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DISCIPLES SEMINARY FOUNDATION - Supporting the formation of emerging theological leaders
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WEBINARS
DSF is excited to host engaging webinars that bring valuable insights and learning opportunities to our community. Be sure to check this page regularly for announcements about upcoming sessions — you won’t want to miss what’s next!
Upcoming:
What happens when we unbind the Bible and let it speak afresh into today’s questions around gender, identity, and inclusion? We know Disciples love the Bible and that our DSF alums and friends desire more justice in the world – this is a way to put those two together.
We invite you to find out at a brand-new workshop hosted by DSF:
Unbinding the Bible: A Trans-Affirming Approach to Scripture
Tuesday, September 23
10 a.m. Pacific/1 p.m. Eastern
Live on Zoom (2 hours)
This workshop is designed for clergy, seminarians, and lay leaders who want to engage Scripture more deeply through a lens that affirms and celebrates trans lives. Whether or not you identify as trans, you are welcome.
Together, we’ll explore the rich world of trans biblical interpretation so that you can apply it in your personal life and in your communities.
Featuring the co-editors of the groundbreaking volume Trans Biblical – J. Marchal, Melissa Harl Sellew, and DSF alum Katy E. Valentine – this event will open up new ways of seeing familiar texts—and help you bring them to life in your context.
Email info@dsf.edu for more information.
About the Speakers:
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 with 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, plus a proud DSF alum and staff member. 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 now lives in the homeland of Alexander Campbell and loves facilitating more spirituality in the world.
Joseph A. Marchal is Professor of Religious Studies and affiliated faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at a state university in the midwest of the USA. 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. In addition to Trans Biblical, they are the author, editor, or coeditor of 12 books. Solo-authored works include Appalling Bodies: Queer Figures Before and After Paul’s Letters (2020) and edited projects include 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. 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” (how disgust, trauma, and loss/mourning might just be better cues into practices of solidarity in ancient assemblies, and maybe also now).