Click here to join this online CLGS Lavender Lunch via Zoom!

Join us for a conversation with some of the authors whose writings are featured in the new book Trans Biblical: New Approaches to Interpretation and Embodiment in Scripture  (Presbyterian Publishing, 2025). As biblical scholar Ken Stone has written, this book “opens up a number of new paths in biblical scholarship. By highlighting the perspectives of trans people, the importance of gender variation, and insights from trans studies, the authors expand our understanding of both biblical texts and biblical interpretation.”

Our facilitator for this CLGS Lavender Lunch is Rev. Jakob Hero-Shaw, Director of the CLGS Transgender Roundtable and long-time faculty member of the Trans Religious Leadership Cohort, a joint project of CLGS, the Freedom Center for Social Justice and the National LGBTQ Task Force.

We invite you to be a part of this exciting conversation about gender variation in biblical texts!

Our Presenters

J Marchal

J Marchal (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).

Melissa Harl Sellew

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).

Eric A. Thomas

Eric A. Thomas is a professor, pastor, and public theologian whose research engages Queer of Color Biblical Criticism, Black Studies, and theopoetics. Eric is the Assistant Professor of Bible at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in New York City, and Pastor of Siloam Presbyterian Church in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.  His work invites us to imagine everyday embodiments of freedom, flourishing, and futures, alongside communities for whom such pursuits are impeded by imperial Christianity and its attendant logics of heteronormativity, respectability politics, and erotophobia. Eric is a graduate of Drew University where he completed the PhD in New Testament with concentrations in Africana, and Women and Gender Studies, and the Interdenominational Theological Center where he completed his M.Div. He enjoys naps, spending quality time with his spouse Carlos, and Rottweiler puppy, Zeus.

A CLGS Fall 2025 Lavender Lunch