Contemplative Threads for the Community
Welcome to the first edition of Contemplative Threads for paid subscribers! In these posts, which drop on Mondays during 2023, you’ll be invited to contemplate on an image; reflect on sound; engage in a somatic exercise; and, read a few sentences. Again, I’m introducing sound to the posts, because we all resonate with different aspects when leaning into contemplation! Let me know how the sound is resonating! These posts won’t be long, but rather they will be an invitation for you to follow the threads throughout the week!
These posts are for paying subscribers, so I hope you’ll upgrade your subscription. I’ve lowered the price to $5/monthly or $50/year. You can still be a cultivating member, so that I can gift subscriptions to others who otherwise can’t afford the cost. Let’s fight poverty; not the poor! As a deeply working class person, I am in solidarity with the underside of history! Let’s join together and be the healing of the wounds!
I thought I’d give a brief introduction of this space for the new subscribers who have joined us here at Our Collective Becoming with hopes that you might upgrade your subscription and join the emerging community we are building through thinking together, reading together, writing together, and more! Thank you to those who have joined over the past several weeks! It’s great to see many of you trickling in! I hope you find this space useful and the thinking compelling! Also, since the extreme right seems to target me on a semi-regular basis, I’ve limited the ability to leave comments here to those who are paying subscribers. I do that for my own safety and well-being. I hope you will find value in what you discover here and the threads of thought that can be traced for an imagination of another possible world.
I am working on a new book, slowly, and learning to write what I want to write, so the next book will emerge slower than the first two books, but will be nonetheless good, I think! I’ll be releasing some of my thoughts for the next book here and my friend, Derek Webb, will be collaborating with me on creating a visual album of songs that will correspond with the book. I don’t know how much songwriting I will do, but Derek will take the manuscript and create an EP or full album of the contents of the book. Right now, the book is centered around belonging and freedom. I’m still tracing the concept of becoming, which I understand as radical transformation. I hope you’ll stick around to get sneak peaks of the book and more!
Thanks for being here and thank you for trusting me to think with you as we endeavor to build another possible world where we all flourish.
About Me
I’m Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza and I’m a professor of philosophy, theology, and ethics. I am really a one trick pony in that I love to think thoughts and write them down. This space is where I do a lot of thinking aloud and thinking with people, so that we can connect the dots between theory and action and generate another possible world. I believe in the ethical dimension of theory, so a lot of what I do and what I write maintains the ethical dimension. So, things like how do we fight poverty and not the poor, for example, is huge for me. Or, how do we not be conscripted into the self-perpetuating elitism of higher education and maintain community over the competitive relating that happens in academia? Another thing about me is that I live with Autism, so I miss things or can take things to a cosmic level that is unintelligible. I’m doing my best to translate theory to action in a way that everyone can understand and doing that as a matter of principle. I want us to be a better society.
I’m writing today from South Korea where I am here doing two things: 1. supporting my partner who is teaching Integrated Movement Studies to therapists and 2. giving a lecture in Seoul on queerness, bodies, and Christianity.
I write on Substack several times a week, many of which are free posts, but I do create exclusive content for paying subscribers, like Audio Notes, these Contemplative Threads, and more! I will soon release the schedule of classes that I’m offering that are self-paced and can be accessed through an app, along with fifth Sunday reading nights where we join together to discuss what we are reading! I hope you will consider upgrading your subscription and join the community and help support community pubic scholarship. As I say,
This is community supported scholarship ‘making little moves against destructiveness’ with the people for another possible world.
Thanks for being here! I hope you stay a while!
Onward, —Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza