The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology welcomes Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza— Transqueer, Latinx public theologian, activist-scholar—as they discuss their new book “Body Becoming: Our Path to Liberation.” Pointing to the increasing disconnection from our bodies and from one another, Body Becoming takes a critical look at which bodies count in this country and offers a vision for an embodied, inclusive democracy. Mixing memoir and faith, somatics theory and body practice, Dr. Roberto reveals embodiment as the primary place of deep wisdom, where culture shifts originate and materialize—and a better world becomes, as we too become.
Event Transcript:
Dr. KJ Swanson: Good evening, and welcome to The Seattle School, both on campus and online. I’m Dr. KJ Swanson, a member of the theology faculty here, and I’m excited to kick off tonight’s event—one of our first guest events that we’ve hosted since many changes over the past two years.
I’ll offer a bit about where we are, who we are, and what we’re doing, and then I’ll hand it over to our guests. For this campus event, you’ll see a mix of masked and unmasked folks while you’re here. Please feel free to communicate any space needs to those around you, and we’ll all aim to be hospitable as we navigate folks’ preferences.
First, I would like to acknowledge that here in Belltown, we are on the traditional land of the first people of Seattle, the Duwamish people, past and present. We honor with gratitude the land itself and the Duwamish Tribe.
If this is your first time visiting The Seattle School, whether that’s online or on campus, welcome. You can find out more about us in your event programs and on our website, including information about the Center for Transforming Engagement and the Allender Center, both housed here at The Seattle School.
We are an interdisciplinary graduate school offering immersive, holistic degree programs in counseling psychology and Christian theology.
I want to spotlight our three distinct Master of Arts in Theology and Culture degrees that we just launched and are enrolling for fall. The MATC degrees in the arts, in community development, and in ministry are two-year low-residency programs designed for artists, activists, and ministry leaders seeking to integrate creative, entrepreneurial, and deep-listening practices into their work.
If you’d like to know more or sign up for one of our informational sessions, you can check out info online or talk to me afterward.
Why are we here tonight? Because Dr. Robyn Henderson Espinoza is in the house, and I couldn’t be more thrilled. Dr. Robyn Henderson Espinoza is a nonbinary, trans, queer Latinx scholar, activist, and public theologian, founder of the Activist Theology Project. Dr. Robyn has spent two decades working in the borderlands of church, academy, and movements, seeking not only to disrupt but dismantle supremacy culture and to help steward the logic of liberation.
Dr. Robyn was named one of ten faith leaders to watch by the Center for American Progress in 2018 and published their first book, Activist Theology, in 2019. They are with us today to discuss their new book, just released from Broadleaf Press, titled Body Becoming: A Path to Our Liberation. Joining Dr. Robyn today is Matthias Roberts, psychotherapist and author of Beyond Shame. As host of Queerology, a podcast on belief and being, Matthias writes and speaks nationwide about the intersections of gender, sexuality, mental health, and theology.
Along with holding two master’s degrees from The Seattle School, Matthias serves on the instructional staff of the Counseling Psychology program here and is also a fellow at the Allender Center. His forthcoming book, Holy Runaways: Finding Home in a Shattered Faith, will be released fall 2023. We are delighted to have Dr. Robyn here today to discuss Body Becoming, and to have all of you with us as well.
For those on campus, we have books available for purchase, and Dr. Robyn will be available afterward for signing. We’ll hear from Dr. Robyn and Matthias for about 40–45 minutes, and then we’ll open up for public Q&A. To submit a question, which Matthias will read aloud, you can log on to Slido.com with any device and enter our event number, or scan the QR code that will be posted. We’ll have a slide with information here on campus, and the link information is already posted on the YouTube livestream.
And with that, Dr. Robyn and Matthias, welcome.
Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza (Formerly known as Dr. Robyn Henderson Espinoza): It’s good to be here. I arrived on Monday, and Seattle is very different than Nashville. I don’t know if you know that. It was sunny on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then it was heavy rain today, so I was not out very much today. But Seattle’s been great, and it’s always good to get to the Pacific Northwest.
And Matthias, you know, I said I would do an event, but I would only do it in conversation. My top pick was Matthias. If Matthias was not available, then I was not going to do it.
So thank you, Matthias, for being available, and thank you so much for what we’re going to do tonight. Matthias thought it would be nice for me to read a little bit from the book to maybe get our conversation going. This is from an advanced reader copy, so I hope it’s the same as what has been published.
The part that I’m going to read from is the first chapter, titled “What Is a Body?”
I’m curious about bodies. I’m curious how we got to where we are with our understanding of bodies.
