Dear Becoming Ones: This correspondence comes to you today in an effort to write through the debilitating anxiety after a recurrence of online threats. Please bear with me as I find the ground beneath my feet and take care of myself in a world that is just as dangerous as people say it is! Find your people!
Gracias for being here.
I am a politicized orthodox theologian. What does that mean, exactly, in an age that lacks nuance?
I believe in things like fidelity, tradition, and mystery, but I have not always been faithful, followed dominant traditions, or allowed mystery to move me.
I am just as compromised as everyone else, which is why I write.
The above kept emerging in my mind as I drank my coffee this morning. I am writing from a safe place where I’ve been for the last little bit after a resurgence of online threats.
As you know, I’ve been reading the James Baldwin biography, which follows his relationships during the varying times of his life in the States and abroad. I am finding belonging in these pages, as I am re-parenting myself and learning how to be well in an age of accelerated violence. And, learning how to unravel from years of violent conditioning in various institutions, relationships, and family systems.
Baldwin left for long periods of time to write. I seem to need that, too, so I’ve applied to various residencies around the world to try and write this next book on belonging and freedom: food, art, ritual. I don’t know where the book is going, except toward community. We need each other now more than ever.
I’ve taken a break from the public writing to focus on my safety and my mental health. I have been posting on Substack Notes, but taking a break from the Monday Meditation and the Friday Care Package. Thank you for your patience!
My work remains free to the public. I never did believe in a pay to play model. The paying subscription covers the food that I use to cook for the community around the world. This publication is the written expression of the non-profit I help lead in community, Our Collective Becoming.
My master’s thesis was on community.
My PhD dissertation was on the materiality of the body as always becoming.
I am interested in how we are together and how we come to practice the Way together. Can we?
I think things like marriage and parenting are vocations. I believe my vocation in the world is theologian, and I have become a social critic and writer to express my vocation. I use this medium to publish to a broader global audience. Thank you to those who have joined! You are joining at an interesting time in my life.
I am spending my time reading about the history of Allegany county while I am a bit nomadic right now for work and safety. I am learning about the radical abolitionist roots of the place that I now call home. I will soon be digging into non-dominant histories and learning about different cosmologies that exist in the place that I now call home.
I will be focussing my public writing on helping with the US launch of a book on Spiritual Violence as part of my public theology work and social healing commitments.
I am endeavoring to repair all of my relationships. I am new to the work of repair, and the Jewish wisdom of suturing the world back together still really compels me. I think Jesus was up to the work of social repair in his community and he was crucified for it. State-sponsored terror exists in this day, too, and part of the trauma from which I am healing is the constant onslaught of hate from people who call themselves Christian, including the State.
I now understand better some of the writing of Baldwin as he dealt and left the hate for France for periods of time.
In 2017, my life changed and I got in touch, slowly, with how much people hate me for my work on Activist Theology and Body Becoming. I follow non-dominant paths to do my work. I follow the unspoken traditions, the ways in which our stories are ensouled with the magic of transformation.
I am writing every chance I get on this new book. I don’t know where it’s going, but it’s taken me all over the world to be with Afro-Carribeans in London to the secular strands of the North of Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Zurich, and Italy.
I will be joining the undercommons after I complete my time at Duke University as visiting professor in the Divinity School. I”ll become counter institutional in everything I do.
I’ll be taking my monastic vows for the noviate phase this fall and remaining a nomadic hermit as I outfox empire.
Look for future publications here amplifying the work of Soulforce and The Rev. Alba Onofrio on spiritual violence. They are coming for all of us, so now is the time to find your people.
Onward, —RCE+
Excerpt from the New Book, essay currently titled “Stranger in the Village”
Roberto Che Espinoza
“My life changed in 2017 and I began to decline. The precarity of my mental health was upended in the summer of 2017 and I am just beginning to be well, again. The ninth anniversary of Charlottesville passed this week. When the Signal message from my security detail arrived, I felt the ground beneath my feet—the ordinary solidity of the moment colliding with the knowledge of what still moves toward me.
Living with accelerated threats and unrestrained hatred has changed the way I understand intimacy. It has compelled me to take inventory of my relationships: who offers refuge, who asks for access, what safety requires, and what it costs to remain open.
In the fall of 2025, I read children’s books, looking for the moment otherness first enters the story. I expected to find it later. Instead, I found it woven in early—into the categories, villains, exclusions, and small moral lessons that teach children who belongs and who does not. Even when our intentions are good, we can pass on ideologies of othering to the next generation before they have language to recognize them.
I have found a kind of belonging in the pages of James Baldwin, though it is a belonging shaped by complication rather than ease. Baldwin knew the force of hatred directed at him. He left Harlem often, seeking refuge in the relative solitude of France—an isolated paradise that offered distance, if not escape.
Like him, I leave. I am held by communities around the world, finding home in places that are foreign to me. There is a particular grace in being welcomed where no one is obligated to know you.
And then there is Alfred. There, I am a stranger in the village. Belonging takes on a different texture when estrangement is not something you encounter abroad, but something you carry within your own community.
I am drawn to the quiet of Alfred. These days, I need its stillness—the space to think, to breathe, to become. Here, I am not inundated by commercials or billboards, not pressed on all sides by the city’s relentless demands to consume.
But distance is not disappearance. The same capitalistic pressures may be less visible here, yet racialized capitalism has not gone anywhere. It lives in Western New York, too—in the structures that determine whose labor is valued, whose safety is conditional, and whose life is made more precarious.
What Alfred offers is not escape, exactly. It is room to keep my distance from the hegemonic forces that would further compromise me: enough quiet to hear myself, enough space to remain intact.”
This was a gift to read. Thank you. Blessings.