Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World

By Kat Armas

"A thought-provoking look at the intertwining of religion and social control."--Publishers Weekly

● Explains what "empire" is in our modern day
● Gives practical spiritual guidance for resisting empire's daily influence
● Explores how early Christians navigated imperial pressures
● Unpacks how empire influences how we see ourselves and others

Everyone wants to belong.

What does true belonging look like when the society you live in is not something you want to "belong" to?

In Liturgies for Resisting Empire, Cuban American theologian and writer Kat Armas provides a roadmap for Christians seeking a countercultural way of living that prioritizes community and humanity over dominance and power.

Armas combines spiritual practices and biblical theology to help us create authentic belonging to God, ourselves, each other, and creation. She begins by examining how empire affects us daily through its pervasive ideologies and systems of control. Drawing from decolonial and postcolonial biblical interpretation, she explores how the New Testament church resisted Roman imperial power while building communities centered on God's kingdom values rather than worldly dominance.

This book offers hope for Christians struggling to live faithfully within systems of exploitation and oppression. Armas provides practical spiritual disciplines, community-building strategies, and theological frameworks that empower readers to resist empire's dehumanizing effects while cultivating spaces of authentic belonging and liberation.

Discover a spiritual way of life that you actually want to belong to--one liturgy at a time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
• Release date: Nov 4, 2025
• ISBN: 9781493450268

Kat Armas

Kat Armas (MDiv, MAT, Fuller Theological Seminary) is a Cuban American writer and podcaster and the recipient of Fuller Seminary's Frederick Buechner Award for Excellence in Writing. She is pursuing a ThM at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Armas is the author of two books, Abuelita Faith and Sacred Belonging. She has written for Christianity Today, Sojourners, Christians for Biblical Equality, Fuller Youth Institute, Fathom magazine, and Missio Alliance.

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Cover: Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World by Kat Armas.

Liturgies for Resisting Empire

Liturgies for Resisting Empire

Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World

Kat Armas

sBrazos Press: a division of Baker Publishing Group Grand Rapids, Michigan

© 2025 by Kat Armas

Published by Brazos Press

a division of Baker Publishing Group

Grand Rapids, Michigan

BrazosPress.com

Ebook edition created 2025

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Identifiers: ISBN 9781587436499 paperback | ISBN 9781493450268 ebook

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the Common English Bible. © Copyright 2011 by the Common English Bible. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations labeled KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture quotations labeled NIV are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.®

Cover design by Chris Tobias / Tobias Design, Inc.

The author is represented by the literary agency of Gardner Literary Agency, LLC.

Baker Publishing Group publications use paper produced from sustainable forestry practices and postconsumer waste whenever possible.

This one’s for you, T.

You are every word in these pages, breathing and alive.

Somehow you carry the weight of them all,

and still you make the load feel light.

I am more human,

more whole,

because of you.

Contents

Preface

A Liturgy for Resisting Empire

1.Rejecting Empire, Embracing Joy

2.Rejecting Lies, Embracing Reality

3.Rejecting Ideology, Embracing Wisdom

4.Rejecting Hierarchy, Embracing Kinship

5.Rejecting Dualism, Embracing Paradox

6.Rejecting Hustle, Embracing Slowness

7.Rejecting Sameness, Embracing Wholeness

8.Rejecting Dominance, Embracing Connection

9.Rejecting Violence, Embracing Peace

A Benediction of Belonging

Notes

Preface

This book lived many lives before finding its way into your hands. The idea first took root in me during Advent of 2021, when I first became a mother. It began to take a clear shape a year and a half later, in the summer of 2023. By this point, I had spent years studying empire and postcolonial theology in seminary and divinity school, but something in me longed to hear these conversations break free from the academy. I wanted to see them reflected in the rhythms of ordinary life. Many of us hunger for an honest reckoning with empire and the ways it has crept into our bones, shaping how we live, love, and belong.

At times, this work felt impossibly beyond me. But creativity is a relentless force; it pursues you until you surrender—and so I wrote. Then, in October of 2023, the devastation in Gaza came crashing into my consciousness. I couldn’t write about empire without holding this in my hands, without attempting to understand its histories, its griefs, its complexities. So I read and listened and learned. Empire demands we pay attention to the stories it has fractured.

