Papers by James (Jim) W . Perkinson
Perkinson, J.W. (2024). Mirror. In: Political Spirituality in the Face of Climate Collapse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-59471-7_1, 2024
Looking the contemporary climate emergency in the eye without fantasy compels, for a rampaging sp... more Looking the contemporary climate emergency in the eye without fantasy compels, for a rampaging species such as ours, a full halt: what does it really mean to be human? Have we always been self-destructive and thus in need of something like a heretofore unattainable (much less unimaginable) revolution? Or did we once know the mutualism inherent in eco-systemic viability over long stretches of time that allowed both human and more-than-human flourishing in a co-communion simultaneously magnificent, but also uncompromising in its enforcements of limits? In exploring such, the résumé of chapter topics herein pursued will wantonly “skip”—with indigenously-provoked curiosity and biblically-exercised exuberance—across seemingly unrelated subjects, ranging from mountains to metals, mules to muck, menhirs to mites. But exercising the writing unrelentingly will be this concern for limitation! How to get our species to stop assuming its supremacy and recommit to a reciprocity with the more-than-human world that might actually have a future? Organizing the inquest here is the trope and reality of monstrosity.
How to approach the world of plants and animals, waters and minerals, peaks and winds as a domain of peers and teachers and even “elders” underscoring the fact that monstrosity is our condition, whether as a now outsized species-terror ravaging all else on the planet and provoking the biosphere to respond in kind, or by recovering our ancestral role as symbiotically embedded collaborator with forces larger than our formulas (such as oceans) and more minutely potent than our microscopes (like viruses)? Patent for the “Christian” leanings of the effort—piqued, schooled, and downsized by indigenous challenge—will be the way these “monster agencies” intersect with the tradition’s fascination with angels both beneficent and “fallen”—as Messengers elaborating wisdom or as powers engendering destruction. In the mix the introductory sketch organizes the venture as “Monsters we need to meet” as well as “Monsters we have mobilized” across many millennia as companions, likewise positing as provocation the idea of monsters musing through us, mentoring all around us, and meddling with us—all “from without” in origen and aim, serving an intention mysterious and beyond our comprehension, but ineluctably involving us (and ultimately “eating” us!), whether or not we would cooperate in kind. And obviously the goal is not tight argument but fecund wonderment.
500 Years of Christianity and the Global Filipino/a , 2024
This chapter works toward developing a Christian spirituality of land, tutored by involvement in ... more This chapter works toward developing a Christian spirituality of land, tutored by involvement in Filipino indigenous struggle to halt land dispossession and recover ancestral tradition, authored by a white settler colonial educator/poet, partnered with a diasporan Filipina activist/scholar. Rooted in recent experience of having challenged development interests in Luzon to face Filipino “Doctrine of Discovery” decimation of the indigenous Ayta homeland there, the chapter recounts lessons learned and questions raised before then turning to the biblical tradition to reread with an eye to being schooled by agencies wild and living (like Moses with a bush, Elijah with ravens, John with a camel). Indigenous Filipino innovations of a “re-baptism” rite, considered alongside an eco-sensitive re-reading of gospel traditions of Jesus’ baptism opens toward Asian theologian Aloysius Pieris’ insistence that the first task (and true test) of any “missionary” enterprise is not teaching, preaching, or conversion, but immersion, in the most profound sense and widest scope of the term. The first task of Christian vocation is to be baptized—into both land wisdom and indigenous practice of such—for the sake of an anti-colonial vision of a future that is actually viable and worthy of the planet.
In De Beer, S. (ed.), 2018, Just Faith: Glocal Responses to Planetary Urbanisation, in HTS Religion & Society Series Volume 3, pp. 43-74, AOSIS, Cape Town., 2018
How shall we think indigeneity, land, settler colonialism, and climate change in relationship to ... more How shall we think indigeneity, land, settler colonialism, and climate change in relationship to issues of race, class and religion, in the face of a monstrosity of urbanization whose maw is now planetary-wide? I write in place, out of an academic discipline that might be loosely called “political spirituality” (more technically, “eco-theology”), schooled for more than three decades by the harshly embattled location of inner city, post-industrial Detroit. Riffing on the work of postcolonial scholar Gayatri Spivak—dreaming, at one point in her theorizing, of the impossible possibility of “globe-girdling movements” energized by “animist liberation theologies”—the galvanizing concern in this chapter might be glossed as the eco-critical irruption of the subaltern in the place of history, Global South eco-animism challenging Northern consumerist geocide, indigenous wiles and wisdoms haunting the weal and wealth and weapons of the colonizer-world of settlement and settlements and urbanized savagery.
In J. Havea ed. Theology in the Age of Empire Vol. 1 Religion and Power. Lanham: Lexington Books /Fortress Academic, 149-166., 2019
This paper will focus on the way movements such as the Ojibwa-led Water Walkers of the Great Lake... more This paper will focus on the way movements such as the Ojibwa-led Water Walkers of the Great Lakes region as well as the Standing Rock Sioux opposition to the Dakota Access pipeline in the name of protecting the water, have informed the struggle against water shutoffs in Detroit in recent years. Each of the former combines spirituality with politics—insisting on relating to water as relative and spirit, not just resource and right. Such a challenge from indigenous wisdom throws down a gauntlet to Christian concerns for water access in the coming century of water wars and has provoked a new methodology of “passing over” (to the power of oral traditions enchanting their watersheds with living mythologies) and “coming back” (to the biblical tradition in particular) to re-discover indigenous traces and treasures yet extant in the texts that can re-animate a shared struggle for justice in an age of neoliberal dominance and climate comeuppance.
