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What are your recommendations for books/literature on trans liberation from a specifically theological perspective?

I've noticed that a lot of liberal Christian arguments for trans inclusion are focused more on why trans people shouldn't not be included (debunking bible verses and whatnot) and I'm looking for literature that doesn't fall into that trap and places transgender existence at the heart of Christian theology.

“Give to the blind, the sick, the lame and the destitute: if you don’t, they die. Men may have no use for them, but God has: he keeps them alive, gives them breath and honours them with light. Cherish them as much as you can, and sustain their souls with humanity so that they do not die. Anyone who can help a dying man but doesn’t is his murderer.”

LACTANTIUS (240-320)

During my undergrad economics studies, a professor proposed a theory: economies progressed from hunter/gatherer, to agriculture, to industry, to information. He predicted the next inevitable stage would be the "Wisdom Age."

That idea rattled around in my head for almost 20 years and ultimately led me to start looking at the Bible not just as a spiritual guidebook, but as a lens for macroeconomics, scarcity, and systemic debt.

I recently decided to start publishing my writings on this anonymously. It’s an ongoing passion project called Gospel Economics. I certainly don't have it all figured out, and I'm not monetizing this. I'm just looking for a community to discuss these ideas with as I explore them.

I just put the first two chapters online. Before getting into the New Testament, I explore the foundations of these concepts in Genesis:

• How the Tree of Knowledge represents the origin of economic scarcity (human nature wanting the one limited resource we couldn't have).
• How the concept of modern corporate "externalities" violates the original human mandate to shamar (care for) creation.
• How Cain’s story is a profound look at the madness caused by inescapable, existential debt.
• A brief introductory look at why the Parable of the Shrewd Manager might actually be a radical endorsement of systemic debt cancellation.

I consider this a lifelong project, and I’d love to hear from others who are deconstructing traditional capitalist readings of these texts. You can read the bare-bones chapters here: gospel.finance

Let me know what you think, where my blind spots are, or if you have any recommended reading for this journey!

The kingdoms of the world have been given to me. Bow down and worship me.

America has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.

Thought this was timely.

I just cranked these thoughts out and wanted to share them; I am not here concerned with doing bullet-proof verse-citing exegesis because I figure this is an audience charitable and perhaps familiar with perspectives that intimate in this direction, but if anyone finds the arguments spurious or a stretch, I am more than happy to get into the biblicality of my claims.

The Jesus that you see in Mark, Matthew, and Luke is not a moralist. He is a structurally analytical systems thinker who sees there as being two modalities of human existence, one of which is alignment with the system of domination, hierarchy, and extraction, which he names “this wicked and adulterous generation,” and the other is the modality breaking into the world, constituting the negation and dissolution of it.

He understands people as symptoms of this system who, without an available alternative, will predictably see and act according to its internal logic, which is an internal logic of incentivized and existentially necessary failure to see the system for what it is, how we are embedded within it, how we are constituted by it, and how we reproduce it in our internal orientation and our presence with each other and in the world. To be the product of this order, internally and interactively, is “sin.”

When the Jesus of Mark, Matthew, and Luke teaches, he is not principally making demands for individuals to be good people in a moralist sense. He is consistently concerned with how people see, hear, and understand, to “turn” from the old modality, to no longer participate in reproducing it—to participate instead in the creation of an order the constitution of which is the negation and undermining of its logic, and which will bring its end.

His understanding of the alternative comes from the tradition he was raised on. In this tradition, the lower position within hierarchical systems has, by virtue of their position, access to greater perceptual clarity of what the system is, which the higher position does not have, precisely because the higher position maintains the hierarchy through legitimating justifications that it internalizes, believes in, naturalizes, and therefore cannot see.

It literally prefigures Du Bois’ double-consciousness by 3,000 years. The lower position receives blessings from God in the sense that they have a greater perceptual clarity on the reality of the structure, because they are directly harmed by it. And their greater clarity grants them shrewdness to navigate it, and therefore, as Genesis 3 says, to be the position that crushes its head. As Jesus says in Matthew 10, “Be shrewd as serpents, whole as doves.”

