Ched Myers
About Ched | Speaking Schedule | Articles for Downloading | Bibliography | About Theological Animation
About Ched Myers
Ched (at right, with wife Elaine Enns)
holds a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley (1978) and an M.A. in New Testament Studies from the Graduate Theological Union (1984). He has served as adjunct faculty at Memphis Theological Seminary, Fuller Theological Seminary and Claremont School of Theology (where he was the 1998-99 Fellow in Urban Theology). Other schools at which he has taught include: Ecumenical Theological Seminary (Detroit), the Seminary Consortium on Urban and Pastoral Education (Chicago), Maryknoll School of Theology (New York), Loyola University (Chicago), Virginia Theological Seminary, Phillips Theological Seminary (Oklahoma), Pacific School of Religion (Berkeley), Toronto School of Theology, Vancouver School of Theology, Churches of Christ Theological College (Australia) and Tamilnadu Theological Seminary (India).
Ched’s books include: Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (1988), Who Will Roll Away the Stone: Discipleship Queries for First World Christians (1994), and Say to This Mountain: Mark’s Story of Discipleship (1996, co-authored), all published by Orbis Books. He writes regularly for Sojourners and has published more than 100 articles and essays in periodicals in the U.S., England and Australia. He also works with other writers and publishers as an editor and manuscript evaluator.
Ched travels throughout North America and abroad giving seminars and retreats, teaching, preaching and facilitating gatherings. He works with Catholic, Protestant and Anabaptist parishes and diocesan/denominational offices, as well as with ecumenical organizations. He is particularly committed to faith-based peace and justice efforts such as Christian Peacemaker Teams, Borderlinks, the Catholic Worker movement, Witness for Peace, and the Servant Leadership Schools.
Ched describes the work of “Theological Animation”
Over the past 15 years I’ve traveled around North America and abroad in pursuit of this vision, moving among a wide cross-section of faith-based groups and parishes teaching, listening, challenging, encouraging and networking. I have developed a holistic pedagogy of “theological animation” that integrates the disciplines of popular education, evangelism, political organizing, pastoring and theological reflection.
At the center of my approach is the practice of relectura: a “rereading” of the Bible in light of concrete struggles against violence and oppression. I believe that the Judeo-Christian sacred story is the older, deeper and wiser tradition that has the power to transform our lives and our history–but only if we can overcome its domestication under the dominant culture. Our churches – conservative and liberal alike – are often inhospitable to the gospel’s invitation to the cross, to solidarity with the least, and to Sabbath Economics. Our task is thus to rebuild literacy in which the Word and the world are brought to bear on each other at every turn.
When and wherever this has happened throughout the history of the church, communities of discipleship, creative celebration, healing and solidarity with the marginalized have been created or re-created. The same holds true for our time. I have heard from participants countless times exclamations such as these:
Such responses express at once both frustration and hope, and indicate how hungry our people are for an integrative approach to faith and politics.
My work has three goals:
- To recover the vocation of evangelism grounded in Jesus’ call to radical discipleship, engaging communities of faith across the ecumenical spectrum in critical conversation about the shape of discipleship today.
- To help rebuild a movement of faith-based witness for peace and justice by supporting, encouraging and interconnecting diverse local, regional and national expressions of faith and action.
- To promote and nurture biblical literacy and social analysis among Christians by helping groups re-ground their perspectives in sacred stories and discern how those visions can be embodied in our contemporary contexts.
Below I reflect more on why I chose the name “Theological Animation.” To invite me to work with your community please email us.
People often chuckle when I describe my work as “theological animation.” Apparently this is seen as a contradictory rubric: the serious endeavor of theology is perceived to have little in common with something as fun-loving as animated cartoons. This, of course, is part of the problem. So I use the double entendre of “animation” intentionally. As I’ve explained above, one meaning is to facilitate a “coming to life.” Here’s the other meaning.
One of the cultural founts from which I draw inspiration is early American animation. Years ago my brother Grob turned me on to the work of cartoonist Max Fleischer, whose animated short features pre-dated (and profoundly influenced) Walt Disney. I am particularly drawn to Fleischer’s “Out of the Inkwell” series. There were two very cool things about Fleischer’s pioneering animated filmmaking.
For one, his cartoons rolled to jazz music–at a time jazz was still very much edgy and underground. This manic, free music cohered perfectly with Fleischer’s rubbery, weird
Vaudevillesque cartoon characters (especially Koko the Clown, pictured right). Jazz also fit with Fleischer’s non-agonistic, non-linear stories. That is, there were no good guys or bad guys, and no plot crises in this fabulated toon-world; just characters bumping along to the music, doing random things and having a good old time. Theologically speaking, then, this early art form represented a sort of utopian dreaming, the imagining of a world in which characters never die or suffer, but do alot of laughing and dancing. (Fleischer invented the time-honored cartoon convention in which characters bounce right up from any and all toon-mayhem.) A vision, in other words, of heaven.
No accident perhaps that Fleischer and many of his colleagues were Jewish immigrants: they were, like most of the jazz players to which they were drawn, brilliant artists marginalized by racial-ethnic codes. I think of their early cartoons as a sort of midrash on America, reflecting a longing for life-after-transfiguration: all good.
Any theology that loses sight of that sort of mystical vision of the world-as-it-should-be cannot hope to struggle for redemption in a all-too-real world that could not be further from a Fleischer cartoon. And that’s why I strive to practice theological animation.