While writing, I found myself navigating the sacred thresholds of motherhood again. Carrying my second child, a son, felt different. Raising my daughter had been a work of decolonization. I was parenting her under the shadow of colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism, systems that have long weighed most heavily on women. But a son? He demanded a new kind of reckoning, a stripping away of the systems I’d inherited so I could mother him with both integrity and tenderness. I wrote for her, and now I was writing for him too.

This book was born alongside a life lived in all its fullness: through pregnancy and birth, through sleepless nights and postpartum recovery. I wrote amid the clamor of a toddler’s laughter, the tender work of tending a farm, the grief of family loss, and the quiet joy of nurturing an animal back to health. I wrote through my friends’ miscarriages, some births, a presidential election, and the raw ache of being human. This is the nature of life—to write, to live, and to wrestle with what it means to be fully alive in the midst of life’s fiercest realities. This is also what it means to resist empire.

And liturgies?

Liturgy finds its origin in the Greek words for people and work. It is the labor of a community, alongside the prayers, meditations, and rituals that shape us as we gather. Empire, with its hunger for domination, division, and isolation trembles at this. It fears our togetherness, our longing for belonging. And so we must resist the forces of individualism and discord that threaten to unravel us. This resistance does not deny the necessity of solitude. It is in the quiet exploration of our inner landscapes that healing begins, not just for ourselves but for the collective whole.

Each chapter of this book begins with an invocation, calling on the sacred to guide and bless us. As we do this, we also acknowledge ancestors who have lived under empires past. Their stories linger, reminding us of the wisdom in their struggle. From there, you’ll find parables or fables from non-Western cultures, ways of knowing that empire has often tried to erase. These stories hold lessons for us and invite us to sit with truths that can’t always be intellectualized. Then each chapter unveils a defining characteristic or insidious lie of empire—a pattern woven into the fabric of the world as we know it. These patterns are ways of being we must confront and reject, making room instead for new rhythms of living that nurture freedom, truth, and collective flourishing. Each chapter then closes with a prayer of resistance and a benediction, offering a space to exhale, to ground the weight of what you’ve read in something sacred.

Whether you read alone or with a community, let these prayers and reflections guide you not toward easy answers but toward the sacred work of wrestling, confessing, and dreaming of something freer. There is no right way to do this work, only the honest way. Let us begin.

A Liturgy for Resisting Empire

Invocation

God Who Dwells on the Margins, where power does not dare to look, we call upon you, the sacred who lives in whispers and shadows—in the quiet, where words are not rushed, where power has no place to hide. Let us be grounded in your mystery, for you are more than nation, more than law or hierarchy. You are the hidden strength in the fragile and the small. We call upon you, Spirit of the oppressed and the silenced, help us to let go of all the small tyrannies within: the worry, the fear, the need for control. Here, we choose to resist the powers that would divide us, exploit us, or convince us to believe in our own isolation.

May we find courage in your presence, and may we resist the voices that seek to dominate our souls.

Prayer of Confession: Acknowledging Our Complicity

God of Liberation,

We confess the ways we have been entangled in the workings of empire. How some of us may have sought comfort at the expense of others’ dignity. Or stayed silent in the presence of suffering, sought safety over solidarity, accepted dominance over humility. Let us release the ways we have used our own power as empire would, and let us begin again, in truth and in courage.

Hold us in your mercy when we’ve upheld systems of injustice or been crushed by them. Help us to see clearly, to name truthfully, and to resist humbly. Turn us toward life that does not dominate but sustains, that does not exploit but nourishes. Open our hands to surrender the power that harms and to tend the wounds it leaves behind.

Guide us to honor each life as a sanctuary of the sacred.

Readings from Sacred Texts

Isn’t this the fast I choose:

releasing wicked restraints, untying the ropes of a yoke,

setting free the mistreated,

and breaking every yoke?

Isn’t it sharing your bread with the hungry

and bringing the homeless poor into your house,

covering the naked when you see them,

and not hiding from your own family?

