“I think that Christ was a heavy radical.” As a statement of politicized spirituality by a religious Latino, this comment suggests progressive associations with Catholic liberation theology, especially for those familiar with ’80s Latin American solidarity movements.
But Arlene M. Sánchez Walsh—a DePaul University professor of religious studies—records these thoughts from John Luna, a 50-something Southern California Chicano and member of the Vineyard ministry, a post-denominational strand of evangelical Christianity labeled charismatic. Where Luna challenges his church to “walk a picket line or be willing to do a sit-down,” another Latino evangelical—Cruz “Sonny” Arguinzoni, a founder of Victory Outreach Pentecostal ministries—clarifies his political outlook for Sánchez Walsh: “The Kingdom of God is not a democracy.”
Category: Writing
In March 1989, University of Texas at Austin premed student Mark Kilroy disappeared during a drunken spree that led him and hundreds of spring-breakers from South Padre Island across the Texas border into Matamoros, Mexico. What promised to be a carefree week of surf, sun and cheap Mexican liquor became grisly grist for tabloids, as an international manhunt eventually discovered Kilroy’s body and the mutilated remains of at least a dozen others in a mass grave, located at what came to be known as Hell Ranch.
The messages of great poets to each man and woman are, Come to us on equal terms, Only then can you understand us. We are no better than you…Did you suppose there could be only one Supreme? We affirm there can be unnumbered Supremes…”
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)
The static scratch of a turntable needle plucks into a trumpeting groove of dramatic bombast, bringing Zarathustra’s fire from the mountains for fight-to-the-finish phonetic fisticuffs at tonight’s full-court, one-on-one, make-it-take-it poetry rumble. We find ourselves in medias res, the joust afoot, vendettas flagged and fallen, the bitter taste of beer and too much cigarette smoke fueling hearty wordsmiths to more and more feats of fearless foolishness on the microphone passing hands, the masses encircling victors and consoling the vanquished, and always the words, oh the words, representing all sides, cultures, and peoples in a microcosm of this country’s formative tongues: formal verse, free verse, monologues, mano-a-mano sonnets, parables, odes, ballads, schizophrenic rambling, antichrist rants, hip-hop meditation, old-school rap, new-school lyricism, athletic assonance, dirty limericks, head-to-head haiku, twisted tales, iambic pentameter, napkin-scribbled words of wisdom, beat-box scratch-verse, abstract experimentalism, drunken-master mind-over-matter magic—all styles and subjects for the sport of the spoken word.
