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Featured Book for September 2025

Body Becoming: A Path to Our Liberation

by Rev. Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza

The body that Roberto Che Espinoza inhabits is a nonbinary body, a trans body, a body in two races–and a body continually in discovery. Theirs is also a body on sojourn invested in experience, body understanding, and engagement in and for human thriving. Espinoza relates coming into a new body story, beginning with the deep emotional work of connecting the abstract intelligence of their mind with their body’s intelligence, to explore the relationship between living and becoming, doing and listening.

Combining that deep listening and living with their work in activism, Body Becoming offers us a way of understanding the body beyond constructions–political or medical-industrial-complex defined–toward cultivating the body as important in our endeavors to build a more inclusive vision for democracy. Mixing memoir and faith, somatics theory and body practice, Espinoza steers us through territory both familiar and difficult–as we discover embodiment as the primary place of deep wisdom, where culture shifts originate and materialize–and a better world becomes, as we too become.

Rev. Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza is a public theologian, pastor, and Professor nurturing other possible worlds. Believing that public theology is a kind of social healing, Roberto transformed the Activist Theology Project into Our Collective Becoming, a social healing project dedicated to the work of repair. He writes on Substack on Our Collective Becoming—translating theory to action. Cultural analysis with a spirit of hope!

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Community Questions

Community Questions from Claudia Love Mair

Part I

  1. “If René Descartes said, ‘I think; therefore I am,' then what makes a body?” p.16. How would you answer this question?
  2. “…everything around us is a body.” p.16. Describe how you experience something outside of your own body, that is not a human being, as being a body?
  3. On page 22-23 Roberto talks about pain and how it affects our relationship to our bodies. How does pain affect your relationship to your body?

Part II

  1. What do you think metabolizing your physical pain to become more fully embodied can look like?
  2. On pages 28-29, Roberto writes about emancipatory politics as being part of how we think through things like embodiment. Politics is a hot button topic all over the world now. How would you describe emancipatory politics, and what embodying liberation through it would look like?
  3. “I am reminded here that even the phrase person of color refined whiteness. We must find a different way to speak about difference and embody not only a hermeneutic of suspicion but a hermeneutic of retrieval.” p. 46. Name a simple way we can begin to speak differently, so that we are not making whiteness our central perspective.

Part III

  1. “Play can be lots of things, have many elements, but one thing play does is set things in motion for them to become.” p.59. Describe a way in which play is central in your process of becoming more fully embodied.
  2. “In the language of theology and panentheism, we might say that God—in motion and relationship—is in all things and willing all things to come to life. In the language of the lens of animism, it is the cognization and awarenesss that all things are endowed with spirit and life.” p. 63. What is a way you can cooperate with the God who is willing us to come into the fullness of life?
  3. The chapter, “Bodies, Violence, and Embodiment” deals with heavy subject matter. p.115. Things have gotten worse since Roberto wrote Body Becoming. How are you taking care of yourself as the world seems to head at breakneck speed in the wrong direction?

Part IV

  1. “Embodiment reorients our whole selves into a better aligned relationship with all we encounter every day. Embodiment isn’t a transaction; it is finding yourself in the deepest parts of who you are and living from that space.” p. 142. Describe a way you may be having a hard time experiencing your body, and a step you can take to support this area.
  2. “Healing our democracy is part of healing on an collective scale. So participating in a vision for democracy is the ancient practice of world building. When we dream the world we want to inhabit, we can begin to intentionally make it so.” p. 174. Much is trying to actively thwart and crush our collective dream of democracy. What is a way we can empower our dreaming?
  3. “Lately though, through sheer despair and the inability to successfully intervene around my body, I have come to the edge of my grief and have met a kind of invitation. An invitation to a kind of radical acceptance and self-love. An invitation into a more feminine, receptive space of not overflowing or overforcing. I find myself skeptical of this invitation, beyond the concerns of my body. And I am curious.” p. 217. Imagine you have just been given this invitation. How do you view it?