New York University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020
The American Historical Review, Nov 25, 2013
In the midst of the Los Angeles debacle of 1992, footage was shown on national TV in which a whit... more In the midst of the Los Angeles debacle of 1992, footage was shown on national TV in which a white-looking 30-something man carrying a bag of “stuff” across the parking lot of a looted store is accosted by a black man who is about his same age. The white man is grinning. The black man is visibly upset. The irony is palpable. The black man swats the bag out of the white guy’s arms onto the ground. Solidarity in the struggle is not the same as partnership in the parking lot.
CrossCurrents, Mar 1, 2014
CrossCurrents, Dec 1, 2016
Palgrave Macmillan eBooks, Jul 13, 2015
Palgrave Macmillan eBooks, Jul 13, 2015
African Sun Media eBooks, Mar 30, 2017
Theology Today, 2004
What would it take for whites (especially those males claiming to be Christian) to have formed wi... more What would it take for whites (especially those males claiming to be Christian) to have formed within themselves the kind of “vital ferocity” necessary to struggle lifelong against the powers and privileges that whiteness constantly leverages in and around them? This essay seeks to answer this question by embracing black liberation theology as gift of bombast for the white church, bearing the blood-cry of a betrayed “American” Abel. The white church in our day continues to live largely in denial of a judgment already clogging its own veins. It has yet to listen and learn from the deepest groan of Spirit inside its own history.
BRILL eBooks, Mar 18, 2023
Anglican theological review, Mar 14, 2023
While it constitutes an overwhelmingly complex discursive event, the 1992 LA uprising could be co... more While it constitutes an overwhelmingly complex discursive event, the 1992 LA uprising could be construed as, in part, the eruption of a kind of urban commentary on official “white” speech and authorized consensus represented by Simi Valley. It was a moment of shock for the nation, when racialized reasonableness and racist lawfulness showed their illogic and the communities that have most painfully suffered that illogic in history ritually exhibited its contradictions. It begs to be read under the rubric not only of a momentary “black”-led attempt at “urban exorcism” (violent repudiation directed against some of the sites of economic exploitation and symbols of political constraint in the inner city), but also of continuing white disingenuousness. The aftermath reveals how a pervasive power formation reconstituted its hegemony after a moment of compromising self-revelation and refused a possibility of education. What could have served to challenge white self-certainty in the end only...
Onesimus Our Brother, 2012
Apocalypses in Context, 2016
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Papers by James (Jim) W . Perkinson
How to approach the world of plants and animals, waters and minerals, peaks and winds as a domain of peers and teachers and even “elders” underscoring the fact that monstrosity is our condition, whether as a now outsized species-terror ravaging all else on the planet and provoking the biosphere to respond in kind, or by recovering our ancestral role as symbiotically embedded collaborator with forces larger than our formulas (such as oceans) and more minutely potent than our microscopes (like viruses)? Patent for the “Christian” leanings of the effort—piqued, schooled, and downsized by indigenous challenge—will be the way these “monster agencies” intersect with the tradition’s fascination with angels both beneficent and “fallen”—as Messengers elaborating wisdom or as powers engendering destruction. In the mix the introductory sketch organizes the venture as “Monsters we need to meet” as well as “Monsters we have mobilized” across many millennia as companions, likewise positing as provocation the idea of monsters musing through us, mentoring all around us, and meddling with us—all “from without” in origen and aim, serving an intention mysterious and beyond our comprehension, but ineluctably involving us (and ultimately “eating” us!), whether or not we would cooperate in kind. And obviously the goal is not tight argument but fecund wonderment.
How to approach the world of plants and animals, waters and minerals, peaks and winds as a domain of peers and teachers and even “elders” underscoring the fact that monstrosity is our condition, whether as a now outsized species-terror ravaging all else on the planet and provoking the biosphere to respond in kind, or by recovering our ancestral role as symbiotically embedded collaborator with forces larger than our formulas (such as oceans) and more minutely potent than our microscopes (like viruses)? Patent for the “Christian” leanings of the effort—piqued, schooled, and downsized by indigenous challenge—will be the way these “monster agencies” intersect with the tradition’s fascination with angels both beneficent and “fallen”—as Messengers elaborating wisdom or as powers engendering destruction. In the mix the introductory sketch organizes the venture as “Monsters we need to meet” as well as “Monsters we have mobilized” across many millennia as companions, likewise positing as provocation the idea of monsters musing through us, mentoring all around us, and meddling with us—all “from without” in origen and aim, serving an intention mysterious and beyond our comprehension, but ineluctably involving us (and ultimately “eating” us!), whether or not we would cooperate in kind. And obviously the goal is not tight argument but fecund wonderment.