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.
Standing Rock is Everywhere: The Indigenous Heart of the Climate Change Fight
We can celebrate a genuine victory with the end of the KXL and it is appropriate to be grateful for the indigenous guidance responsible for this victory. Nevertheless, the struggle continues and it is our struggle, not just someone else’s. Stay rooted in real stories. Never give up. Standing Rock is everywhere.
September 10, 2021
Rural Organizing as a Spiritual Practice
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