Some would question the wisdom, or the right, of someone like me--White, Mennonite, Christian--writing about the historic practices of torture among Indigenous cultures on Turtle Island. Hopefully, the work I have been doing on this podcast and in my book so far has helped me pull enough of the log out of my own eye that I can at least look at the …

A golden-voiced radio host falls from glory. A rooster crows and struts and demands rough sex. A husband catches some reflections of himself.By Marcus Peter Rempel & Alana Levandoski

A horse-and-buggy Mennonite community has all of its children apprehended by agents of the state because of the use of corporal punishment in the community. What does this story expose about how we think about the legitimate use of force in our modern world? Girard and Illich offer some insight on the odd role of the Gospel in reshaping everything …

For our fourth and final conversation, around and beyond the legacy of Ivan Illich, we hear reflections and discussion from Katherine Bubel and Michelle Berry Lane before moving into an extended open discussion. Katherine discusses Illich's mythopoetics of Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Pandora, the latter a patriarchally diminished version of the Ear…

Gustavo Esteva coined the slogan "One No, Many Yeses" to communicate the way Illich's sense of "the vernacular" offers many small and winding exits off of the one big road of industrial "progress" that tries to gather up the whole globe into one great machine, one overriding system. In this conversation, Dougald Hine, Sam Ewell and friends colour i…

Christian mission has gotten a bad name in our time, for good reason. Illich talked about the razor's edge walked by the missionary, between violating the world into which one has been sent (he used the word raping, actually) and betraying one's spiritual inheritance. Some have read Illich as anti-mission. In this conversation, both David Cayley an…

Welcome to chapter 2 of Life at the End of Us Versus Them. This is where I give an introduction to the thought of Ivan Illich's sense of the way Christianity was perverted when it sought to impose the Gospel of Christ through state power and institutional administration. I could think of no clearer case example than the Indian Residential Schools p…

Two Illichian thinkers dialogue on the legacy of Illich, in the light of our present times and predicaments. This is the first of four fortnightly conversations. David Cayley: friend and associate of Illich and the author of Ivan Illich, An Intellectual Journey. Dougald Hine: co-founder of The Dark Mountain Project, A School Called Home and the aut…

Firing up the old podcast again! This is the first in a series of audiobook chapter releases. I never did figure out how to package and sell my book as an audiobook per se, but it feels like the right time to put this out into the world. The "expectant - and apocalyptic time" that was named on the back cover seems more vividly at hand now than in 2…

Lydia Wylie-Kellerman is co-editor of the blog, radicaldiscipleship.net, coordinator of Word and World: A People’s School bridging the gap between seminary, sanctuary and the street, and the newly minted editor of geez magazine, recently flown the coop of Winnipeg to be nested in Detroit.By Marcus Peter Rempel & Alana Levandoski

By Marcus Peter Rempel & Alana Levandoski

Jodi Spargur is a settler of Nordic/German heritage living and working on the unceeded territory of the Squamish, Musqueaum and Tslei-Watuth Peoples. Jodi is a farmer, furniture-mover, pastor and catalyzer for justice and healing between the church and indigenous peoples in Canada. Jodi continually crosses thresholds into spaces where she has much …

We like to think of Stan McKay as Manitoba’s Bishop Tutu. He has held the highest office in the land in the United Church of Canada, but his influence and recognition as a spiritual leader of the Cree extends well beyond the bounds of the church. The name given to him in the lodge is Walking Buffalo, a name that associates him with a creature and a…

Alana Levandoski has been called a “right-brain theologian,” but she wasn’t always open about her faith. Today her website introduces her as “a song and chant writer and recording artist, in the Christian tradition, who lives with her family on an aspiring permaculture farm on the Canadian prairies.” She is really on her second music career. Her in…

Steve Bell is a much beloved Winnipeg singer/songwriter. Steve sings songs of Christian faith, but with an authenticity that makes him accessible to fans well beyond the Christian fold. “You are singing your story, you aren’t telling me my story,” says one of Steve’s regular atheist concert attendees. We were delighted to sit down with Steve to hea…

Chris and Hazel Harper are leaders in the Indigenous food sovereignty movement from St. Theresa Point, Manitoba. Born and raised Catholics, they have reclaimed and reintegrated the ceremonies of their people, including the Wabanu thanksgiving ceremony, which was passed on to Chris after Christian influence pushed it underground and nearly extinguis…

For many years, Danielle Shroyer was a pastor to people recovering from a toxic theology of original sin, a theology that said that God couldn’t even bear to look at them without a very bloody intervention by Jesus. With a fierce empathy for her parishioners and an intellectual hunger for good theology, Shroyer went digging through the early writin…

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is a southern-bred preacher, a New Monastic, and a street-level activist. His disciplined life of prayer has driven him straight into the public square as a leader in North Carolina’s Moral Monday movement, a movement that has now morphed into a nation-wide poor people’s campaign, Repairers of the Breach. In a wide-ranging…

Kathy Kelly learned not long ago that her last name is Gaelic for “strife.” Kelly has spent a career coaxing communities into the struggle for justice, always nonviolently, always in the face of formidable violence. So successful has she been in recruiting young people to this dangerous, disciplined activism that there is a joke going around about …

Tim Otto is an openly gay Christian pastor, affirming of same-sex relationships for others, while committed to a life of covenanted celibacy for himself. He is truly queer. In one sense, he doesn’t fit in anywhere. In another sense, he has found his people and lived among them for thirty years. Tim lives as a life-long student of the art of loving …

One of the strange wonders of Marcus’ life is that the core of his after-degree theological training came to him through the medium of publicly funded radio programming, almost all of it curated by David Cayley. For over 20 years, Cayley was a producer for a program entitled simply, “Ideas” at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Always clear, al…

In the late winter of 2016, Alana Levandoski and her family traveled to Beausejour, Manitoba to give a concert in a small country church, one of the oldest buildings in the rural town. Alana was promoting her album, Behold, I Make All Things New.The acoustics were gorgeous, and attendees were hungry for an authentic, living voice to sing songs of p…

James Alison might insist that he is “fairly clearly not an authority, and often just a silly old queen,” but underneath his mirth and modesty lies an exceptional theological depth. America: The Jesuit Review hails this institutional outsider as an authority who “belongs on any short list of the most important living Catholic theologians.” In this …

In this episode, Alana and Marcus introduce the vision of The Ferment and introduce ourselves from opposite shores of a prehistoric lake. Then we ring in the coming New Year with Alana’s musical take on Tennyson’s achingly beautiful Ring Out Wild Bells. We couldn’t think of a better way to name our tender hopes and fierce longings to “Ring in…the l…