My Story
Poco a Poco
Roberto has always been a reluctant leader—drawn more to collaboration than control, to weaving than commanding. In a world that often prizes certainty and hierarchy, their quiet insistence on togetherness has been a quiet revolution in itself. Their life, like their theology, has emerged poco a poco—little by little—through paying attention to stories, questions, and the wisdom that emerges in the margins.
Born in the mid-1970s in the piney woods of Longview, Texas, and raised in San Antonio, Roberto came of age inside Texas baptist churches. There, they first felt a calling toward the work of the church—but because of the rigid theology of the Southern Baptist Convention, that call was denied again and again. But where empire closed doors, wisdom cracked open new ones. A contemplative by vocation—the ability to listen for truth not in doctrine but in story—became a survival skill. In the face of exclusion, Roberto turned to books, devouring theology not to win arguments, but to understand what makes life meaningful, what makes love real, what makes community possible.
At age 16, just before their senior year of high school, Roberto survived a brain aneurysm and two emergency craniotomies. It was a brush with death that clarified their sense of purpose. They returned to school that fall and graduated on time, carrying with them questions that couldn’t be answered by easy theology. They began college on a music scholarship in West Texas but found themselves continually drawn to the deeper currents of life. They couldn’t put down their philosophy & theology books.
Eventually, they entered the Logsdon School of Theology at Hardin-Simmons University, where they met kindred spirits—teachers who didn’t just offer information, but who practiced a kind of wisdom that resonated deeply. It wasn’t about being right. It was about learning to live well, to live truthfully. This was the beginning of their movement into the wisdom economy: a way of living that values meaning over metrics, relationship over achievement, and imagination over rigidity. But, it would be 30 years before they learned about the wisdom economy and Narrative Intelligence!
From that foundation, Roberto began shaping a theology rooted in curiosity, compassion, and liberation—a theology that listens first and speaks only when love requires it.
An unfolding identity
Born to a Mexican mother and an Anglo father, Roberto has always lived in the in-between. Not just geographically or culturally, but narratively. From early on, their story refused to fit into tidy categories. Instead, it invited them to become fluent in ambiguity, to hold tension with tenderness, to read between the lines. This is the work of Narrative intelligence—the ability to interpret one’s life through the layered, complex, and often contradictory stories we carry—became a survival skill, a sacred art.
This capacity became especially vital during their college years, as Roberto began to navigate life as a mixed-race Latinx person who was also queer and gender nonconforming. The world didn’t offer many maps for such a path. So Roberto began to imagine their own—one shaped by voices on the margins, by unspoken truths, and by the ache for belonging that didn’t require erasure.
In 2001, they left Texas for Chicago to study theology and ethics at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary under Dr. Nancy Elizabeth Bedford, a brilliant Latin American feminist theologian. It was there, in the tension and richness of seminary life, that Roberto experienced multiple, layered coming-outs: as queer, as trans, and as Latinx. It wasn’t a linear process—it was a slow unveiling. Chicago became a kind of sacred threshold, where the plurality of gender, sexuality, race, and spirituality called them more fully into being.
They found themselves asking dangerous and necessary questions—questions narrative intelligence demands. Why is the LGB(T) movement so white? Whose stories are missing from the table? Whose voices are systematically erased, and who benefits from their absence? They cut their teeth on radical queer politics while simultaneously learning to read the Bible with decolonial eyes. Faith and justice were never separate languages—they were two dialects of the same desire: to tell the truth and to be free.
In learning to see their own story clearly, Roberto became someone who could help others do the same. Roberto’s attention to the stories that shape us was a deep part of his becoming Trans and Queer—not just the capacity to interpret his own life, but the courage to honor and amplify the stories of those whose truths have been denied.
Finding a place to live their calling
Still the reluctant leader, still the weaver rather than the builder, Roberto found himself pulled toward the aching edges of the world. After seminary, they stepped outside the walls of academia and entered the anti-violence movement, eventually working with crime victims for the Illinois Attorney General. This three-year sojourn away from graduate school was no detour—it was a baptism. It was where Roberto learned that injustice isn’t a moment or an incident. It’s not exceptional. It’s the air. It’s the water in which we swim.
And yet even in those waters, Roberto kept listening—for story, for silence, for spirit. This, too, was part of his emerging narrative intelligence: the capacity to see that violence is not just about what happens to people, but about what gets told—and what doesn’t. In that work, Roberto began to witness the deep dissonance between what institutions say they are and the harm they cause. They also learned how to hold space for stories too heavy for the page, too holy for metrics.
By the mid-2000s, Roberto had left the church—not faith itself, but the institution that could not see their fullness. The queer and transphobia they encountered had made their body a battleground, and their soul a site of theological negotiation. And yet, the call never left. The vocation of theologian—the call to interpret the sacred and wrestle with the unspoken—persisted. It whispered. It returned in dreams. It walked beside them in quiet hours.
