Tuesday Telegram
Toward a Fugitive Classroom 🕯️🌱
Tuesday Telegram
Toward a Fugitive Classroom 🕯️🌱
I’m teaching a Decolonial Thought class this semester.
And for years—years—Tripp Fuller has been telling me:
Host a pop-up class.
I always said I wasn’t ready.
Maybe what I meant was: I wasn’t yet willing to risk being seen.
On Refusing the Script 🔥
After I finished my PhD, I was expected to perform a particular kind of public intellectual—
polished, palatable, legible to institutions that love critique but fear consequence.
But something else kept calling me.
Not the stage, but the prophetic.
Not the brand, but the Spirit.
Not arrival, but becoming.
So I resisted the status quo at every turn.
I became increasingly counter-institutional, increasingly fugitive.
It didn’t win me many friends in Progressive Christianity.
I kept telling folks, plainly:
I am not a progressive Christian.
I’m a liberationist.
There is a difference.
Memphis, Terror, and the Body 🩸
I remember giving a talk in Memphis, at one of the Smithsonian museums—
on the same grounds as the Lorraine Motel,
where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
I stood where he was shot.
Only now do I fully understand the terror he lived under.
My body knew before my mind did.
A somatic rupture.
History breaking open in muscle and breath.
Then I gave a talk—on becoming, on difference—
and the people who responded were the ones who always do:
The misfits.
Bodies marked with color and metal and story.
Those already living in the cracks.
And my white ally-comrade, Dr. Courtney Pace,
cheering me on like a drumbeat of solidarity.
Why I’m Done with One-Off Talks 🧭
I’m tired of parachuting in and leaving.
I don’t want moments.
I want community.
Back when Twitter was still a commons, I tried to build it there—
and some of those relationships became real life:
shared meals, shared homes, shared care.
I think of living with the Averys in Temescal, Oakland—
that sweet East Bay house that taught me something about belonging.
I wrote my first book there on the couch in the living room!
I’ve always known social platforms could be gathering spaces.
I just didn’t yet know how to hold them.
Following the Faint Light 🌌
Michael McRay - The Wild Way keeps guiding me—
toward the wild way, toward becoming restoried.
I follow the faint light of life.
So many others guide me too—
Liz Morrison among them.
What’s saving my life right now is Experiential Narrative Practice—
alongside therapy, contemplation, cooking good food,
and the daily, difficult practice of coming home to myself.
This fall, I read deeply on Complex PTSD.
Complex trauma has shaped my entire life.
And still—
I rise.
Why Now: Pedagogies of Crossing 🌉
I think I’m finally ready to host pop-up classes.
Even if I’m scared.
Even if I worry they won’t “work.”
I still care deeply about theological education
and about American Christianity—
even as it curdles into a nationalist, racialized ideology
now called White Christian Nationalism.
In a time of escalating state terror,
I’m choosing the life of wisdom,
the life of the Spirit,
as a way to navigate these waters together.
This is where M. Jacqui Alexander steadies me.
She teaches us that transformation happens through
pedagogies of crossing—
where spirit, politics, memory, sexuality, and ritual
are not separate domains
but braided practices of survival and liberation.
Crossing is never clean.
It happens in nepantla—
that in-between space Gloria Anzaldúa names
where identities blur, borders tremble,
and something new insists on being born.
These pop-up classes won’t be lectures.
They’ll be conversational, ritual, relational.
We make the way by walking.
We think together by being together.
What’s Coming 🌱✨
I’m beginning to host pop-up classes—
fugitive classrooms for decolonial thought,
spiritual wisdom, and collective becoming.
I won’t do this alone.
I’ll be working with many collaborators—
including Tripp Fuller, who never stopped believing I’d get here.
📬 Stay tuned for details on the inaugural pop-up class.
I hope you’ll consider joining us—
in the crossing,
in the conversation,
in the work of becoming otherwise.
Paz, —RCE+