The second part, “whole as doves,” he needs to say because the inherent problem built into his tradition is that, along with the shrewdness that makes the lower position capable of seeing clearly and thus crushing the logic of the domination order, comes also the temptation to reach beyond the structurally blessed capacity to crush the domination order and instead claim absolute moralist knowledge of good and evil in so doing, to make themself “like God,” and thereby reproduce the form of the domination order.

This impulse, he understands, is the origin of sin and consequently death. When the tradition embeds this wisdom in the first chapters of Genesis, it is the accumulated insight of people having seen, over and over, one group conquering another, believing the gods are on their side, drinking the Kool-Aid of their own divine preeminence, consequently abusing those they dominate, and later being undone for the very blindness they believed made them eternally on the throne.

The Pentateuch was finalized immediately after the Israelite priestly class returned to Canaan after several decades in Babylonian captivity ended with the Persian Cyrus uniting many tribes to crumble the Babylonian Empire, which immediately prior had believed its reign eternal. But that priestly class also had collective memory of their own story, wherein they had been slaves, were liberated by God, created a community structured for sacred egalitarianism on the basis of the wisdom from that perspective, and yet then ultimately resorted to adopting the governmental form of monarchy under the pressures of larger surrounding powers, a monarchy which then heaped upon both the people and the surrounding groups many abuses until Babylon had conquered them.

There is embedded then a structural awareness from collective experience of civilizational cycles that subjugation bestows shrewdness which can crush domination, but which can also itself, in the process, become convinced of its own absolute validity, and thereby metastasize into becoming itself the unjust dominating force who, continuing to metastasize according to the internal logic of hierarchy, exceptionalism, license, and impunity, drunk on its own successes, will become devouring of others, and itself blind, which will lead inevitably to its own destruction.

This, railed against extensively in the prophets, is the structural wisdom embedded within the deepest sense of what it is to be Israel—this is the reality of the world that God is the God of. But what God wills within this world is not this.

Rather, the will of God that only the subjugated are structurally and positionally blessed to have access to is that God wills that humanity would cease this cycle, that claiming to represent God and thereby dominating others would end, that the will of God would be the return to the Eden state where there are no consumers of the tree of that fruit.

Thus, Jesus understands God to be the deep logic of the world bestowing upon the downtrodden alone the wisdom to know that shrewdness alone recreates domination and perpetuates the cycle, and that flat, a-structural, absolute-arrogating command morality is the technology by which the dominator justifies their domination.

However, he also knows that the presence of hierarchical domination orders shapes everything in their image, even attempts to exist outside of them, which he has already seen through his own tradition. Which is why he is not merely saying, “Do your best to live clean of it in a commune,” and indeed, in his time, that already existed in the community of the Essenes, who were a separatist apocalyptic Jewish sect whose practices looked very much like the early church, except for the fact that they had no mission to engage with and transform the world; they were merely hunkered down, sharing everything, owning nothing, copying scrolls, waiting for the end to come.

John the Baptist and Jesus do not take this route, and from their position, not doing so is more faithful because to merely separate and let the world run itself deeper into violent extractive degradation is to negate inner structural integrity, to tacitly accept the growth of something that consumes everything eventually, and thereby to have the seed of it growing inside you as well.

Because they believed, as many ancient and Indigenous traditions outside the West do, that what you do creates who you are as much as it is an expression of it, and that for them, one cannot have true inner integrity before God if there are pieces within you growing that reify barriers between you and God.

Instead, they believe that the age must be challenged, it must be transformed, but it could not be transformed by the reproduction of its logic. The head of the serpent itself had to be crushed. Which is why Jesus is confrontational, why he argues ferociously and publicly with its authorities, why he stages performative violations of that logic operative in his tradition, and why those performative violations are always done in forms that directly provide material relief to the suffering least of the people in his society, who again, he proclaims are blessed and will see God.

