2 MIN READDespite Fidela Salvador’s professional qualifications, she humbly knelt to wash the feet of the underprivileged. She became a servant of the people and was martyred in the company of her revolutionary friends.
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4 MIN READIn my writings I had been using ‘Kindom of God’ for ‘Kingdom of God’ a lot. This was intentional. Those who are familiar with theological literature in the last sixty years or more may understand why ‘Kindom’ reads more theologically and politically correct than ‘Kingdom.’
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2 MIN READ“As we offer our atang and light our candles, may we be able to sense the ‘han’ of those who died unjust or wrongful deaths: the thousands of victims of extra-judicial killings in this country, most of them innocent and powerless ‘sinned against’.”
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4 MIN READ“The chain of mountains where Igorots live is where bushes still burn and where our leaders are calling us to band together as kins in the defense of the earth against the monstrous beasts of this age… .”
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3 MIN READNationalism is not simply about flag-kissing. It is about living the narrative and aspirations of the flag. Nationalism is not simply about dismissing the US as an unreliable and hypocritical ally, a mass murderer, and a magnanakaw of national patrimony. Nationalism is also about denouncing and resisting US global hegemony.
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4 MIN READToday, the “foreigners in our midst” do not see a state protecting itself. The demos of the international community can fully understand what these strange tongues in the streets are saying. These tongues do not come to them as strange or glossolalic. They are tongues that echo the cries and voices of the suffering poor, of the victims of systemic and institutional violence, of resistance, of a people, come of age.
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3 MIN READProphet Ezekiel prophesied in this context of exile. Like most of the prophets of ancient Israel, Ezekiel was, in the words of Musikang Bayan, “hindi pangkaraniwan.” He did not only prophesy. He did his in distinct hindi pangkaraniwan ways. Unfortunately, the prophet’s eccentric approach to prophecy was misinterpreted by some readers as mere flashes of cataplexy.
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4 MIN READWe may not see them marching en masse this year due to the pandemic, but the spirit of the militant worker and the cry of Mayo Uno reverberate in every act of selflessness, in every food shared, in every cry for justice and equity, in every hand extended to the neighbor, in every genuine act of service, and in every life given for others.
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5 MIN READThis is what the resurrection may be partly about. This is what’s Jesus’ showing his wounds may be saying to us who find home and comfort in the bottom of a deep, dark, and damp well – who wallow in our ideological captivity and resigned to embracing the proposition that all reality is no bigger than the mouth of the well.
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3 MIN READThe global pandemic and the many social and spiritual viruses that continue to afflict us may be draining us spiritually and physically; and that there may not be that many signs of us learning lessons from our collective experience of the pandemic – but the resurrection of Jesus brings to us the good news of the “eighth-as-the-first day.
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2 MIN READThe many stories today – of activists becoming “suicidal” whenever they are served arrest warrants in the wee hours of the morning even when their families are with them tend to question the proposition that Judas hanged himself.
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2 MIN READNo, not even NCIP, can prevent the Lumads from raising their voices at the gates of “imperial Manila” saying, “We are Subanen, Blaan, T‟boli, Mandaya, Mansaka, Tiruray, Higaonon, Manobo, Bagobo, Bukidnon, Tagkaolo, Ubo, Banwaon, Kalagan, Dibabawon, Talaandig, Mamanwa and Manguangan but we are also Lumads.
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3 MIN READLast Sunday, March 7th, the Lord’s day was desecrated by them who feared the eighth day as the first day of history’s reopening. It was a bloody Sunday. We weep. We reach out to the families and communities of those who perished in this act of “whole-of-nation” terrorism.
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3 MIN READTo the Left, the EDSA shrine is symbolic of the elite’s leadership and control of the course of the revolt. Conversely, the political elite regarded an exodus from the shrine towards Mendiola as yielding to the radical impulse of masa and Leftist politics.
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4 MIN READOur conventional Christian anthropology may bracket off “all we are” of “lamang” from the lines but contests not the affirmation with our own versicle, “we are dust and to dusts, we will return (Gen 3: 19).” This is what Ash Wednesday is about. It reminds us that something happened between our being molded from dust and our ending in the dust.
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4 MIN READWhen we all look back and remember this Christmas, we give birth to imaginative hoping. It is this hope that energizes us to “imagine boldly” and “dwell creatively” in the present.
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3 MIN READRemembering is a must for life to flourish. Remembering the Christmas story with the intensity of minsan pa nating hagkan ang nakaraan allows us to imagine and flourish as a community as we move past this year and the global pandemic.