For me, I have been on a five-year journey developing a relationship with my body and further deepening my relationship with what is sensate, seeking understanding in what it means to participate in my own becoming embodied.
Obviously, I’ve been on a much longer journey with my body, but these last five years I’ve intentionally committed to befriending my body—my nonbinary transgender Latinx body—as my therapist has asked me, “How can you be your own best friend?”
When I started thinking about and feeling into the question, “What is a body?” I looked to different sources for answers, beginning first with the dictionary.
I was surprised, but not entirely, that the dictionary perpetuates a kind of Cartesian dualism that has harmed us for centuries.
Answering this question requires each of us to engage with our own material being while also connecting to other material beings, albeit sometimes through difficult dynamics.
When we begin to take seriously the felt sense of the body and the relationships that come from that felt sense, we can reshape not only our own bodies but the bodies of our culture, and finally our cultural body.
Doing this sets in motion a generative relationality that can ultimately reshape our democracy.
That is my hope as I share the following curiosities with you.
Do you have similar curiosities when it comes to the body?
Body is a word that is familiar to each of us, but do we know what a body is?
A body is the main part of a plant or animal, especially as distinguished from limbs and head, according to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary.
This sums up a specific approach we take when we often talk about a body as something that is familiar, but is almost never talked about as an entity which includes the head.
When I was in graduate school, I remember starting to research topics for my doctoral dissertation. I expressed my desire to research the body to one of my professors, Dr. Edward Phillip Antonio.
Dr. Antonio is brilliant by all accounts. Born in Rhodesia, he can quote philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein by chapter and verse, including footnotes.
I can’t do that.
So when I began to research my topic, I immediately tried to make an appointment with Dr. Antonio. It took numerous emails to finally get a reply. That was one of the things that was super frustrating—he didn’t reply to emails.
Yet he is a thinker in this complex world, and I aspire to his capacity, so I overlooked that fact.
When I approached his office, I unclipped my messenger bag, which had a seatbelt for a buckle. It was clunky, and I’m not exactly graceful. I’ve been told I take up a lot of space. I admit I wore my hair as tall as Texas when I could.
After I got settled in Edward’s office, I was ready to dig deep into conversation. I almost always had a cup of coffee or a water bottle with me. We agreed that we would meet for an hour to an hour and a half each visit, so I did my best to keep wetting my whistle when we spoke.
With all my enthusiasm, I let him know I wanted to research the body for my dissertation in philosophy of the mind.
He quickly responded. Even now, I don’t know whether he was asking me if I wanted to research the mind—the inner world of the head—which in this discipline of analytic philosophy is distinctly disconnected from the body—or flipping the script on me and suggesting the body has a mind.
I have only now come to think about the complexity of his forward question to me and the possibility of flipping the script after many years of my seeking to have a relationship with my body.
Like I mentioned before, he is brilliant in every way. After that initial talk with Edward, I set out on a journey to understand what a body is. Even after writing so much on the subject—like 300 pages—I feel as though I’m still scratching the surface of what a body is. It seems as though the minding of the body and understanding the body are ever-expanding processes.
For example, you might ask, what is the relationship between a body and a being?
In academic circles, being is often understood as the philosophy of ontology. We can trace the ways that being has been stabilized throughout history and has impacted our language, religious practices, habits, and policies, especially in this country and other democratized governments, largely due to the influence of Plato and Aristotle. And if our bodies are our being, then there is a connection to this branch of philosophy. But how does that help us understand what a body is?
For my part, I’d like to think that motion and being are part of understanding what a body is—a new and queer fold of thinking about bodies that continues to bubble up in me as I read philosophy and theory. But that conversation with Edward is where I go back to my initial questions about the body.
I still fumble through my thoughts when thinking about the body, and I still fall short in the ever-expansive understanding of bodies. But I’m learning to trust the stories, and not only the ideas, that have shaped me. Those stories will also shape you, the reader, in a way that further contributes to our understanding of bodies and their becoming.
That conversation with Edward was and is a point of departure for this book—for this articulation of bodies and becoming. Nurturing our roots in relationship and in conversation helps us get a bit closer to a more perfect union.
This initial conversation with Edward set me on my journey and raised a series of questions about the body, about my body, and about what a body in motion can be changed into and become. At the time, I had been reading a lot of critical spatial theory and theories of place and space, and had been researching the body as space or place.
But one day, after a full day of reading on my day off from Apple, I was alone at my house enjoying a mug of fresh India Pale Ale. I invested in a kegerator during my PhD program and always had a pony keg of a really great IPA so that I could have beer on tap. I mean, who wouldn’t?
