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, “The privatization (and commodification) of water poses a serious threat to life on our planet, even as it poses most immediate threats to poorer communities.” These wars, he argues, are not just material—they’re spiritual. They disclose the spirits we serve. They reveal 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.
Perkinson doesn’t pull punches. He exposes the colonial and capitalist infrastructures that undergird even the most benign-seeming religious pieties. He names the “theopolitical domination system” that has 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,” he writes, “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,” he calls it, 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 what he calls “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.
He writes:
“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
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As I’ve reflected in The Divine Dance, co-written with Richard Rohr, the Trinity itself 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.
Perkinson writes:
“In every political economy, in every moment of imperial decline or democratic death-rattle, the Spirit sneaks in under the door… not as coercion, but contagion. Not domination, but diffraction. A rupture in the rational, a whisper in the wound.”
That whisper is what so many of us are trying to listen for in this moment of planetary upheaval. And Jim’s voice is one of the precious ones helping us attune—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 not with triumph, but with tenderness. 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 this reflection from Perkinson:
“Let the water of the world teach you to pray again. Let the trickster teach you how to laugh, even when empires fall. Let the Spirit of the street teach you how to dance on the grave of despair.”
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Because the Evolutionary Revolutionary is not just someone who sees the pattern—it’s someone willing to embody the shift.
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 just save your soul.
Related posts:
Christ and Antichrist: Matthew Fox on Democracy, Joy, and Spiritual Resistance
The Hive: Where Indigenous Wisdom Meets the Way of Jesus | Hillary Raining and Mike Morrell
Creator and Destroyer of Worlds: On God and Oppenheimer | Richard Rohr with Mike Morrell
From Holy Week to Holy Work: An Easter for the World Becoming
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