Scholar-Activist Encounter: Understanding Trans Biblical Interpretation with Melissa Harl Sellew, Katy Valentine and Joseph Marchal

June 29, 2025, 6:30-8:30pm Eastern US Time

How do activism and scholarship contribute to our understanding of Scripture in the world today?

Right now, the Bible is too often being used as a tool to misunderstand and malign those who identify as transgender and gender-expansive. In response to these patterns, and in solidarity with Pride month, CLBSJ is honored to welcome Melissa Harl Sellew, Katy Valentine and Joseph Marchal to lead us in an exploration of the history and future of trans biblical interpretation.

Dr. Sellew, Dr. Valentine and Dr. Marchal are co-editors of Trans Biblical: New Approaches to Interpretation and Embodiment in Scripture, recently published by Westminster John Knox Press. This session will provide a glimpse into this book’s goals and content, including an overview of the history of queer and trans hermeneutics in light of broader trends in queer and trans theory. We will focus in on several specific scriptures and accompanying interpretations as examples of trans hermeneutics. We will then spend some time in dialogue and contemplation on one of the book’s central questions: “what makes a biblical reading trans, or a trans reading biblical?”

This session will be hosted by CLBSJ Contemplative Traditions Advisor, Sr. Sharifa Vernice Meytung. We are also honored to welcome as respondents Africa Lynn Nesbitt-Gaines and Eric A. Thomas.

Please Note: This session will start earlier than our usual time, and the format will be slightly longer than usual to make more space for dialogue and contemplation.

Speaker Bios:

Melissa Harl Sellew is Professor Emerita of Classical and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her contribution to Trans Biblical is called “Considering the Body with the Gospel of Thomas” and builds upon her longstanding research interest in ‘apocryphal’ texts like the Acts of Paul and Thecla, the Gospel of Thomas, and other Coptic-language liturgical and hagiographical texts. In addition to Trans Biblical, she is also the editor or coeditor of several other collections, including volumes produced in honor of Calvin J. Roetzel and Helmut Koester, and is the recipient of a three-year NEH grant to support the digital humanities project Resurrecting Early Christian Lives as well as a Member and Storyteller of Telling Queer History. She has been an influential voice for change within the academy to support LGBTQIA voices, as well as a longtime foot soldier for many social justice causes — including opposing the Vietnam War as a CO, chairing her Presbytery’s committee in solidarity with refugees from El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s, and participating in “Falcon Heights: We Can Do Better” in response to the police killing of Philando Castile in 2016. She currently works ISAIAH, the Racial Justice Action Team and the Sanctuary Support Group through her home church, First Congregational Church of Minnesota (UCC).

Katy E. Valentine is a New Testament Scholar, an ordained minister and creator of Soul Forge Coaching. She puts her scholarship to work in her spiritual coaching through a Christo-expansive framework for collective healing of people with the Earth. Her contribution to Trans Biblical is an essay called “Putting the ‘Trans’ in Transfiguration in Mark 9:1–9” which explores Jesus’ mountaintop experience in light of metamorphasis and gender transition accounts from the ancient world. In addition to Trans Biblical, she is co-editor on an upcoming volume on reproductive justice and the Bible, and is the author of For You Were Bought with a Price: Sex, Slavery, and Self-Control in a Pauline Community, as well as numerous academic articles. She had her calling to gender identity justice 10 years ago, and while serving as associate minister at First Christian Church in Chico, CA, she fostered relationships with the Stonewall Alliance, resulting in the church hosting the week long events of Trans Visibility week for multiple years. An American living in Ireland, she volunteers for the newly established Clifden Pride events each summer.

Joseph A. Marchal is Professor of Religious Studies and affiliated faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at Ball State University. Their contribution to Trans Biblical is an essay called “Captive Genders, Fugitive Flesh, and Biblical Epistles: Trans Approaches to Ancient Apostles and Assemblies in the Afterlives of Enslavement and Imprisonment,” and builds upon abolitionist writing and organizing by trans scholars and activists and a growing body of biblical scholars engaging critical carceral studies. Their primary academic training was in feminist counter-kyriarchal hermeneutics, increasingly moving along postcolonial, race-critical, queer, and trans trajectories, building upon years of local and sometimes campus organizing in feminist, anti-war, and LGBTIQ+ efforts. Dr. Marchal’s current research projects circle around how “bad feelings” might get us a different sense of the people in the first century communities that sparked, received, recirculated, and repurposed the letters we now call “Paul’s;” lingering over the “edges” of these epistles and assemblies for vexing issues in the present; as well as collaborating on queer and trans commentaries and companions to the scriptures of Judaism and Christianity. In addition to Trans Biblical, they are the author, editor, or coeditor of 12 books, including After the Corinthian Women Prophets: Reimagining Rhetoric and Power (2021) and Bodies on the Verge: Queering Pauline Epistles (2019). Dr. Marchal also serves as a founding co-editor with Melissa W. Wilcox of the completely fee-free and open-access journal, QTR: A Journal of Trans and Queer Studies in Religion, and just completed their term as the founding chair of the Society of Biblical Literature’s first-ever Committee for LGBTIQ+ Scholars and Scholarship.

Africa Lynn Nesbitt-Gaines is an ordained reverend, artist, and theologian pursuing a Master of Arts in Church and Witness at Virginia Theological Seminary. Studying with academic distinction, she serves as Class President, Class Chaplain, and President of the Students of Color Union. Africa is the first Black trans woman to matriculate at VTS and will be the first in the U.S. to earn this degree from a seminary. She is the founder of The Lo Mein Lady, an Afro-Asian diasporic pop-up restaurant that explores culture through food, story, and sound, and the former owner of The Style & Finish Lab, a beauty salon rooted in Black creative care. With over 15 years in ministry and deep roots in community activism, she has organized around racial justice, LGBTQ+ rights, and housing access—including her work with Housing Works to fight for funding and legislation ensuring that people living with HIV/AIDS have access to quality housing, healthcare, prevention, and other lifesaving services. Africa blends spirituality, advocacy, and the arts to serve marginalized communities. She plans to pursue a Ph.D. in Practical Theology and establish a nonprofit that bridges interfaith service and embodied liberation.

Eric A. Thomas is an Assistant Professor of Bible at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church and a member of the Board of the Center and Library for the Bible and Social Justice. His research interests include Queer biblical interpretation, Diasporic Studies and Homiletics. Eric is a graduate of Drew University where he completed the Ph.D. in New Testament with concentrations in Africana, and Women and Gender Studies, and the Interdenominational Theological Center where he completed his M.Div. His research explores the potential for queer people of color to engage with scriptural texts to articulate and embody their own modes of flourishing. In addition to his scholarship, Eric is a pastor and an activist, having served since 2017 at the Siloam Presbyterian Church in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

Sr. Sharifa V. Meytung is a Catholic-Buddhist lay contemplative practitioner; teacher of young children; haijin (writer of haiku poetry) and an abstract painter. Her spiritual practice is also deeply informed by her ancestral animist indigeneity. She has studied in many community and academic settings, including Catholic Theology at the University of Erfurt, Germany, has published multiple books and multi-media collaborations including her latest, Said The Tiger To The Rabbit. She currently hosts “Our Changing Times”, a community radio program on WPEB 88.1 FM in West Philadelphia, highlighting Black folk music artists and the writings of African American essayists platforming the Black experience in America. In addition to serving as Contemplative Traditions Advisor for CLBSJ, Sr. Sharifa is also a Senior Teacher for the Chenrezig Tibetan Buddhist Center of Philadelphia.