—Isaiah 58:6–7

Jesus . . . said, You know that those who rule the Gentiles show off their authority over them and their high-ranking officials order them around. But that’s not the way it will be with you. Whoever wants to be great among you will be your servant.

—Matthew 20:25–26

Prayer of Resistance

O God, we resist the temptations of empire: control, comfort, and apathy.

Help us walk in a way that honors your vision of wholeness and liberation.

We choose love that frees, justice that restores, and peace that is born of truth.

When we fail to see your image in the oppressed and the marginalized, open our eyes, O God. Make us defenders of dignity. Show us the way of humility.

Let us live lives that bear witness to a kingdom that is not of domination but of deep communion. Teach us to honor your image in ourselves and one another.

Amen.

Benediction

May God strengthen our hearts to confront injustice, knowing that resistance is not simply a cry or an act but a way of being. May we have courage to face the world unbowed by power, unafraid of truth. And may we go with a spirit of compassion and humility, knowing that God walks with the oppressed and dwells among the disinherited.

Amen.

Chapter 1

Rejecting Empire, Embracing Joy

Invocation

Divine Liberation, we acknowledge our place in a world marked by systems of exploitation. Let us open our hearts to how these systems live and move through us. May we move toward freedom, together.

We are here to listen, to learn, and to act with compassion and love.

Reflection

The Quechua people tell a story about a hummingbird:

There was a time when the Great Forest caught fire. The flames roared and the smoke billowed, and all the animals fled in fear. Gathering at the edge of the forest, they watched as their home burned and burned.

What can I do? cried Buck.

This fire is so big, and I am so small! howled Fox.

Among them hovered a tiny hummingbird, her beak the size of a honeybee. She flew to a nearby stream, picked up a single drop of water, and flew back, dropping it into the fire. She made her way back and forth from the stream to the flames, carrying one drop at a time. Over and over.

The other animals watched, confused. Finally, Bear asked her, Little Hummingbird, what are you doing?

The hummingbird looked at the animals and said, I am doing what I can.

Those who have ears let them hear.

I wake earlier than I intend, the first notes of birdsong filtering through the crack in the window, the soft light of dawn just beginning to trace its way across my room. I exhale slowly, releasing a small sigh of gratitude for this new day.

Then the light of my phone pulls me from this quiet place. A headline. Another tragedy. More innocent lives stolen, so many of them women and children. It’s been two hundred days now.

Yesterday, I read about a massacre that took place while people were in line, waiting for bread. I paused, heart heavy, before moving into the kitchen to make myself something to eat. Later, I saw an image of a family buried in rubble, a child’s face twisted in terror. I winced, caught my breath, and then slipped under the covers with my own family to read my child a bedtime story. I kissed her goodnight.

There are no words, none, for the collective pain we’re bearing. For the bodies, souls, and lives that are still being slaughtered.

It’s too much. It’s all too much.

As I write these words, over 150 Israeli hostages remain missing, kidnapped on October 7, 2023, by Hamas, an armed Palestinian group whose attack—one that killed over 1,200 innocent people—came after decades of Israeli occupation and oppression. In response, the Israeli government launched an assault so devastating that tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed and countless others injured or displaced. Hospitals bombed, food and water cut off—human rights violations no one can deny.

Thanks to social media, we didn’t just hear about the atrocities happening in Gaza; we saw them unfold in real time, on the screens in our hands, on waking, as we went about our days, when we tried to close our eyes and rest. Images of children, lifeless, cradled in the arms of their caregivers, flooded our feeds.

You might wonder why I chose to start this book with this brutality. Because when the earth groans so must we. Because speaking of peace and justice in a fractured world requires that we acknowledge the brokenness and the violence that continue to spread unchecked.

