TransVersal

In geometry, a transversal is a line that intersects two or more other lines at distinct points. It doesn’t run parallel and it doesn’t follow a single track. Instead, it crosses through, connecting separate lines, sometimes in multiple places, revealing relationships between angles, and opening up new perspectives that would otherwise go unnoticed.
 

A transversal line in math creates interaction, interruption, and interconnection.
 

A transversal cuts across and through walls in systems and structures which allows it to break down isolation which can reveal new patterns. It doesn't belong to any single line but relates to all of them.

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Transversal thinking is the intellectual and creative practice of cutting across traditional boundaries including ones that are disciplinary, ideological, theological, spiritual, or social. Transversal thinking resists silo thinking. That means it challenges binary thinking, inviting us to think in shades and spectrums, not absolutes which in turn allows us to move past the false sacred/secular divide into the messy middle where real life happens.

This honors the sacred weaving of story, identity, and insight across communities, fostering dialogue between diverse ideas, identities, and disciplines, which allows humans to sow the seeds of transformation through unexpected connections.

In short, transversal thinking can be magical in opening new ways of being.

To think transversally is to ask:

How do systems of power intersect?

How does race affect gender?

How does disability impact access to faith?

What happens when we bring together science and spirit? ancestry and innovation? queerness and divinity?

 

It’s not about blending everything into sameness. It’s about holding our beautiful and amazing difference in dynamic relationship to one another and with one another.

 

The upcoming curriculum to accompany the book is called TransVersals because we are no longer to walk straight lines of acceptable forms of being human drawn by the empires of today or the empires of the past. We are weaving new paths and reclaiming ancient ones. We inherited a nation descended from religious decrees designed to build empires, which means we have the freedom to stop walking the path for our future that was imagined under the power of empire. To start, we must reclaim truths buried beneath forgotten memories and broken and suppressed histories.

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To be the transversal in an equation is to accept the role of moving across and through other lines, which can disrupt systems that are only programmed to divide and dominate, like empires. By connecting the stories that colonization tried to erase,

Our lives do not unfold in neat categories. We are race and gender, sexuality and disability, migration and memory, faith and doubt, all at once. We do not believe in single-issue solutions. We cannot believe justice can be found in isolation. And we have all lost the path if we try to build a world where believe any one identity, institution, or tradition holds all the truth.

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This is a book and a curriculum based upon it, about intersection and integration. It is a call to build a world where justice is not a distant ideal but a living practice rooted in relationship, spirit, and shared struggle.

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Here, we will intersect the lived experiences of race, gender, sexuality, disability, migration, class, and faith to disrupt supremacy (whiteness, patriarchy, sexism, transphobia and homophobia, and others) in spiritual and political spaces, especially those shaped by colonial Christianity and imperial violence. And that allows us to connect across difference to forge sacred kinship and embodied solidarity. It makes difference the best part of the "American" dream again.

 

The word transversal reminds us that we are not alone. We are many lines carrying many truths and having walked many paths, but still bound together. We do not need sameness for this, because we can reach the same place with shared purpose. But to get there we are going to replace the characteristics of whiteness like perfectionism in all things including others, and center courageous love. If we can release the purity and judgemental culture, we can find collective healing.

We are not following the lines they told us were safe. We are crossing them, because any safety in the stories and histories we have been told is tarnished by the stories that remain untold.
So we will remember and in remembering, we will transverse those stories in new ways, shifting the memories of the past to find a better path together.