As I was drinking my IPA, I had a thought:
Does the body become?
I had been reading Gilles Deleuze too during this time, so his philosophy of becoming had been metabolizing in my mind, and perhaps in my body as well.
I began thinking about the body not just as a body, but as the body and as a body becoming.
From the question, “What is a body?” I asked another:
What is a becoming body?
What does it mean for the body to become?
Could the body be something that is more than the material reality of flesh and bone, consciousness, and affect?
Could the body also be a social reality—a collective body that is composed of all bodies within a particular geographic location, maintaining their own genus, species, and kind?
What is a body?
What is a body that becomes?
Since the IPA day of questions, now I drink bourbon.
I’ve come to learn that the body has wisdom. That each cell in the body is, in a sense, a mind in itself. That the body is our teacher, whether we like it or not.
And most times, I don’t like that my body teaches me hard lessons.
When I set out to research the body, I was not in touch with the wisdom of the body that I now understand as embodiment—the ways that the body is sensate wisdom, and in that sense, in motion.
My journey to come into close relationship with my body has been not only a reflection on my own gender transition but also looking back into my body’s history to when, at age 16, I had a brain aneurysm.
So Dr. Antonio’s question related to mind and body was a question of deep complexity and relationship for me.
My body has always had the wisdom that I’ve needed.
When I recount what happened in 1993, when my brain had an acute intracranial hemorrhage—a brain aneurysm—and when I look at how my body healed from the medical community’s invasive treatment, I’m amazed at the resiliency of my body.
As I’ve listened to other stories of those with brain injuries, I realize not everyone has the same story as I do.
No body is the same, and each body has inherent wisdom.
When I think now about the current uprisings in the United States in the middle of a global pandemic, the particular years I write in and through continue to show us how culture is shaped by particular bodies—by those in power, by those making policy decisions, and by those with a microphone.
And I grow concerned. I grow an urgency to understand how we might shift culture so that everybody benefits and can be connected to other bodies within a given culture.
The questions deepen:
Am I—are we—aware of the process of change and how our bodies becoming actually reflects that connection?
As I continue to research the body, I came to understand how disconnected our bodies are, and how philosophies and theologies accelerate what is a really profound disconnection.
When I say “our bodies,” I’m reflecting on what I see and experience in our society.
Not everyone is aware of our bodies as bodies living and socialized in the church and in academia—both perpetuating a radical sense of disconnectedness from the body politic and from our own bodies, from the felt sense of who and what we are.
Even as so many of us were making our survivability primary during the global health pandemic, I began to put pieces together about disconnection in my body and how my brain worked.
Sometimes I think, “I’m so smart, I’m dumb.”
And by that, I don’t mean to be disparaging toward myself. What I mean is that my brain works in ways frequently praised by the academy but infrequently praised by society.
Even my own understanding of myself as nonbinary and trans has continually presented challenges for folks wedded to the gender binary as a way of understanding the body and culture.
Add to that what I learned as I wrote this book in the summer of 2020: I am on the autism spectrum, formerly known as Asperger’s.
This is what I learned. This true thing for me and my body.
I am still becoming.
Okay, our turn.
Matthias Roberts: It’s so different hearing you read it, and I really like that.
Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza: Thank you.
Matthias Roberts What I mean—what was it like for you to even read that for us right now?
Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza: You know, I just peeled back the veneer on me in this book, and it’s very different than Activist Theology. I think I tell people all the time, I’m a one-trick pony. All of my degrees are in theology. It’s the thing that I only know how to do. And I think being a good theologian is being able to make meaning of the everyday, or what Latinx theologians called. And I think that’s what I tried to do in this book: just make meaning of my everyday.
For me, writing in the middle of a pandemic—I mean, my partner and I moved out of downtown Nashville into the hood, and I just started writing. And I thought, gosh, if I can’t be honest about my own body, how are we ever going to heal our democratic body? I really thought I was going to write a book about my process of becoming embodied.
But then we found ourselves in this accelerated adventure called a global health pandemic, and I started to see connections between what was happening for me, my anxiety, navigating Nashville, and everything else happening in the world. So I thought, gosh, I’ve got to tell the truth. I’ve got to make meaning of the everyday because I feel very concerned for our world.
Matthias Roberts: I know when you first told me that you were working on this book, it was right as you were finishing up your first book, Activist Theology, which you even say in this book is a very heady book. You told me that you were starting to explore questions around your body, especially in regards to transitioning. You describe in one of the later chapters of the book your Sunday ritual of injecting T. Can you talk about it?
Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza: Yeah, testosterone. That was a real journey for me. I had a former partner who—I don’t know if they were transphobic or trans-antagonistic—but I had a question about dosing T for a long time. The response they would give to me is, “You’re not a man. You’re not trans. You’re not a man. You’re not on testosterone.”
And I’m like, “Right. That’s why I’m not trying to be a man. But I am trans, and I would like to try testosterone.” So there was this push and pull, and there were no conditions for me to explore that.That relationship did not continue, FYI. Spoiler.
When I took my first faculty position in Berkeley, I finally got trans care and started sort of researching and whatnot. And then I had this anxiety of, “Will I be able to date someone if I’m on testosterone?” Because there’s so much transphobia and so much trans antagonism. I really wanted to be in relationship with people. I wanted to have a partner. And I didn’t know how to navigate transition care as a single person—as a newly single person—while also trying to date.
It wasn’t until I moved to Nashville and was told that Vanderbilt—who would have thought Vanderbilt University has a gender clinic?—that I started going. I mean, if you want conventional medicine, you want to be at a hyper-competent teaching hospital, you know what I’m saying? And so I was very happy to go to Vanderbilt. They have this gender center, and my doctor, Shane Taylor, is Jewish, and we talk about politics and theology all the time. I went to her and I said, “I’d like to think about microdosing T.”
The interesting part about that moment is I was in a relationship with Erin, my current partner, and I asked them, “How do you feel about this?” We were early in our relationship, but I was really afraid that it would disrupt something in the relationship. And Erin said, “If that’s what you need, you should do it.” Completely different response than what I had years ago. I’m like, “Okay, I think this relationship can work.”
And so I started microdosing because I thought it would help my gender dysphoria, and it does. I went and saw Shane Taylor, my physician, and I said: “I am staunchly nonbinary. I do not want to check any box. I want to stay nonbinary. I would like to get into this androgynous look as best as I can. Will testosterone help me achieve that?”
And she said, “Yeah.” So I went from microdosing to a full dose.
I started dosing T on the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, in June of 2019. So what is that—going to be three years this June? And then Erin and I had a conversation about, “How did I find a partner who has been advocating for trans care since they were in college?” I don’t know.
But they were like, “You know, I used to advocate for young trans people at college when I was in college.” They did a graduate degree at Smith College and heard lots of stories about aggression and whatnot. So we had a conversation about, “If testosterone impacts you this way, how do we mitigate that?” It doesn’t happen to everyone. We navigated our uncertainty with a lot of generosity. We really believe in communication, and we trust each other to be able to be in conversation.
But yeah, that ritual—my very first T shot—Erin came and sat down next to me. She’s also a somatic instructor, so she’s like, “You’re not going to take the shot without you being in your body.” And I really appreciate it because that can be very mechanical sometimes. From that very first day in June of 2019, she’ll sit down with me and invite me to breathe, and we’ll have a whole somatic experience.
Then she’ll ask me a few questions, and then I will give myself my shot. And gosh, how that is so hospitable to what I have—to the situation that I was in years prior. I don’t know if that answered your question.
Matthias Roberts: I mean, it’s so interesting to me that you’re literally writing a book called Body Becoming, and I know you highlight this—you highlighted it in what you read—as you are taking this medication that helps your body become. You’re watching your body change in the mirror.
Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza: Literally, I just had a conversation today with my social media person, Kim. She has a really great podcast called Ladyland Podcast—go check it out. But I said to Kim, we were talking about how bodies changed during the pandemic, and I said, “Yeah, my fat redistributed, so my clothes fit differently.”
She was like, “Oh my God, I didn’t even think about that.” We were talking about caftans and like, maybe I need a caftan.
Matthias Roberts: Yes. Don’t we all? So I’m curious—you’re literally watching this…
Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza: In real time.
Matthias Roberts: Right? You’re writing about bodies becoming, and you’re connecting this all to this idea of liberation. In fact, even claiming that becoming embodied is our path to liberation. Could you tie some of those things together?
Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza: Well, I think you and I have been doing it for the past two days. It occurred to me as I was writing and as I was watching the political upheavals that the logic of whiteness stewards disassociation.
This shows up in theologies of whiteness and white-serving institutions and whatnot. And I thought, because when I figured out how to be embodied and live my life from an embodied place, it changed my relationships with people. Then I thought, well, if it changes interpersonal relationships, then that piece of embodiment can shape and shift our cultural body.
