Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping revives activism by staging it in new places. We hope activists' imaginations are sparked by our playful forays. The cash register exorcisms at Starbucks are one. The cell-phone operas at Disney. The shopping cart “Whirl” at Wal-Mart. The performances about global warming for motorists trapped in traffic jams – we call it “Traffic-jamming.”   Read More...

Weddings have within their skin, deep within them, down in the water of the shining well of "I do!" - when the two lovers are looking into one anothers' eyes - they see cities and continents they will cross and stay in together - years of this dreaming and sex and walking together those two are imagining when they make their promise. Weddings have the power in them that still gives us hope in a bleak time when we shout "Peace and Love!" and only half believe it and look around at others' eyes hoping someone else believes it more than we do, as we look for the faith that would save us all... SO good that Connecticut found its way to compassion and justice, after all these years, for the gay and lesbian lovers among us... gay marriage is the power and the glory! -rev

Don't buy some things. Following Jesus, Thoreau, Gandhi and Abbie Hoffman - don't shop. Give! Receive! Steal! Start a new economy...

Don't buy Wall Street's story. Don't buy McCain. Don't buy that the big business of America is big business. Start businesses that are personal, out of our garages, in our old computers, from our backyard gardens... Have shops that we own, where we like our own products, and where corporate policy is not what makes us nice to our customers.

It won't be easy. For many of us - Wal-Mart is the only store with safety pins or bar-b-que grills or generic sleeping pills within a hundred miles. We're trapped in the Wall Street-financed economy, the products from faraway sweatshops, shipped here in an emissions-intense way, with saturation advertising and toxic waste. It's been going on for a long time.

The change starts when two or three of us gather in the neighborhood and talk common sense. Of course, the Consumerized environment doesn't want us to find each other. Lots of places don't even have sidewalks anymore. But "you make the road by walking" and as we embody our new way of life, we will find each other. We'll agree not to buy some things.

Rev

We Americans are at some hellified turning point. Do you have the sensation that we're in a great slow motion that we're not noticing? Disappearing up our own arse with fabulous shopping – with the two $700 billion buys for the war and for that nature walk through The Valley Of The Shadow Of Debt.   Read More...

Both candidates in the debate were trying to normalize what's happening. In fact, the financial partnership of Wall Street and Washington has now been revealed – it is absolutely breathtaking - and we have an opportunity we haven't had in generations.   Read More...

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We see now that Wall Street is just the gambling casino not run by the Mohicans. The sucker-every-minute advertisements have lost their suckers. The big boxes are stranded, full of unsold sweatshop products. The $7 an hour salespersons hesitate and then edge away. We suddenly have an window of opportunity on a biblical scale. Can we take back our cities with our own bodies? We tried to do that in Syracuse this weekend at another failed American Utopia: the DESTINY USA super mall.   Read More...

Meet us Sunday, September 14 at 12 noon at an abandoned gas station overlooking Carousel Center (northeast corner of Park St. and Hiawatha Blvd. across the street from Babies R Us). Click here for map.

Look at this super mall standing here before us, Destiny USA. Where did we Americans get the idea that our built environment would never effect us? Did we ever stop and ask the question: Can we keep the Peace if our families spend time in this thing? It is an enormous commons, a vortex to entice citizens away from their own neighborhoods from hundreds of miles away.   Read More...

Thanks to Louise Millmann!

Astroland at Coney Island. Listen to the names of the rides: Cyclone, Water Flume, Dante’s Inferno, Top Spin, the Tea-Cups... Children screaming and laughing, filling with wonder, and their parents guardedly watching and then laughing too. This was all happening yesterday and it was maddening, because it was Astroland’s last day.   Read More...

To come from our Union Square and Coney Island struggles in New York - and then arrive in Burning Man, let me say this: We create these Utopian living experiments in this country. We've been doing it since the beginning. We want to make new rituals, arts, and forms of love. Try to arrest us for different opinions, oust us with rising rents, overwhelm us with the giganticism of marketing - then you kill the dream of America, too.   Read More...