The Wild Goose Festival

What do wildness, geese, and the Holy Spirit have in common?

How about social justice, spirituality, art, music, and camping?

In a little over a month, the US version of the longstanding Greenbelt Festival will plant its tent pegs, portable generators, and biodegradable  soap dispensers firmly into the North Carolina soil.

If done right, this could be more than Greenbelt 2.0.  This could be a chance to rip theological authority from power grip of empire assumptions, colonial presumptions, and the religious elite – to open up faith & spirituality to dialogue, discourse, and subaltern perspectives in an uniquely American context.

Ok, maybe that’s hoping for a little bit much.  Who knows, it could go any which way if the Wild Goose* shows up!

Check out the Wild Goose website and the Wild Goose blog.  See you there?

*The Wild Goose is a Celtic metaphor for the Holy Spirit.  The Wild Goose Festival is followers of Jesus creating a festival of justice, spirituality, music and the arts.  The festival is rooted in the Christian tradition and therefore open to all regardless of belief, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, denomination or religious affiliation.

Peacemaking Insight #1 – Dave Frenchak

At the last meeting of the National Planning Committee we had the chance to talk individually with a few of the wonderful minds gathered around that table.  While these videos offer just a slice of the wisdom and experience being leveled at these meetings towards moving us away from a culture of violence through peacemaking, they pack quite a punch.

Dave Frenchak speaks in this video about the 2011 Congress on Urban Ministry and the tools and equipping that the gathering will provide to those whose ministries will actively create peace.

Dave Frenchak - Peacemaking Insight I

“My best hope is that this event is going to be a disruptive event.  That we will be able, through this event, to disrupt the routines in the culture that cause violence… That we will be able to disrupt the roles that different people play in this culture of violence… the roles that we ourselves play, unwittingly, that promotes a culture of violence… And that we will be able to disrupt the rules, both spoken and unspoken, known and unknown, that all of us obey which actually feed the culture of violence.

So that we can begin thinking out of a different framework: not a culture of violence but a culture of making peace.”