And then if our cultural body, or our collective body, or our church, or school, or what have you, can actually become embodied, we can reshape our democratic body. It seemed so logical to me, but I had never seen anyone say it in that way. People are talking about embodiment all the time, but they’re talking about individual embodiment. They’re not talking about embodiment on a collective scale.
If we’re concerned about things like neoliberal subjectivity, it’s because it’s rooted in dissociative behaviors and a transactional relationality. Whereas embodiment is, I think, a really generous relationality. You’re being hospitable to your body and to one another, and I think that changes things.
But I’ve learned—I spent my summers in Mexico growing up. I went to white-serving institutions, private schools for college and graduate school, and I’ve learned very much how to negotiate and navigate white spaces. They’re very transactional. I have to perform a kind of orientation to whiteness to survive them. And I thought, no wonder students of color acquiesce to whiteness. It’s the only way they can survive the bullshit. Then they become dissociated, and then they become disembodied. That’s how we get cut off from our roots.
And I just thought, could I write a book that helps us return to the roots of relationship—first with self, then with other, and then with the larger body? Could that help us get a step closer to this utopia of liberation?
Matthias Roberts: You start with this idea of rupture, and in fact, I think you even write that rupture is almost a necessity for becoming. I know here in The Seattle School community, we often talk about rupture and repair from an attachment perspective—how important that is to build attachment bonds.
You write a lot about attachment theory in this book as well, but I think you’re saying even more than just from an attachment perspective: rupture is a necessity for becoming. Could you talk about that?
Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza: Yeah. I borrowed this word from French post-war philosophy—continental philosophy. Gilles Deleuze and French psychiatrist Félix Guattari did a lot of collaboration and kind of revolutionized French post-war thought.
It’s highly unintelligible. It takes days to read. I have spent a lifetime reading it. I sometimes wonder why, but I don’t get that time back at the end of my life. It’s already spent. But Deleuze talks a lot about rupture and becoming—that they’re connected.
And when I think about rupture, it’s that little blip that happens. There could be a big blip. It’s the crabgrass that keeps growing up in between the cracks and ruptures. I think we often think about ruptures being bad, but I think there can be lots of blips that are good—that facilitate becoming. And I think sometimes we need to have ruptures so that we can wake up.
I think, in one sense, the pandemic helped wake people up. Then they read all the anti-racist books. And I also say that’s not enough. But that rupture facilitated something. Maybe now they have ten Black friends instead of one Black friend, right? And so, in that sense, rupture is good.
There’s more to the story, right? There’s more than just reading all the books. It’s about embodied awareness. I tend to think the right relationships will help us have embodied awareness and not just talking points.
Matthias Roberts: Yeah, that piece of relationship feels so important because you do talk about the anti-racist books and that kind of logic of whiteness to just consume knowledge, but not necessarily put it into a relationship.
It feels so key to your work here—saying it has to go beyond an intake, beyond just a head thing, and into movement.
Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza: Yeah. I mean, our whole education system relies on the banking method. If we can get students to bank enough information, then they can be educated. And that just never really resonated with me as a professor.
My classroom, whether it’s at Duke Divinity School or online, is a place for relationships. I just don’t know how to be a professor without also being a learner with my students. So I tried to take that sort of pedagogical practice and write about it in this way—connected to bodies and relationship.
How do we become a collective body? Well, we have to be in relationship. And then always kind of de-centering the expert. I think I make my students very anxious because I don’t have due dates on any of my assignments. It’s actually an invitation for them to be in relationship with freedom. And I find that a lot of students don’t know how to navigate that.
I also have a thing where, at the end of class, I have a one-on-one with my students and ask them: “If you were assigning grades, what would you give yourself?”
Because I want them to articulate their relationship to the discourse and to the class.
And I tell them, “I want to learn from you.” You know, grades are a hegemonic tool, and I’ve got to assign a grade. What would you give yourself?
Someone said to me, “I would give myself a C.”
I said, “Why?”
And they told me it was because they didn’t know how to have a relationship with the class. It’s very interesting. Our institutions are not set up in this way.
Matthias Roberts: I’m going to switch topics briefly because I want to make sure we cover this. You use the language of “composting supremacy,” which we’ve actually not talked about. I don’t know if you know, but in Seattle we’re required by law to compost.
So we’re familiar with putting little buckets and peels and whatever in there. But you’ve been very intentional—you explain this in your book—but you’ve been using that language for quite a while, of choosing that word: composting supremacy. Could you talk about that?
Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza: Yeah. I mean, it goes back to a conversation I was having with Erin, my partner. We were driving somewhere in Nashville, and I had not long before given a workshop on dismantling supremacy culture. And I like supremacy culture, but I didn’t really like “dismantling.”
