Alan Jay Richard

Alan Jay Richard, Ph.D., is a scholar and activist currently affiliated with Realistic Living, an educational nonprofit in rural north Texas that researches and experiments with new forms of collective religious practice. His current research and writing is focused on ekklesia, valuation, and frontier between religion and politics.

Resilience.org short break

By Resilience.org Staff, Resilience.org

The Resilience.org editorial team are taking a short break from 13-14 July. Regular posting will resume on Wednesday 15 July.

July 10, 2020

Rural Organizing as a Spiritual Practice

By Alan Jay Richard, Resilience.org

The difficult work of organizing builds solidarity based not on some received story that reinforces given identities and friend-enemy distinctions but on shared action that, in taking on oppressive power, forces that power to reveal itself beyond the identities and stories that mask it. It is a radical and risky option that won’t work without transforming organizers who leave the coastal urban enclaves as well as the rural people they encounter. It is a transformation of politics by way of spiritual practice.

August 1, 2017