Laurel Dykstra – författare

Liberating Biblical Study is a unique collaboration of pioneering biblical scholars, social-change activists, and movement-based artists. Well known and unknown, veterans and newcomers, these diverse practitioners of justice engage in a lively and critical conversation at the intersection of seminary, sanctuary, and street. The book is divided into eight sections; in each, a scholar, activist, and artist explore the justice issues related to a biblical text or idea, such as exodus, creation, jubilee, and sanctuary. Beyond the emerging themes (e.g., empire, resistance movements, identity, race, gender, and economics), the book raises essential questions at another level: What is the role of art in social-change movements? How can scholars be accountable beyond the academy, and activists encouraged to study? How are resistance movements nurtured and sustained? This volume is an accessible invitation to action that will appeal to all who love and strive for justice--whatever their discipline, and whatever their familiarity with the Bible, scholarship, art, and activist communities.

Bury the Dead is a collection of personal encounters with death: stories of Alzheimer''s, AIDS, cancer, hospice, suicide, murder, systemic violence, genocide, and war. In this book a teenager tenderly washes her mother''s body, a community organizer cries outrage over his blood-soaked comrade, a father builds a coffin for his infant son, martyrs are honored by a former political prisoner, a young scholar''s experiences in Palestine shape her reading of the Exodus narrative, and a community of gardeners plant trees at urban-core murder sites. Drawing from sources such as the peace movement, the Catholic Worker, and Occupy, these stories make connections between medicine delivery, labor picket lines, and PICC-lines; between jazz funeral secondlines and the front lines of countless struggles. Part pastoral theology, part movement history, this book powerfully demonstrates that resisting the power of death is at the heart of Christian discipleship, and that in a culture that fears death, we will only find resurrection in facing it.