Mark Van Steenwyk is the Executive Director at the Center for Prophetic Imagination. Mark is a writer, teacher, organizer, and spiritual director. For nearly 15 years, Mark has sown seeds of subversive spirituality throughout North America. He co-founded the Mennonite Worker in Minneapolis in 2004 with his wife Amy. Mark is the author of That Holy Anarchist, The unKingdom of God, and A Wolf at the Gate.  

In this episode of the Iconocast Joanna interviews L. M. Bogad. L. M. Bogad is an author, performance artist/activist, professor of political performance at UC Davis, Director of the Center for Tactical Performance, and co-founder of the Clown Army.  He has performed across the USA, Europe and South America, including occupied zones and a squatted military base in Barcelona.  

Bogad’s first book, Electoral Guerrilla Theatre: Radical Ridicule and Social Movements, analyzes the international campaigns of performance artists who run for public office as a radical prank. His new book, Tactical Performance: On the Theory and Practice of Serious Play, analyzes and critiques the use of guerrilla theatre/art for human/civil rights, social justice, labor and environmental campaigns.  

Bogad’s performances have covered topics such as the Egyptian revolution, the Haymarket Square Riot, the Spanish Civil War, the FBI's COINTELPRO activities, and the Pinochet coup in Chile. His ECONOMUSIC: Keeping Score, has been performed at festivals in Helsinki, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Santiago, San Francisco, and Barcelona.  His play, COINTELSHOW: A Patriot Act was recently performed at the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s Studio, in New Orleans, and in Mexico City.

Bogad has led Tactical Performance workshops, helping activists create performative, nonviolent images to contest and critique power, in Cairo, Barcelona, Riga, Helsinki, Buenos Aires, Trondheim, and across the United States.

In episode 73 of the Iconocast Joanna interviews David Brazil and Sarah Pritchard. Together they discuss Christian discipleship founded on hospitality, in-depth bible study and the dismantling of capitalism.

Sarah Pritchard is an experimental dancer and choreographer, a third generation preacher, founding member of SALTA dance collective, improvisational cook in the kitchen and cat co-parent to Alvin and Isadora.

David Brazil is a pastor and translator. His third book of poetry, Holy Ghost (City Lights, 2017) was a finalist for the California Book Award.

Sarah and David co-pastor the Agape Fellowship, in Oakland, California. Agape Fellowship is a Christian-interfaith community church and 'spiritual safe space' dedicated to building the spiritual foundations of liberation movements for our generation.

Chude Pam Allen is a member of the Bay Area Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. She coordinates speakers for schools and community groups and has spoken widely about her own experiences. Her writings can be found on their website, www.crmvet.org, which is considered by many veterans to be the best source for information on the Southern Freedom Movement.

In 1964 Chude participated in the student movement in Atlanta, Georgia while a white exchange student at Spelman, a historically black college. That summer she was a freedom school teacher in Holly Springs, Mississippi. She is featured in Doug McAdam’s book, Freedom Summer and in the award winning film, Freedom on My Mind.

After leaving the South, Chude was an organizer of the Women’s Liberation Movement, first in New York City and then in San Francisco. She taught anti-racism workshops for both women’s liberation groups and the YWCA. She is author of the 1970 classic, Free Space, A Perspective on the Small Group in Women’s Liberation and wrote the chapter on woman suffrage for the book, Reluctant Reformers: Racism and Social Reform Movements in the United States. In the mid-seventies she joined Union Women’s Alliance to Gain Equality and became editor of their newspaper, UNION WAGE. She is featured in the film, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry.

In episode 70 Joanna interviews Beth Roy. Beth Roy was born into a Jewish family and raised in Texas where she attended a segregated high school at the time that the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education. Nurtured by parents committed to racial equality, she has built a life with a quest for justice at its center. She is an author, educator, therapist and restorative justice practitioner. She was part of founding the Practitioners Research and Scholarship Institute, a dynamically diverse group promoting writing and relationships among oft-marginalized people. In 2008, the project published its first anthology, Re-Centering Culture and Knowledge in Conflict Resolution Practice. She resides in San Francisco with her partner and two playful dogs.

