Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries

09/07/2026

In talking about the glacier collapse and resulting tragedy in Nepal, the idea of repaying “climate debt” is an alternative to simply talking aid or charity.

- Tim

09/05/2026

Tomorrow’s lectionary gospel reading is Matthew 18:15-20, a text that has animated a renewal of faith-rooted restorative justice work over the last five decades.
Hear the interview Derrick Weston did with Ched for his Creation Justice Ministries podcast on the relevance of restorative justice frameworks to ecological stewardship and repair at www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-atqrg-1b4d628 (40 min).

09/04/2026

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of philosopher Ivan Illich. I commend the Ekklesia Project conversation about his legacy by friends Ragan Sutterfield and Sam Ewell (https://ekklesiaproject.substack.com/p/the-witness-of-ivan-illich-with-sam).
I met Illich only once, but it’s a vivid (I daresay convivial) memory. In the summer 1988 he was in Los Angeles, and the Catholic Worker community (which was my spiritual home during my years in the metropolis) invited him to speak at their Friday afternoon “clarification of thought” gathering (there were many mutual influences between Illich and the Catholic Worker movement).
The living room of rambling old Ammon Hennacy House was packed and sweaty, and in walks Illich with an entourage that included former CA governor Jerry Brown (who was apprenticing to Illich during his mid-life crisis).
Two things stand out in my memory. The first is that Illich had an 8 inch stick-like tumor sticking out of his face; impossible to ignore, but to which he never referred during the afternoon. (He had developed a cancerous tumor on the right side of his face in the mid-1970s, but true to his book "Medical Nemesis," he declined surgery and standard pain medication—and amazingly lived another 14 years from the day I heard him.)
The second thing is that half way through his talk I remember saying to myself (or perhaps audibly under my breath): “WTF; I do not understand half of what this dude is saying.” He was talking about the medieval project of erecting campaniles (belled clocktowers in the central square of cities and towns), introducing centralized time-marking and sound-projection as a form of social control that laid the groundwork for the industrial revolution in Europe. It wasn’t that I couldn’t immediately see the relevance of this deep critique; rather, I wondered how this dude could know so much history, sociology, philosophy, etc and weave it all together so brilliantly such that it excavated the roots of modernity. (He published a paper on the subject in 1990 that can be found at www.davidtinapple.com/illich/2000_loudsppu.pdf).
I became a fan that day, as reflected in the epigraph of my second book, "Who Will Roll Away the Stone? Discipleship Queries for First World Christians," Orbis, 1994).
I thank God for Illich’s dis-established genius, which I took as a model for trying to do my work “between seminary, sanctuary, streets and soil,” and for his life and witness. Ivan, pray for us!
--CM

09/03/2026

People of faith showed up last weekend in solidarity with Haitians in Ohio:

“Gedeon’s plea was part of an especially turbulent week in Springfield, Ohio. After the arrests of two Haitian pastors, Adrien and Julio Dumano, local Haitian leaders put out a call for support. More than 400 people responded — many of them faith leaders, some traveling from as far as Minnesota and Florida — to stand with Springfield….

During the weekend, hundreds of volunteers — Baptists, Unitarian Universalists, Mennonites, Quakers and others — packed food boxes for Haitians in hiding, held phone drives asking elected officials to release the pastors and stood outside Haitian churches on Sunday morning to advocate for Haitians’ right to worship without fear.”

- Tim

Two pastors detained, a student dead: Haitians in Ohio turn to faith amid fear of ICE

09/02/2026

Last Friday night, Elaine and I joined two local friends in Sonora, CA to *finally* get to see Alison Krauss and Union Station live in concert. They are perhaps the greatest living ambassadors for bluegrass music, and their 2 hour set was amazing, particularly Jerry Douglass' master work on the dobro. But what made the evening magical was that we sat outside and watched a full moon rise behind the stage, and bathe the western Sierra foothills--and the whole night of music--in love. What a memorable event; we are so grateful!
--CM

09/01/2026

A MEETING (by Wendell Berry)
In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: “How you been?”
He grins and looks at me.
“I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees.”
--CM May it be so. Thank you for your life and witness, Wendell.

09/01/2026

Marking the passing of a deeply influential prophet and poet for so many of us in the BCM community. From the NY Times:

“The national economy that is really run for the benefit of a very few people is preying upon and slowly destroying local communities everywhere,” Mr. Berry told Sierra magazine in 1990. “Everything we produce in rural America makes more money for other people than it does for those who produce it. We’re destroying rural America.”

From Berry’s Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front:

“Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.”

See first comment for link to NY Times obituary. Feel free to share other tributes in the comments.

- Tim