BOOK REVIEW: Political Spirituality for a Century of Water Wars: The Angel of the Jordan Meets the Trickster of Detroit by James W. Perkinson
What happens when animist insurgency meets biblical imagination in the belly of empire?
What happens when the Jordan River meets the Detroit River, the angels of ancient texts swimming alongside the trickster currents of colonial entanglement?
James W. Perkinson’s Political Spirituality for a Century of Water Wars is a book unlike any other. It’s scriptural midrash, revolutionary manifesto, theological howl, and mystical cartography of resistance—all woven with the trickster’s thread. If Walter Brueggemann, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Sun Ra, and Vine Deloria, Jr. co-wrote a field guide for the end of the world, it might sound like this.
Reading Jim is like sitting down with a preacher-poet who’s been marinating in community organizing, decolonial anthropology, and apophatic mysticism for decades—and who’s still willing to get his hands dirty in the garden of real life, in his beloved city of Detroit.
And that’s what makes this book so necessary for our moment.
A River Runs Through It
Water, the book’s thematic lifeblood, is not merely metaphor. It’s the ground of being, the flow of spirit, the most elemental commons—and a site of escalating global crisis. From Flint to Standing Rock, from Gaza to Detroit, water wars are already here, exposing the racialized economies and theological undercurrents of modernity.
As Perkinson reminds us, “This threefold constellation of concerns—settler colonialism; the Doctrine of Discovery; and Native water protection—articulate the political background against which to wrestle with the challenge to recover water spirituality.” These water wars, he argues, exemplify the inextricability of what colonized minds often separate: the material and spiritual. Water discloses the spirits we serve. It reveals the idols we’ve enthroned.
The Trickster and the Angel
At the book’s center stands an unlikely encounter: the angel of the Jordan—biblical river of threshold, cleansing, and descent—meets the “trickster of Detroit,” a figure of subversion and sacred mischief. Together, they co-author a new kind of political spirituality, disinherited but not disempowered, rooted in the margins and rising from below.
The scope of this book is creative and audacious. Perkinson sets it up toward the beginning, in part saying:
In Detroit, the battle (in particular) to keep Great Lakes water available to citizens as a “commons” is leading not only to agitation against water privatization by the corporate sector, and organization of water policy as a public trust, but to re-imagination of the Detroit River watershed as itself in some sense the material and spiritual arbiter of future viability for the bioregion. In pursuing such an aim of re-visioning the potency of local water flows, the writing to follow will itself mimic the concern—“arguing” the question more in the mode of a wandering river than an efficient pipeline. It will first outline the colonial roots and future significance of the present water struggle in Detroit as supplying the gradient of passion for its motion. A second “meander” will swing wide out of the history of Detroit peoples—Native, settler, enslaved—before “bending back” historically to the gospel texts for imaginative provocation and perspective on the Detroit battle in reading water politics “into” and “out of” the movement struggles led by John the Baptist and Jesus the Prophet in first-century Palestine. A final section will wind (snakelike) back up to the City of the Strait to call to the surface indigenous ways of engaging the place of the river and what they might mean for a global future of water battles. Obviously such a methodology privileges the present in its reading of the past. But I would insist any turn to history (including biblical studies) is always beholden to some measure of contemporary interest. And indeed, here the ensemble of present political pain, extant indigenous practice, and ancient biblical text does not only open imagination for the future. It galvanizes fascination for the tradition. For this writer the Jordan joins with the dove and the land as a kind of collective “haunt” of Spirit-Powers, shadowing Jesus and John, that bears remarkable witness. Exegesis of such a Watershed Voice at once partially resembles, as well as learns from, Ojibwe/Ottawa and Wendet/Huron modes of signifying the “strait-place” of their own dwelling and struggle.
Perkinson doesn’t pull punches. He exposes the colonial and capitalist infrastructures that undergird even the most benign-seeming religious pieties. He names the “colonial domination systems” that have co-opted the gospel into empire-speak. But he doesn’t stop at critique. He excavates alternative lineages—deep grammar from the underside—where Afro-diasporic wisdom, Indigenous cosmology, and biblical resistance merge.
In a time when so many spiritualities chase transcendence, Perkinson calls us back to the ground: to the dirt, to the water table, to the sacred subsoil. The political is always ecological. And if our theology doesn’t compost, it’s dead.