In episode 69, recorded in the fall of 2017, Joanna interviews Carol Lee and Sarah Lee.

Carol is second generation Chinese American of Toi San background. Carol works with PICO California growing faith communities’ institutional capacity for long-term justice work in Oakland, California. Their program creates accessible on ramps to uncover the root causes of injustice in housing, policing, and immigration policy, while cultivating communal spaces to creatively, seriously, and maximally steward their communities' power and resources for collective liberation.

Sarah is a second generation Chinese American of Hokshan and En Ping descent. Sarah works as a Sanctuary Organizer with Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity, developing networks of community safety for immigrants through congregations and immigrant justice coalitions. Her specific focus has been uplifting the stories of formerly incarcerated immigrants and those most in danger of deportation through a project called Migrants in the Pulpit.

In 2017 they created the “Reading is Resistance” Readathon for people of Asian and Pacific Islander descent. The commitments of the readathon included: to speak and act from a deep foundation of the historical work for liberation, to imagine and create a more loving and just world, to resist cultural amnesia by reading and sharing knowledge, and to support organizations doing critical work.

In episode 68 Joanna interviews David Solnit. David is an organizer, writer and puppeteer. His activism began in high school with draft resistance organizing and hasn’t stopped since. He was part of shutting down the WTO in Seattle in 1999 and in San Francisco the day after Iraq was invaded in 2003. This past year he spent time at Standing Rock, creating art and telling the story of that struggle, as well as helped to organize art at the People’s Climate March in Washington DC in April. He currently works with 350.org as the North American Arts Organizer. 

In the San Francisco Bay Area he organizes with anti-corporate capitalist, climate justice, anti-war, human rights, and environmental justice groups. He is editor of Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World and with his sister, Rebecca Solnit, he co-wrote The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle.

In this episode, recorded at the Kinsler Bartimaeus Institute in February of 2017, Elaine Enns and Ched Myers reflect on the fragmentation of movements for justice since the Beyond Vietnam speech. Ched shares about the disillusionment following the 60s when justice-minded people broke into niches, focusing on one issue to the exclusion of the rest. Elaine offers the wisdom of Audre Lorde who challenged people to "do their own work" and recognize that our very bodies are intersectional and therefore our movements must be as well.

Elaine Enns and Ched Myers are co-directors of Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries. Elaine recently completed a doctorate of ministry on historical responsibility and intergenerational trauma among Canadian Prairie Settler Mennonites and their relationship with Indigenous neighbors. Ched Myers has authored many books, including Binding the Strong Man and Say to This Mountain. Together Ched and Elaine reside in the Ventura River Watershed.

Opening song by Joshua Grace, with Charletta Erb on violin.

In this episode, recorded at the Kinsler Bartimaeus Institute in February of 2017, Elaine Enns, Ched Myers and Joanna Shenk offer input on the history of enslavement, the eras of reconstruction and the drafting of the Beyond Vietnam speech that Dr. King delivered on April 4, 1967, one year before he was assassinated.

Many people in movement communities are familiar with the Beyond Vietnam speech, but few know about the man who drafted it, Dr. Vincent Harding. Elaine and Ched offer analysis of the history of movements for justice in the United States, encouraging us to neither overplay our current political reality or underplay the obstacles and oppression of the past. Joanna shares from her personal relationship with Dr. Vincent Harding and from his own words describing the experience of drafting the Beyond Vietnam speech and what it means for us today.

Elaine Enns and Ched Myers are co-directors of Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries. Elaine recently completed a doctorate of ministry on historical responsibility and intergenerational trauma among Canadian Prairie Settler Mennonites and their relationship with Indigenous neighbors. Ched Myers has authored Binding the Strong Man and Say to This Mountain. Together Ched and Elaine reside in the Ventura River Watershed.