Chapter 1 Chapter 2

Notes Chapter 1 1. And here I am keenly aware that, at one level, framing the question as one of sustainability is already problematic. At the deepest level of our under- standing, nothing is sustainable, including the universe itself. Change is ubiquitous and relentless. The battle between synthesis into more com- plex forms of existence and entropic breakdown into a cold mass of mat- ter flying away from everything else similarly flying away into entropic coldness—the evident destiny of the entirety—is a losing one. Perhaps a better framing of the question would be in terms of something like “gen- erativity.” But that too will have its own set of problems. There remains a certain relative valence for the term “sustainability” to the degree it poses a possibility like that in evidence throughout long durations of geologic and human history of ecologies that “held together”—in relatively symbi- otic modes of biodiverse equilibrium—for long periods. It is toward such a roughly construed “template of wholeness” that I would refer the term “spirituality” in its popular ascendance today over the term “religious.” 2. The process of gradual differentiation and maturation of an organism in relationship to its environment, during which genetic information is modi- fied and translated into the substance and behavior of that organism. Chapter 2 1. Maroon communities composed of runaway slaves and disaffected whites who made common cause with Native Americans in out-of-the-way domains of wilderness, where they could hunt, gather and grow their own food in small-scale, “cut and burn” (swidden agriculture) plots of mixed root crops, while creating their own social institutions, separate from the taxation, conscription, and exploitation of the grain-based, urban-centered state (Loewen, 2007, 107–108, 126–127, 151; Leming, 1993, 37; Scott, 2009, 9–10, 18, 41, 54, 77). 2. See Jim Corbett’s commentary on the Exodus account of Moses’s struggle to name the Voice that spoke to him out of the bush (Corbett, 2005, 84–87). 3. And even renegade “swidden agriculturalists” doing root crop cultivation in highland zones or desert areas (or other “out-of-the-way” places of revolt), where food production can be carried out beyond the reach of 204 Notes imperial taxes and plundering, as detailed by James C. Scott in his book, the Art of Not Being Governed. Chapter 3 1. Myers carefully exegetes the flow of sayings here to emphasize that far from trying to cloak what he is saying (“putting a lamp under a bushel”), Jesus is rather seeking to “excavate” ears that can actually “hear.” What is entailed is a kind of awakening: breaking the crowds’ hearing free (“take heed what you hear”) from colonization in simple catchphrases and aphorisms whose purpose is to conform them to the status quo. 2. It is worth noting that Jesus’ own favored self-signifying—in oblique, third- person allusions—is what Myers calls the “Human One,” translated back into Hebrew as ben adam, “Son of Man,” itself building from the Genesis 1:26 citation in which God creates the collective “Earth Creature” (“Mud Community,” we might say) adam, from the ground (Myers, 1988, 37, 64, 243, 248, 391, 405; Gen. 1: 27). Of course, the reference here is especially to Daniel’s version, the Human One who comes in apocalyptic vindication of those “warred against” and “worn out” ones who receive (indeed, embody) the kingdom (Dan. 7:11–27). 3. It is likewise worth noting that, in this Lev. 25 vision, everyone is reduced to “gleaning” food like a forager for the duration of time that the fields are allowed to “rest” in a fallow state. 4. As Brandon Scott offers concerning the “expectation of the kingdom under the symbol of the cedar or apocalyptic tree” (Scott, 1989, 386). 5. There is not space to elaborate a full-blown schema for these differing lifeways. But suffice it to say here that I am primarily interested in forms of human dwelling that remain attentive to their dependence on local ecosystems and to a responsibility to the holy embodied in such that is carried out by ceremonial faithfulness to the visions and dreams continu- ously given to ancestors and community members over time. Forager communities offer the clearest testament to how our species handled this way of living that is quite alternative to our modern ideas, but subsis- tence agricultural communities, honoring cycles and seasons and limits, or smaller scale pastoral nomadism, reacting to enslavement by going feral and recovering a sense of reciprocity with the wild grasses, also continue the tradition. 