Sunday School: Narrating the Impossible, Again
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
— James Baldwin
“You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”
— Ta-Nehisi Coates
Dear Becoming Ones:
When I started seminary and came into the awareness that I was called to be a theologian committed to an ethical turn, I knew it wouldn’t look like anything I had ever seen before. I began making film as theology. I drew sprawling mind maps when others wrote neat outlines. I drafted my master’s thesis in a coffee shop in Chicago, Kopi, barefoot on the floor at low tables with no internet.
I have never fit inside a box. I have refused categorization.
I am fundamentally estranged from white supremacy, though it has conditioned me so thoroughly. Becoming a theologian was always going to require risk and vulnerability—but I never thought it would mean I would have to flee my home to live out my vocation.
Estrangement and Becoming
After a lifetime in academia, I find myself estranged from the very title scholar. I know its weight and its promise, but now joy calls me elsewhere: to the stove, to silence, to wandering and wondering. I will always be some form of academic, but I have stopped asking empire for permission to be intelligible.
I am a Trans and Queer scholar. A word artist who makes a way out of no way. My craft stretches across long-form writing, film, and recorded conversations. Like Baldwin, I solicit kinship and love throughout my relationships, even as the world around me insists on my erasure.
I am unfurling here in Western New York, after yet another life-changing trip with Michael McRay.
In 2022, Michael took me to Palestine, and something irreversible happened. I came more fully into my being, and everything at home shifted in generative ways. This year, 2025, I returned from the North of Ireland—weeks spent among people whose wounds of colonization echo my own. Again, I am changed. I am learning, with clearer eyes, that there is no social trust left in our communities.
There are no safe spaces.
Not even in my little rural village of Alfred, NY.
Harassment and Hyper-Colonized Empire
Walking home from the local college bar not long ago, I experienced my first moment of harassment. A grey SUV sped up toward me, windows down, voices spilling into the night: “Fuck you!” White college guys. The sound of entitlement at full volume.
I texted my buddy system immediately. Put people on alert. Because I know how quickly a drive-by slur can become a drive-by shooting in a hyper-colonized site of empire.
There are no safe spaces. We are polarized to the bone here. And what makes it worse is not only the violence itself, but the silence that cloaks it. Violence accelerates whenever communities stay mute about what is actually happening. Silence is empire’s favorite accomplice.
For those with eyes to see, they will see.
Narrating at the Edges
As a Trans and Queer scholar, I have always been drawn to the margins of the margins—to perverted theologies, to obscure thinking, to strange and luminous truths. This is why I am shaped by both Gilles Deleuze and Gloria Anzaldúa.
I craft my scholarship and my activism at the edge of the university, in kitchens and conversations, in writing that refuses domestication. Another way is possible, and this Substack is part of that way.
I narrate the impossible because to narrate is to resist disappearance. To narrate is to refuse silence. To narrate is to believe another world is still possible, even here, even now.
Benediction
Go into this day with eyes unclouded by silence.
Go knowing that your story is a form of resistance.
Go remembering that the underside of history is still holy ground.
Go refusing disappearance.
Go narrating the impossible—
until another world is not only imagined,
but made flesh among us.
Paz,
—RCE+