Confronting the Theology of Empire

On Christmas Eve 2023, Palestinian pastor Munther Isaac stood in Bethlehem and spoke of a theology that disguises itself as divine but is far from it. He said:

Here we confront the theology of empire. A disguise for superiority, supremacy, chosenness, and entitlement. It is sometimes given a nice cover using words like mission and evangelism, fulfillment of prophecy, and spreading freedom and liberty. The theology of the empire becomes a powerful tool to mask oppression under the cloak of divine sanction. It speaks of land without people. It divides people into us and them. It dehumanizes and demonizes the concept of land without people even when they know the land has people.¹

Isaac’s words carry the weight of a history in which land, bodies, and dignity have been claimed in the name of power. It’s a history of walls and checkpoints, of lives hemmed in by curfews, raids, and the constant threat of violence. It’s a history of settlers seizing land with impunity, leaving Palestinians without recourse to justice. This history stretches back to British imperial rule, the rise of Zionism, and Israel’s founding in 1948, which created a Jewish state and led to the violent expulsion and displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

Isaac’s words on Christmas Eve have stayed with me. In them, I hear the heart of why this all matters. Why the tangled histories of displacement matter. Why the land matters. Why this war—this genocide—happening, for many of us, on the other side of the world, matters. Because it is not just about land or politics. It is about bodies. Children dying over imperial interests. And it’s about a theology of empire, one so deeply embedded in our faith and our world that we often don’t see it for what it is. It’s a way of thinking that has shaped us, shaped how we see each other, and shaped how we understand divinity. I wonder sometimes if it’s even possible to disentangle ourselves from its grip.

This book is my attempt to begin that disentangling. I won’t claim that these pages hold all the answers or that they will resolve the complexities of colonized faith. Many have written in detail about the histories of empire and colonization; this is not that kind of book. Instead, I hope to offer a wider view, a look at how empire has seeped into our imagination and our theology. I hope my words can be like the tweezers, the alcohol, the balm that might start to lift the empire’s imprint from our skin. It will take a lifetime to heal from its sting, but perhaps this can be a beginning.

________

I currently live in middle Tennessee, a land that isn’t the start of my story but where I find myself being molded by the rhythm of a place and what it reveals about the world around me. I am in the United States, a country that claims my birthright but is not the home of my ancestors, whose stories stretch across shores and generations far beyond its borders. This is the tension I carry, the complexity that shapes my identity and my faith. My story is not just my own; it is braided with the story of empire. And so is yours.

Though I sit far from the soil of Israel and Palestine, the suffering of the people there is not distant from me. We are all bound together, even if we don’t always sense it. Our shared humanity is in the air we breathe, the earth we walk upon, the moon we gaze at. It’s the same moon, the same air, the same ground—no matter where our feet or hearts land. Our connection runs deeper than the physical, though. There’s a tether in our psyches, a thread that links our fears, desires, and longings. Every human, across every border, wants safety, love, and belonging. None of us desires suffering, for ourselves or for those we hold close.

Yet empire weaves our stories into its grand narrative, forcing us into entanglements we don’t always see. The modern world is shaped by individual societies that are deeply intertwined within a global economic system. European colonialism played a pivotal role in building this interconnected global network, leading to the rise of capitalism and globalization and a world increasingly connected through economic exchange. The expansion of markets has bound us, as individuals and societies, into a vast web of commercial interactions involving goods, money, capital, and labor.²

This global structure, often referred to as a world system, explains why many hold the United States partly responsible for the deaths in Gaza. Societies are inextricably linked together as part of a broader social network, and their actions and policies impact and shape one another—often within unequal political and economic relationships.³ These unequal affiliations, whether acknowledged or not, affect each one of us.

The capitalist world economy influences our relationship to time, our bodies, our families, and our sense of purpose. It shapes our priorities, our responsibilities, and how we understand ourselves and others. My hope is that this book will help illuminate how this happened and how we can foster new, life-giving ways of belonging to each other in a world marked by division, discord, and individualism. Empire, after all, is not a relic of the past. It’s alive, entrenched in our daily rhythms. This was true for the early followers of Jesus under Roman rule, and it is true for us today. As Palestinian scholar Edward Said notes, empire isn’t just soldiers and weapons; it’s ideas, attitudes, practices, and stories.⁴ It’s a way of imagining the world.

I wrote this book to uncover the imperial ideologies woven into our everyday lives—whether we are raising children, shopping, working, vacationing, or enjoying a meal with friends. More specifically, I wrote it to uncover the imperial ideologies woven into our spirituality, our churches, our study of the Bible. Understanding these ideologies is essential to understanding ourselves, our world, and our faith—and to imagining new ways of