paraphrase J. Kameron Carter, I am interested in social movement work "(as spiritual craft) and mysticism (as political activity)" (Carter, The Anarchy of Black Religion, 2023). I plan to examine these intersections in order to develop a thicker theological bridge into emerging forms of social transformation. There are three particular moments/movements of interest in which the spiritual and prophetic merge as political praxis in the action and reflection of a people:

1. The twentieth century’s Black Freedom Movement and the branches of action and reflection it generated (Howard Thurman and Dr. King—key figures in the legacy of BU School of Theology—are of clear interest, but I think also of Katie Cannon's analysis of them in Black Womanist Ethics, other womanist thinking with and beyond them at these intersections, and the broader Black radical tradition) 

2. Latin American people’s liberation movements out of which liberation theology emerged, including an important body of literature on the spirituality of liberation and its popular practice in base communities

3. Contemporary BIPOC-led fusion movements that include a transformative critique of colonial racial-capitalism, with particular interest in (a) the emergence of “healing justice” as an embodied and communal spiritual-politics, (b) the Solidarity Economy movement, and (c) the presence of Christian institutions and individuals woven through these spaces and practices.

Methodologically, the actually existing practices, contradictions, and complexities of organizers and community groups resisting oppression and building beloved communities are of equal interest for study as the intellectuals and writings of these movements.

My faith-based social justice career convinced me that we lack adequate linkages between liberation movement-rooted theology and dominant institutionalized forms of social change strategy relied upon by U.S. faith communities—particularly to the extent that such praxis must be antithetical to white supremacist capitalist culture. I hope to relate the completive-prophetic as faith-rooted theory of change to an emerging body of social science scholarship on “movement ecologies.” Such ecologies take an integrated account of the work of (1) personal or internal change, (2) building alternatives, and (3) transforming dominant systems. This framework may allow us to better perceive how inner-spiritual, relational-communal, and political-structural dimensions are presented as an integrated whole in the lived theology of subaltern Christians, particularly as they participated in late 19th- through 20th-century liberation movements. 

I desire to study the ways in which the prophetic-mysticism of the faith-based movements described above function to produce integrated movement ecologies. This includes asking: what theological and praxeological commitments informed and/or found articulation through these praxes? Pragmatically, what challenges do these theological ethics and historical practices pose to contemporary cultures of contemplative spirituality and community organizing? And at its most ambitious, we must question if and how the communal praxis of mystical solidarity may contribute not only to resisting and building alternatives to colonial racial capitalism, but to the long-term work of forming a new humanity no longer organized by the constructs of whiteness.

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My prayer as I head into this next project is simply to be of use. May it be, may I be, of use for freedom and life for a groaning earth struggling for liberation.

Onward toward the next project—in Christ, for shalom, through love, and toward solidarity.

Hope to see you there….