Robyn Henderson-Espinoza - Body Becoming: A Path to Our Liberation

Praise for Body Becoming: A Path to Our Liberation

In Body Becoming: A Path to Our Liberation, Dr. Robyn Henderson-Espinoza does remarkable work in translating so many of the fears of marginalized folks directly related to how our bodies are perceived in wider society. Their focus on the complexity of presentation reveals a critical truth to readers who may be new to these conversations: that there is ultimately no way our bodies can be hidden from the bigotry that targets our existence. I cannot recommend this book enough. It is essential reading for anyone hoping to engage in a good-faith effort to dismantle systems of oppression.

Charlotte Clymer, transgender activist, military veteran, press secretary

Robyn Henderson-Espinozas Body Becoming is pure gift. The story and wisdom of this nonbinary, transgender, Latinx theologian on the autistic spectrum presses squarely into the center of what it means to be embodied. In Body Becoming, Henderson-Espinoza takes readers along on their journey to understand, accept, and embrace embodied living. We all need this book. And in the midst of the COVID pandemic, we are ready for it. Get this book.

Lisa Sharon Harper, president and founder of Freedom Road and author of The Very Good Gospel and Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and The Worldand How to Repair It All

In Body Becoming, the wonderful Dr. Robyn Henderson-Espinoza leads people like mepeople stuck in their headstoward a fuller experience of personal embodiment with wisdom, intelligence, and candor. But more than that, Dr. Robyn shows us how everythingreally, everythingis somehow linked to our relationship with bodies, both human and corporate, spiritual, political, and otherwise. To say this is a brilliant book about embodiment is underselling it. Its really a brilliant book about everything.

Pete Holmes, comedian, host of You Made It Weird, and author of Comedy Sex God

Robyn Henderson-Espinoza has written a brave, intellectually astute, and artistic book in Body Becoming. In a time when so much of theological exploration devalues the body and destroys it, Henderson-Espinoza takes seriously the word that we must have life and life in its fullness. It is theory. It is poetry. It is love. It is witness. Somehow Robyn has created theological beauty that has learned how to witness and celebrate and embrace and make whole. This book is more than a freedom journal or active theologyit is a prayer, a sermon, and a love note to so many people trying to get free.

Dant Stewart, author of Shoutin in the Fire: An American Epistle

The disembodied nature of modern society offers both personal and societal peril. In Body Becoming, Dr. Robyn holds these two perspectives in balance, offering the reader a bridge from knowing their body to making room for everyone else to do the same. This book is both life-changing and world-changing at once.

Mike McHargue, author of Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science and Youre a Miracle (and a Pain in the Ass): Embracing the Emotions, Habits, and Mystery That Made You You

Dr. Robyn Henderson-Espinozas body is a vast terrain of storied longings, traumatic memories, and troubling tensions. You would think that they would want to do everything to get away from it, to renounce it. Instead, by embracing this intelligent territory, they redeem it from its significatory internment as a fait accompli, electing instead to think alongside Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophies, relational cosmologies, liberation theologies, and the soft secretions of their own compelling narratives of struggle and emergence to weave an account of the body that is simultaneously strange, emancipatory, andyesjoyful. I might be so bold as to prophesy that by the time you are done reading Robyns book, youd walk past the mirror to look outside the windowjust to catch a glimpse of your face.

Bayo Akomolafe, executive director and chief curator of the Emergence Network and author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanitys Search for Home

Body Becoming: A Path to Our Liberation is an eye-opening, powerful book. In sharing honestly about their own understandings of their body and detailing the wisdoms and challenges theyve encountered while blazing a new path toward embodiment, Dr. Robyn Henderson-Espinoza tracks, deconstructs, and reframes humanitys relationships with our bodies. Vulnerable, provocative, and freeing, Body Becoming will help you see your body like never before and will empower a deep connection with the living, breathing entity that is you.

Matthew Paul Turner, #1 New York Times bestselling author of What Is God Like? and When God Made You

Even before the Spanish mystic Teresa of vila reminded us that Christ has no body on earth but ours, embodiment has been a core reality of Christian spiritualitybut its confounding how many forces conspire to keep us alienated from our own bodies and from each others. Robyn Henderson-Espinoza writes vulnerably and powerfully to invite us all to make the necessary reconnections with our bodies, with one another, with God, so that we may truly embody justice, freedom, and democracy. Their vision is a vision of hope, truth, healing, and love. Read this book, and join the revolution!

Carl McColman, author of The Big Book of Christian Mysticism: The Essential Guide to Contemplative Spirituality and Eternal Heart: The Mystical Path to a Joyful Life

In Body Becoming, Dr. Robyn Henderson-Espinoza invites you into a rich conversation about bodies. Robyns reflections on a lifetime of embodied becoming will stimulate you to reconsider your relationship to your human body, and to the social relationships into which our human bodies plunge us as part of the body politic. Some books give you vital information. Some ask important questions. Some help you see from a new perspective. This book offers all of the above, plus this: it invites you to feel in your body your interconnection with all the bodies, human and otherwise, in which we live, move, and have our being. A beautiful book from a beautiful human being.

Brian D. McLaren, author of Faith after Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do about It

Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, PhD

Broadleaf Books

Minneapolis

BODY BECOMING

A Path to Our Liberation

Copyright 2022 Robyn Henderson-Espinoza. Printed by Broadleaf Books, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email or write to Permissions, Broadleaf Books, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Published in association with Cathleen Falsani, www.sinnersandsaintsconsulting.com.

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-7357-4

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-7358-1

While the author and 1517 Media have confirmed that all references to website addresses (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing, URLs may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To every body who is awakening in these moments of catastrophe, confusion, and chaos, and to every body that has endured catastrophe, confusion, and chaos. May we find one another in a new reflective light so that we sojourn the paths to our shared liberation. I am not free until we are all free. If that resonates with you, then this book is for you.