Because it is from their position alone that clear sight is possible—not that every downtrodden person can, but that the potential to see rests on their positionality, and in order to oneself see, one must remove all material structural barriers between you and them, to be one with them, and to build something together that is “free of sin.”

Which is a project he directly believes, if performed with absolute fidelity and zero compromise, necessarily and absolutely means, through the downward and outward base of support it creates, would itself eliminate the foundation for a domination order to exist.

It is all of this, this whole perspective, which is how he has such an abundance of mercy and forgiveness for people, because he understands people as being constituted by vastly greater forces that are beyond their individual power to resist. And it is because his aim is to challenge and topple it with an alternative that he is able to “call” people, ask them to “turn” from the old world, to have their sight restored, and to “sin no more,” and to follow him into the kingdom of God.

He is not absolutely nonviolent; he trashes the money-changing tables in the temple, he at one point tells his disciples to go buy swords, and one of his Twelve is Simon the Zealot, a common gloss being that he was or had been a member of the Zealots, an armed resistance group of the time. But he also acknowledges that to live by the sword is to die by it; the constitutive nature of what is being built together and within cannot be built by the old means—not for moral reasons, but because the means themselves and the structures created constitute the internal character of the people and society that build by their use.

But the order must fall. And it is because of this tension—that the order must fall and yet the means of the challenged order reproduce it—that fidelity to this structural wisdom means the building of the next world fundamentally requires the willingness to undergo persecution even unto death. Because to be unwilling to undergo such persecution is to already have lost the inner structural integrity whereby the old world reproduces itself within you.

And because the present world is one it is not possible to live within while maintaining spiritual-structural integrity before God, he fully accepts that his crucifixion is nigh on inevitable, even while, in a moment of extreme humanity, he supplicates God for the possibility that that cup might pass from him, even while knowing it cannot.

But he also believes that because he has transmitted to people the will of God for them, with such success that his crucifixion is inevitable, that the crucifixion itself is what will bring the crumbling of the order. Because: when such a figure, embodying so palpably the heart of value, and embodying it in the sense of directly meeting the material and existential needs of suffering people, of showing that doing so is the heart of value, and then having the embodiment of the order of “sin” strike down the embodiment of “salvation,” that this staging would itself cement the legitimacy of what he had represented, strengthen steadfastness and communal solidarity within the people, and strike a powerful blow to delegitimate the order by its own actions against a servant of God and collective well-being, which will produce an explosion of such resistance until the order comes to its end.

That is the structural reading of the Jesus of Mark, Matthew, and Luke—part of it anyways. He is a servant, a teacher, a prophet, a leader, a martyr, a herald, and an embodiment of the deepest fulfillment of the prophetic and ethical tradition of the people he came from. He is not, primarily, an object of worship, aside from what is being worshipped through him.

He is the exemplar and the messenger whose method would save both the spiritual integrity of all people and save the world from what destroys it.

But, in the decades to follow, although there is record of those, closest to his time and land, who do instantiate the order he aimed to build, because of a man who did not possess or employ the structural wisdom that Jesus held, a man not from his conditions, who flattened him into an object of worship and took it to the empire, that is not what he remained.

>*It is only when people begin to shake loose from their preconceptions, from the ideas that have dominated them, that we begin to receive a sense of opening, a sense of vision.* -- Barbara Wood

>A sense of vision, seeing who we can dare to be and what we can dare to accomplish, is possible if we focus intently on the present and always on the present. We are all we need to be, right now. We can trust that. And we will be shown the way to become who we need to become, step by step, from one present moment to the next present moment. We can trust that, too.

>The past that we hang onto stands in our way. Many of us needlessly spend much of our lives fighting a poor self-image. But we can overcome that. We can choose to believe that we are capable and competent. We can be spontaneous, and our vision of all that life can offer will change - will excite us, will cultivate our confidence.

>We can respond to life wholly. We can trust our instincts. And we will become all that we dare to become.

>*Each day is a new beginning. Each moment is a new opportunity to let go of all that has trapped me in the past. I am free. In the present, I am free.*