Conspire With Us: Submit to Consp!re
Consp!re welcomes your submissions. You do not have to be a co-conspirer to submit your artwork, poetry, articles, fiction, or reviews for consideration in the magazine. All submissions are via our website. You may use the link below. You may submit material on one of our upcoming themes, listed below. We also consider material that does not address a planned theme. Consp!re is distributed free of charge through local communities, and contributors are not compensated. Articles can range from 200 to 1,500 words.
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Failure & Loss // Deadline: August 5, 2010
What We’re Looking For:
Have you failed a test? Failed to yield? Failed a friend? Failed to see? Of course you have.
Has a vision failed you? Has God, your sister or brother, or your community failed you? Has the beautiful dream God gave you imploded—or simply altered beyond all recognition?
The Hebrew Scriptures are filled with followers of God who stumble, falter, and fall short of great heroics. Moses the stutterer doesn’t make it to the Promised Land. David is a veritable minefield of moral and familial malfunction. Solomon for all his wisdom succumbs to pagan concubines and imperial pretentions. Jonah messes up his prophetic vocation. There’s Job to remind us of the agony of loss. And what was Jesus thinking in picking fickle Peter as the head honcho of the disciples?
In contrast, though, the church has taught most of us that at the end of the day, God is victorious and triumphant. It sends the very clear message that people who really trust in God and have a vital faith don’t ultimately… er… fail. Nor do their efforts seem completely lost. Maybe they falter in the middle. Maybe they look rather unimpressive and unreliable at times. But in the end, they come out on top. Indeed, for centuries, victory has been the ultimate litmus test of true faithfulness.
Yet as we cycle through our own brokenness and the brokenness of those around us, our lives and communities are perhaps more familiar with failure than success. How shall we make friends with it—or should we?
Here’s your chance to share your rawest stories and the gleanings that came of them. Tell us about all the good intentions—and the intentional good that left you or others wounded. What did you learn (or perhaps not learn) along the way? We are not looking for Pollyana experiences or easy answers, and we don’t want to hear the moral at the end. We want to explore how our most wounding experiences alter and reshape our faith and our lives
Grit & Grace // Deadline: September 25, 2010
What We’re Looking For:
For this issue of Consp!re we are exploring GRIT & GRACE—how we can sustain an activist life of faith and community over a lifetime.
We’ve heard stories from older people who did something counter-cultural when they were young—only to settle into a life that looks more like the American dream than the vision of God’s reign. What do we draw on for the staying power to keeping seeking, serving, growing and hoping over a life-time? How do we move our faith-inspired activism beyond an expression of youthful idealism and root it in something more substantive? Are we part of a growing movement of the Spirit or a passing fad? How do we stay engaged in the struggle without becoming jaded, embittered or burnt out? What rhythms and practices might sustain us, and what might we learn about stamina and sustainability from our elders and sages?
A surprising number of our intentional community and neighborhood relocation experiments or campaigns are short-lived. Some end with hurt and disappointment. Can we approach these situations with realism and appreciate the fertile volatility and natural life cycle of such initiatives? The greater self-awareness and realism that comes with time can help us see the path toward what Dorothy Day described as “the long loneliness” of obedience—and discern calling with greater clarity.
Tell your stories and learnings so far about the emotional, spiritual, physical, and relational vitality. How do you stay in reconciled relationships with your companions? How have you dealt with resistance and criticism? Who has taught you resilience by their seasoned example? What are your lingering questions and concerns about “the long loneliness?”
Walls, Prisons & Borders // Deadline: October 15, 2010
What We’re Looking For:
God’s story is a freedom story. Scripture is full of liberation stories, and illuminates a God who is a Deliverer—setting captives free and casting the mighty from their thrones, who can close the mouths of beasts and protect prophets from the fiery pits of imperial dungeons. Here are stories of jail cells flung open and walls falling. God hears the cry of Hebrew slaves and leads them from Egypt into a land of promise, where milk and honey replace the salty tears and sweat of slavery. God’s people sing, dance, and march—and God topples Jericho’s walls with no weapon being raised. One of Revelation’s final images is of the “new Jerusalem” where the gates are left open for all to come and go as they wish… no more checkpoints, no more defense shields, no more walls or borders or jail cells.
What does this freedom story have to say to our world today—and how we choose to live in it? What does it say about the 2 million people living in prison and the punitive justice system? What does the story of the Rich man and Lazarus have to teach us about the fences and walls and gated neighborhoods we create to protect us from people who make us uncomfortable?
Ponder the walls of history and those of today. Prisons. Concentration camps. Berlin walls. Segregation. Border checkpoints. Some of the most sophisticated systems of apartheid ever created.
What does the Scripture have to teach us about our fear and obsession with security? How does the Resurrection story address that? Does love not drive out fear? How does our language box people in or lock people out?
Maybe you are in prison or on death row. Maybe you are trapped in the picket fences and culdesacs of the suburbs. What does it look like to tear down the walls and barriers? Can God use fear as a liberator? What does it mean to name your own fear and break through it?
Maybe you are working for restorative justice. Maybe you’ve studied the prison industrial complex or worked or lived inside the prison archipelago where 2 million U.S. people live.
We are looking for stories and images, articles, reviews, fiction. Stories of walls and borders, of things that trap us and of the things that begin to crack those walls. We are looking for unpredictable and powerful stories of liberation and holy trespassing and border-crossing. We are looking for ways to share this God who is all about busting through the walls that separate heaven and earth, and rich and poor, and us and them.