But I didn’t know what else to use, right? Because it’s so bad and we’ve got to do something about it.
And Erin and I were driving, and she said, “You know, dismantling is a…dismantling is a really negative term. It’s violent.” And she said, “Is there a more generative word?”
I’m a bit of a nerd, so I read a lot. I went back to eco-studies, climate grief, climate anxiety, animal studies—all of that was running through my mind while we were driving.
I said, “What about compost?”
She said, “I like it. Tell me about it.”
I said, “When you compost, the magic happens in the dark of the night. We have some really good things in the world. Some of them—a lot of them—need to be transformed, not just dismantled. So what if, in the dark of the night, we begin composting supremacy culture? We add in the worms, the leftovers, and we actually allow the world to transform itself through relationship.”
She said, “Yeah, I like it. Let’s go with it.” So that’s kind of how it started.
I think lots of things need to be composted—not just supremacy culture. Religion needs to be composted. The medical-industrial complex needs to be composted. Ableism needs to be composted. Adult supremacy needs to be composted.
But that’s how it started and then that’s sort of taken me into the direction of asking: What can we learn from climate grief and climate anxiety to address supremacy culture?
Matthias Roberts: What did you find?
Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza: I found that I wanted to be more connected to my food and the land. So I found a butcher shop. They don’t advertise; it’s all word of mouth. They know me by name and know my order. I thought, I like that. That’s a way to have a relationship with farms because they only buy from small local farms.
Then I started buying my vegetables from a farm. Those vegetables taste different than what you get at Whole Foods. Looking into eco-studies and animal studies compelled me to be in better relationship with the world around me in sustainable ways. I think composting supremacy culture has a lot to do with asking, “How do we become sustainable right now? What does it mean to steward sustainability?”
I’m a one-trick pony—I think about theology and ethics all the time. So I ask: Where do I buy my groceries? Where do I buy my coffee? Where do I buy my gas? We’re all deeply compromised, so how do I make the best ethical decision in everything I do?
Composting supremacy culture and all of that took me to get out of a big bank and go to a small bank owned by Nashville residents that serves artists and creative entrepreneurs. I call myself a poet, a moral reasoner, and a word artist. I thought, “Well, I’m an artist. I can join this bank.”
Now my money stays in the community. Those are real, tangible things.
Do you all remember when the pandemic hit and PPP loans became available?
I’d banked with Chase for years, even before they became Chase. They wouldn’t process my PPP loan because I didn’t have a million dollars in the bank.
Then my friend Phil Cabucci, a small business owner and a wonderful queen in Nashville, came over one night. He calls me his pastor, so he came for a little pastoral care—and brought chocolate cake, which I’m always grateful for. We were sitting on the porch, and I told him what had happened with Chase bank.
He said, “Oh no. You need to talk to Studio Bank, they’ll do it for you.” He connected me with the vice president of the bank, Harry Allen, who’s a wonderful Black man who is like doing good in the world.
Harry emailed me on a Saturday and connected me with Amelia and Roxanne, who handled the PPP loans. They sent me the application that same day, and by Monday they were submitting it to the Small Business Administration.
And I was like, Forget Chase. I’m going to Studio. I moved all my money there, and the rest is history. How many of us even know our banker’s name?
Matthias Roberts: Yeah, right.
Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza: Studio is like private banking for anyone. Whether you have one dollar or five hundred dollars. I’m a little closer to the one-dollar side.
Matthias Roberts: I want to open it up for questions. Pull out your phones if you’re here, and if you’re online you can submit questions too. We already have quite a few.
Here’s the first one: Who are some public voices whose work inspires you or helps you feel aligned with what you’re trying to embody in terms of liberation?
Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza: I’ve been deeply shaped by Black feminist thought, Chicana feminist thought, and decolonial feminism on the academy side.
As for public voices, I’d say Mpho Tutu, the daughter of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who lives in Amsterdam. I’d also name Dr. Jackie Lewis, Bishop Yvette Flunder, and Dr. Nancy Bedford, my teacher at Garrett Seminary. She’s from Argentina and is a Latin American feminist theologian. The list could go on.
What’s important is that so many of these women’s voices are silenced or erased because they’re not sanitized or “civil.” Joe Luman is another favorite conversation partner of mine—a Colombian immigrant and an amazing human. Because I’m transmasculine and have a PhD, I get legitimized in ways that women of color often don’t. So I try to stand in deep solidarity with women of color and amplify their work whenever I…that’s a few.
Matthias Roberts: You’ve talked a lot about embodiment, both individually and collectively. One question asks: What does collective embodiment actually look like?
Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza: Well I think that part of it looks like returning to ancient practices we’ve forgotten. Like eating together. How many of us go home, shut ourselves away, heat up leftovers, and eat alone? Last night, you and I spent three hours together over dinner. Can we return to practices like that? A few days before, you texted me and said, “I just got home. I’m making dinner.” I was curious, so I asked, “What are you cooking?”
Can we be curious about one another? Could that curiosity lead us into shared practices? Liberation isn’t just a utopian ideal. We have to practice it every day—with ourselves and with one another. Hopefully, we’ll survive ourselves.
Matthias Roberts: You write with such a love for philosophy, which is often seen as abstract and intellectual. How have you experienced philosophy differently—as something embodied?
Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza: I’ve returned to story. I grew up in Texas but spent my summers in Mexico. That story has shaped me deeply. No one in my family has higher education. My mom has a sixth-grade education.
So I always ask myself: If I handed my mom a Deleuze book, would it mean anything to her? Probably not. So I keep in mind the four-year-old I’m writing for—the child I hope inherits a different future than the one we’re facing.
I’m working on my next book about belonging and freedom. Those are philosophical concepts, but I’m talking with teenagers of color about belonging and freedom because I want to become a better cultural translator. I don’t want to write theory for theory’s sake. I want to translate ideas into something people can actually read and internalize.
It’s been a return to story. When we embody our theology… in Activist Theology I say I couldn’t care less what you believe. I care about your practices because your practices reveal what you believe.
The same is true of embodiment. If you’re embodied, your ethics are different. You treat people differently. Your orientation toward the world changes. Your intentionality changes.
For me, it’s about internalizing story so deeply that my very cells embody it.
Matthias Roberts: Someone asks: You talk about being firmly non-binary and not wanting to check any boxes. As a theologian, what does it mean not to check boxes?
Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza: That’s a good question.
I believe all theology is ethics. Theology, for me, is making meaning in the world.
When I think about the theology I embody, it comes back to one question: How do I follow Jesus? And how do I remain faithful in the small things? There are all these schools within theology—performative theology, Catholic social thought, and so on.
I believe the whole tradition belongs to me. I can read Augustine, knowing his work has been weaponized against people, and still engage it without becoming attached to the ways it has been deployed.
I can read Black liberation theology. I can read Martin and Malcolm. I can hold those traditions without rigid attachment and still let them shape me. When we begin to reframe theology as ethics, something changes.
Many of our traditions have required assent to dogmatic beliefs. But what if we instead asked: How do our practices show up in the world? I think we’d see a different kind of spiritual life emerge—one that doesn’t require checking boxes. Instead, it compels us into a different kind of relationship with ourselves and with one another.
Matthias Roberts: Another question asks: How do we move beyond the Black-white binary that dominates conversations about race? How do we make space for other voices?
Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza: I talked about this last night with Bishop Yvette Flunder on their television show. Our racial discourse has become so polarized into Black and white that it renders Brown people invisible.
That’s a particular kind of violence toward immigrants and toward many different Brown communities. First, we have to recognize that this country has very little historical memory of its betrayal of Black people.
We have to address that historical amnesia. At the same time, binary thinking itself is one of the pillars of white supremacy. How do we opt out of binary thinking? How do we stop domesticating polarization? Only then can we begin to speak more faithfully about race. Theology has reinforced these binaries for a long time. That’s why James Cone’s claim that God is Black was so revolutionary—it challenged a theology that had normalized a God aligned with white supremacy. That work is still necessary.
And what if we also return to Vine Deloria Jr.’s work? What would it mean to cultivate a more Indigenous theology on Turtle Island? Race is a social construct. It’s a hegemonic tool used to oppress people. We need to be honest about the politics of race, how race gets deployed, and be wise as serpents. It’s about strategy.
Matthias Roberts: One last question before we’re out of time. Is there space for theological education and formation to coexist within capitalism? How can we remain expansive in our thinking while living under market realities?
Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza:
Yes! That person should have joined us for dinner last night. That’s a great question. Big surprise: I’m not a friend of capitalism. I’ll be honest with you—academia is a failing project.
The over-professionalization of theological education, and the over-professionalization of clergy, are both motivated and sustained by an accelerated form of capitalism that harms us all. The fact that we are all saddled with student debt—we were just talking about this earlier—is a shame.
I left my faculty post after the 2016 election. I went to Mexico for a bit because I was asking myself, “How the hell am I going to do this?” Then I moved to Nashville in 2017 and launched my scholarship as a collaborative project to try to do theological education 2.0 outside the academy—in an anti-capitalist way, in a democratized way.