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8 MIN READ“Human rights are central to the gospel agenda. They were and are never peripheral to the biblical witness. What is revoltingly wrong and self-serving is when we use the Bible to justify our ‘whole-of-nation-approach’ to violating the human rights of many.”
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3 MIN READ“Like the one at the heart of our Christian narrative, it is the hero who is always seen as the peace and order problem, the rabble-rouser, the dissident, a heartless activist who snatches people from their mothers and families, and a terrorist.”
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2 MIN READ“What Secretary Badoy and her organization cannot see is that the very people and groups that she claims are communist lovers have been condemning violence long before her schooling in the art of Goebellian propaganda.”
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6 MIN READ“Unless we “rise and speak” we are forever consigned to a reed-like existence, trampled upon by hideous beasts and monsters that are now transforming the Igorot homeland into a dirty marshland. “REPENT AND BE BAPTIZED!” is the Christian call for us to “rise and speak”.”
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2 MIN READ“Help us remember that we were reeds once, broken into halves and became a people in our rising. Help us get back our right to self-determination. Help us reclaim our peoplehood in the struggle. Allow us to make amends, to rise as a people… .”
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4 MIN READ“When the Christian speaks of justice, of the integrity of creation, of human rights, structural sin and systemic wrongs, she or he is speaking and acting out of the promptings of his or her faith in the merciful God of justice, hope for Jesus’ promise of the fuller life, and unconditional love for the neighbor.”
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4 MIN READWhen shared among the poor, the gospel of the reign of God was the good news. It meant freedom to those in bondage. It meant justice to those oppressed. It meant the full life for everyone. The poor who saw vision and were seized by hope in this gospel needed no more than that. To them all other else are clanging cymbals
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3 MIN READLet us remember that one of the movements that emerged out of the age-old yearning of the Black slaves for freedom from slavery was the Pentecostal church. At its roots, like the first century pentecost among the amha’ aretz of Palestine, Pentecostalism (esp of the Seymour- Asuza strand) was about freedom.
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5 MIN READOur knowledge of God is also informed by the sacred scriptures that further talk of God as one who reveals godself through the things that God does (“I am who I am” Ex 3: 14): delivers the poor and suffering from their affliction, lives among the poor, gives his everything for his friends, labors to give birth to new life in a new world, and lives in us, for us, and with us in the Spirit.
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6 MIN READThere is today in our country an ongoing debate between those who are positive and negative about the closing of the giant news organization, ABS-CBN. It could have been a simple intramural among the ruling elites if not for what many see as at stake: the 11,000 workers that were rendered unemployed by the NTC order and the bigger issue of press freedom and freedom of expression.
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3 MIN READThe bible that some say is their basis of saying mothers as subordinate to a “higher authority” may have been written in some “abba”-centric language by male writers but these androcentric letters pale and impoverished if not bigoted in contrast to and against the Word of God.
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5 MIN READThe Romans won’t waste their time crucifying thieves. They reserve that to rebelling slaves, insurgents or revolutionaries who defy Caesar and the might of Rome. If ever ordinary thieves were equally crucified during Roman times it was because they see some forms of criminality as resistance – “weapons of resistance” as resistance studies are now saying in our time.
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6 MIN READThe tengao and similar rites call for an occasional check on human excess, a return to the myth of our beginnings, and a reliving of the ideal of what is normal: a responsible, mutual, and reverential cultic exchange between the human and the earth.
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5 MIN READ“About fifty days after his crucifixion, the Galilean rebel became the Christ of faith to a movement that would change the world forever. Whatever happened to that change it brought to the world and all history, it all started in Galilee.”
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5 MIN READHis instructions to his disciples were not harmless moral codes for personal holiness. These were meant to transform his followers into becoming kingdom partisans and revolutionaries whose primary agenda is to turn the world upside down.
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4 MIN READDespite its being met with cold shoulder by the defense and military establishment some possibilities opened up and hopes were kindled. This is one opportunity for both the GRP and the NDFP to rethink their positions, commit to resuming the talks, and moved up the agenda as set forth in the 1992 Hague Joint Declaration.
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5 MIN READ“The exilic situation of prophet Ezekiel’s Israel is not remote to our present planetary situation. We are as separated from our “common home”, and as hopeless and lifeless as the exiled nation of our text, whence these words come as a timely gospel to us in our situation.”
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3 MIN READ“The COVID-19 pandemic happens not in a vacuum but in a world afflicted by the virus of unloved and injustice and scandalous separation from one another.”
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3 MIN READCelebrating International Women’s Month in the church setting and the season of Lent calls us (1) to remember the passion of women in the Christ event, (2) to be repentant about our age-old attitude towards women and the woman question and (3) to revise the social order according to the social vision of the woman question.
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