So they made a leap. They left the Attorney General’s Office and moved west, to Colorado to begin doctoral studies in the study of religion and to study theology and ethics at the University of Denver and Iliff School of Theology. To return—not to the institution, but to the calling.
Moving to Colorado was a breath of fresh air in more ways than one. The mountains offered space for exhale. The dry air taught the lungs a new rhythm. And the faculty? They weren’t just teachers; they were co-dreamers. Roberto found themselves inspired not just by their brilliance, but by the way they taught—by the way they looked students in the eye, by how they made room at the table, by how they said yes, especially Dr. Edward Antonio & Dr. Ted Vial.
It was there, in those classrooms and offices, in footnotes and hallway conversations, that Roberto began to see clearly: religion is not just something to be critiqued—it’s something to be used. Not as a blunt instrument, but as a tool for tenderness, for transformation, for reimagining the world. They began to conceive of social change as something deeply spiritual. The study of religion became a poetic practice, a strategy of resistance, and a technology of repair.
And like all things sacred, it wasn’t about answers. It was about listening, again. Story by story. Breath by breath. Poco a poco.
Settling into leadership
Roberto completed his Ph.D. in 2015 and moved west to the Bay Area, accepting a teaching position in Berkeley, California. It was a move that felt like possibility—a chance to teach, to breathe, to speak freely. But then came the 2016 presidential election, a national turning point that shook Roberto’s soul and stirred something ancient in his bones. The myth of progress had cracked. The need for embodied theology, public witness, and shared resistance felt urgent, immediate, personal.
So they returned home—to the American South—to the region that shaped them. The land of magnolias and memory, of fire and contradiction. There, Roberto launched a new chapter of their scholarly and spiritual life: The Activist Theology Project. It wasn’t just an academic endeavor—it was a collaborative movement, a potential for gathering in time and space for those who believed that social healing could begin with honest storytelling. It was during this time that Roberto learned of the work of Michael McRay and what has become his work with Harris III, and Narrative intelligence became the heartbeat of the work—listening for the stories beneath the noise, the grief beneath the rage, the beauty buried under empire’s rubble.
As the work evolved, so did the name. Our Collective Becoming became the new vessel—a public theology initiative devoted to the slow, sacred work of social transformation through politicized healing and care work. It drew on Roberto’s commitment to relationality, rootedness, and prophetic imagination. It uses story not as illustration, but as method. Not to prove a point, but to open a path. To become…
Still deeply tethered to the South, Roberto remained grounded in the wisdom of red clay and resistance. But in 2023, the growing threat of violence made it unsafe to stay. The region that had once called them home now forced them into a kind of exile. So they fled—not out of fear, but out of necessity. They found sanctuary in a state that offered protection, and even there, the reluctant leader in them kept listening for what was next.
Now, with a baptist ordination in hand and prophetic imagination as compass, Roberto is seeking to live a life that stitches theology and justice into every fiber of their being. Their work remains the same at its core: to gather us around the fire of story, to help us remember who we are, and to invite us—gently, insistently—into our collective becoming.
Now, as a professor, preacher, and public theologian, Roberto moves through the world with a deep commitment to the wisdom economy—a way of living that values meaning over metrics, embodiment over abstraction, and imagination over domination. Their vocation is no longer confined to the pulpit or the classroom, but pulses in every conversation, every protest, every pastoral moment, every poem. Drawing from a well of interspiritual wisdom and queer ancestral knowing, Roberto helps others become fluent in the sacred language of their own stories. They teach not for mastery, but for liberation. Not to fill minds, but to awaken hearts. With each step, they continue connecting the dots—gathering fragments, honoring silences, and helping communities remember that theology, at its best, is not about control. It’s about care. It’s about curiosity. It’s about co-creating a world where all of us can breathe. This is the core value of another possible world that Roberto so deeply believes in.
Today, Roberto serves as a local church pastor in a small village in rural Western New York—a return, not to the institutional church of their youth, but to a reimagined ecclesial space shaped by tenderness, creativity, and justice. It is here, among artists, farmers, students, and elders, that Roberto tends the soil of community with the same care they once brought to the classroom and the public square. Preaching has become an act of collective storytelling. Pastoral care is an invitation to re-narrate pain as possibility. In this sacred, ordinary work, Roberto continues the lifelong vocation of weaving theology into the fabric of daily life, holding space for people to become more fully human—one story, one breath, one blessing at a time.
Roberto is a non-binary trans guy. You may see him referenced by his old name on the internet or on podcasts and books. Please use his current name Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza moving forward. Thank you! For more details about their story, watch their TEDx talk.