So I would say that is a space to do theological education. Matthias and I will be doing a class together in that space at some point. But these normative structures are so insulated by whiteness and capitalism that the structure itself is working by design. We’ve got to find alternative spaces.
I love thinking about knitting groups and how theology happens in knitting groups. No, they’re not reading Barth or Kant or anybody else, but they’re doing theology. I think theological education has been accelerated by credentialing structures that fortify whiteness, and I think we need to question that. Why is that? How do we survive the end of empire? How do we live in Babylon right now?
I’m trying to do it at the Activist Theology Project. We’re convening people in a private social media app powered by Mighty Networks. We’re having conversations about how we build community, what it looks like to democratize the space, and what it means for me to have a PhD while also inviting learners—and being a learner myself.
We’re figuring this out in real time, and I have no intention of going on a tenure-track job hunt. I have no interest. I want to build community. I think community is our only way forward.
It’s relationships all the way down for me. In this moment, theological education is being suffocated by capitalism. As an example, one degree is around spiritual entrepreneurship or social entrepreneurship. How do you do that in an anti-capitalist way? I’d be very curious. I could talk about this for days, and we only have fifteen minutes. But whoever asked that question should reach out to me.
Matthias Roberts: Who was that? Oh, that’s you? Great.
Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza: Oh yes, hi.
Matthias Roberts: Early in your book, you talk about the difference between our cultural attachment to scarcity and the need to renew our imagination for abundance. That feels like a notable reframing of fear-based thinking. Can you say more about our attachment to scarcity?
Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza: I think there’s a lot of fear-based motivation across the board, which creates this myth of scarcity. It’s a myth. There’s enough wealth to go around. Did you know that the early church believed in the redistribution of wealth? That’s why we have the concept of social justice. But the church doesn’t practice that anymore.
We have to return to some of these early practices that society embodied because we’re being told a lie—that there isn’t enough. The CSA where I buy my vegetables demonstrates that there is enough. The land produces enough. Whatever is left over—whatever people don’t buy—they donate to those in need. There is enough. But we’ve so internalized the idea that there isn’t enough, which is why there is competition within capitalism and in every institution: medicine, education, the church.
We have to reorient ourselves to a different kind of relationality because the lies we’ve been told—and have now internalized—are impacting us in deep ways. Look at people buying houses, for example. Wealthy people are buying several houses with cash, making it impossible for people like you and me to buy. That’s wrong.
Matthias Roberts: I think this might be our last question. Could you talk more about the body—your body, or a communal body—as sensing wisdom, particularly in relation to the divine incarnation of wisdom, or, as Wendy Farley describes it, the non-duality of wisdom?
Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza: Well, if God is in all things—panentheism—then we do have a kind of fleshy wisdom already in place. I think we don’t know how to harness it, which is why it took me so long to get in touch with this sensing wisdom. Wendy Farley’s work is amazing. I also think about Lama Rod Owens. I think about Reverend Angel Kyodo. I’m like a thirty-second Buddhist, okay? I just read this book by Thich Nhat Hanh where he asks, “Can you smile at the red light?” I thought, what a novel idea. I can do that. I can smile at the red light. His point was: can you be present at the red light instead of rushing to get to the green light?
I think that kind of wisdom is already in us, but we don’t know how to harness it. Presence is the missing component. How do we become present with ourselves, present with each other, present with the divine that is negotiating the space between us? How do we do that in a world where information travels instantly? You send a tweet and thousands of people see it.
How do we recover presence? I think that’s why I want to start eating with people again, when it’s safe to do so, and return to some of these cultural practices of presence. It’s not sexy, and it’s not going to make me a lot of money, but it might actually recover our humanity.
Audience: Amen.
Matthias Roberts: Thank you, Dr. Robyn. Before we thank Dr. Robyn, for folks who want to follow your work, where can we find you?
Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza: On Twitter and Instagram, it’s @irobyn—the letter “I,” then R-O-B-Y-N.
If you want to come hang out with us on the porch, you can go to atporch.com. You can also check out our work at activisttheology.com. We’ve got a podcast, and my DMs are open. I love talking with people. Then I might invite you to dinner. You never know.
Dr. KJ Swanson: Outstanding. Please join me in thanking Matthias and Dr. Robyn. Thank you both, and thank you, everybody. There are books for sale. Dr. Robyn will linger for a bit. Matthias is here to chat, and if you want to know more about The Seattle School, I’d be happy to talk with you as well. Thank you for being here. It’s great to see you all in the building.