6. Indeed, for indigenous peoples, the initial “revolution” from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture, and then from that expansionist monocul- tural farming project to industrialization, was not “revolutionary” at all, but calamitous! Listening close to the ground around the globe today, I have yet to hear any indigenous leaders calling for a “revolution.” Rather, I hear an insistent call to remember. Revolutionary discourse itself valorizes a progressivist view of history that demands rethinking from an indigenous point of view. Notes 205 Chapter 4 1. And of course, in reality, every religious tradition—mainstream Christian- ity included—is already a working hybrid fashioned over time in concrete ecological and historical circumstances, amalgamating influences from a vast array of sources. Identifying particular forms of Christian practice as hybrid is thus, at one level, misleading. But it is worth noting that such nomenclature is used by imperial orthodoxies of all kinds (political as well as spiritual) to claim the high ground of “right” belief/practice. 2. Historically the genre of “gospel” is a piece of Roman political propaganda—a written document lionizing the emperor’s latest military triumph or announcing his coming visit to an imperial city. 3. See the anthropological anthology Limited Wants, Unlimited Means for a reprise of the argument. 4. See for instance the experience of the CBS with the island-hopping Mokan people following the 2004 tsunami (Leung, 3). 5. I am beholden for this image to a Ched Myer’s sermon given in Detroit at the funeral of a friend in 2006. 6. For further treatment of these ideas, see my contributions to Constructive Theology: A Contemporary Approach to Classical Themes (Perkinson, 2005, 252–253). Chapter 5 1. In history, “Europe” per se did not actually coalesce a shared identity until it encountered multiple others around the globe in the colonial enterprise. But for the sake of economy of expression, I use the term collectively here, before its time. 2. For a book-length treatment of this section, see my White Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity. Chapter 7 1. I recognize that “America” is much more accurately a designation of an entire hemisphere—from the top of Canada to the bottom of Argentina and that the tendency of people in the United States to use it exclusively of themselves is typically imperial and supremacist. Here I am choosing to use it that way largely for reasons of ease of reference (as well as rhythmic structuring in a sentence) when characterizing what so often is invoked self-referentially in US dominant culture. 2. Floyd’s argument could itself be nicely complemented by social scientist James Scott’s notions of “hidden transcripts” and “weapons of the weak” as displayed in his book Domination and the Arts of Resistance, nuanced in application to black musics in conjunction with the rather idiosyncratic idea of hegemony worked out by anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff 206 Notes in their tome Revelation and Revolution. Much the same point would come clear as that being offered by Floyd: namely, the capacity of the human body to encode and crystallize—in various structures of perception, habits of gesture, orientations of feeling, and formalities of movement— historical memory and even political resistance, that is the result of quite consciously engaged ideological struggles and material conflicts from an earlier time, but now carried forward not so much in conscious recogni- tion and thematic content, as in subconscious conditioning and cultural form (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991, 25–41). 3. As a ceremonial vitalization of the amoral (available for either good or evil) life energy known as ashe in Yorba traditions, dance ritual, structured by drum rhythm and song melody, functioned to instantiate principles of interdependence and reciprocity between human and spiritual realms, “making understood the unexplainable” (Floyd, 1995, 20). 4. Without making over much of it, Floyd will even cite Joseph Campbell to the effect that ritual enactment of myth in general, in building its dream- like revelations from the specificities of the material world and its local history, solicits the deepest hopes, desires, fears, potencies and conflicts of the human will, that is itself “moved by the energies of the organs of the body operating vicariously against each other and in concert” (1995, 22; Campbell, 1986, 55). If such can be said of myth in general, much more can it be said of African-influenced enactments informed by African rhythmic, polymetric, and heterophonic stylistics (Floyd, 1995, 6, 29). 5. Among the funky butt, buzzard lope, slow drag and grind repertoire of well-loved and liquored dance steps was also to be found the “itch”— a dance move that became the basis for later jazz-dance developments and clearly suggested the advent of Eshu’s New World reincarnation, Legba, whose human “horse” regularly “scratched” after being possessed (Floyd, 1995, 66). Eshu likewise finds re-instantiation in the blues-trope of the crossroads, popularized in Robert Johnson and Peetie Wheatstraw mythologies of having acquired their musical skills in a midnight transac- tion with the Devil, exchanging their souls for such a gift at the requisite fork in the road (Floyd, 1995, 74).

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