Animist Reading of the Bible
For readers of my work in the ONEing Journal‘s Evolving Wild or Coming to Our Senses, you’ll hear resonant echoes here—of a sacred world alive with agency, a cosmos brimming with presence, and the call to reinhabit our bodies and places with reverence.
Jim reads the Bible not as a book of dogma but as a site of struggle. A textual compost heap where voices from the margins whisper revolutionary dreams through imperial redactions. This is not a tame text. It’s wild, anarchic, and animist to the core.
He opens the scriptures up as a rhetorical ecology, a landscape of competing forces, where theophany erupts not in control but in contact. And crucially, he refuses to leave the land behind—calling readers to reintegrate the scriptural imagination with the rivers, biomes, and neighborhoods of our actual lives.
Trickster Spirituality for a Fractured Time
This is a book of convergence. Not of shallow ecumenism, but of layered resonance: Black church cadences and Indigenous land ethics, Pentecostal fire and anarcho-primitivist critique, postcolonial theory and ancient ritual.
Perkinson is especially potent in unpacking trickster consciousness—an inner disposition that refuses binary logic and embraces holy mischief. In our age of polarization and algorithmic certainties, trickster spirituality becomes a survival skill.
The trickster crosses borders, violates taboos, laughs at solemnity, and undermines the pretensions of power with absurdity.
This is the spirit we need right now.
And isn’t this, after all, the spirit of resurrection?
Holy Water and the Holy Fool
Another of Jim’s excellent books on the subject; you can read an excerpt here.
As I’ve reflected in The Divine Dance, co-written with Richard Rohr, the vision of Source as Trinity suggests a universe shaped by relationship, rhythm, and flow. Gurdjieff might call this the Law of Three: affirming, denying, reconciling. Perkinson’s entire book might be read as a Third Force document—where empire and resistance meet not in static opposition, but in the creative alchemy of Holy Foolishness.
Jim’s Jesus is no sanitized savior. He’s a street-savvy insurgent, a Galilean wisdom-worker with dirt under his nails and wildness in his eyes.
And his call is not to abstract belief but to embodied solidarity. “Take up your cross” becomes a summons not to masochism, but to entanglement—with land and lineage, with resistance and renewal.
Spirit in the deepest sense shows up in the devastation of the center from the edge, arriving as eruption not message, arrival not announcement, teaching not theology, incarnation not instruction, radical indwelling rather than sovereign overseeing.
That indwelling is what so many of us are trying to inhabit in this moment of planetary upheaval. And Jim’s voice is one of the precious ones suggesting shelter—not by offering easy answers, but by holding space for the questions that matter.
Why This Book Matters Now
If you’re feeling the tremors—climate collapse, resurgent fascism, water scarcity, spiritual exhaustion—and you’re looking not just for escape but for a map… this book is a rough terrain map of spirit and soil, of myth and movement. It will not tell you what to believe, but it will agitate what you thought you knew.
And perhaps, it will re-baptize your imagination in the waters of revolution.
You’ll emerge disoriented, maybe—but also reconnected. Rooted. Rewilded.
One Last Thing
Jim closes the book with a rousing flourish. He evokes a spirituality not of answers but accompaniment. Of neighbors over narratives. Of dirt-under-the-nails theology for people who know resurrection comes with blisters.
And so, I want to leave you with these reflections from Perkinson:
What shall we do today? “Biopower” as a critical concept may be a requisite tool for revelation of the Monstrosity. But it awaits a cogent
articulation with Spirit—both what needs confronting and what can do so with ferocious truculence and hope. The war …has tracked seems now global and irresistible, with its highest stake today, the potable flows and aquifer depths that are the planet’s most profound gifts. But then I also think I see something else birthing on the streets of Ferguson, the banks of the Missouri … and the border called Detroit. It is indeed Bios. But its power is neither bullet nor policy. And it has not yet capitulated to either one. It moves like water.
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Because the Evolutionary Revolutionary is not just someone who laments what is—it’s a community willing to move like water.
To sweat. To soil. To listen. To laugh.
To carry the wound, and the wonder.
Pick up Political Spirituality for a Century of Water Wars. It’s not a comfortable read. But it might give you the baptism you need.
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