Jo Luehmann
Writer · Strategist · Advisor
People rarely create the futures they intend. They create the futures their systems produce.
My work examines how power, belief, authority, and institutional life shape what people learn to tolerate, what they’re able to see, and the decisions they make. I pursue those questions through writing, speaking, and advisory work with leaders and organizations—helping them see problems more clearly so they can make better decisions about what to do next.
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Learn to see what you've been taught to overlook. Essays on power, belief, systems, and discernment, in your inbox.
July 20, 2027 · Colombia's Independence Day
Predatory God
Challenging the Worlds We Inherit, Creating the Gods We Need, and Building the Future We Deserve
Ya está en preventa
Predatory God examines a particular relationship with authority and power: one that teaches people to experience domination, self-erasure, and punishment as love. Christianity is one of the clearest expressions of that relationship, and I know Christianity from the inside, including through my years as an ordained pastor. Drawing on memoir, theology, psychology, history, and systems thinking, the book follows that same relationship into marriage, parenting, money, the body, and even the communities built to resist it.
St. Martin's Essentials · Hardcover and ebook
“Predatory God is one hell of a book, and I’m almost certain I’ve never read anything quite like it.”
“Hers is a welcome, important, and necessary voice.”
Bring this conversation to your community. Invite Jo to speak
Preorder bonus
Preorder the book and join me for a live virtual conversation before publication.
From the writing
What Are We Capable of Seeing?
What we see depends on what we know, and on who tells us where to look.
A room can't see what no one in it has learned to recognize. It also can't see what somebody recognized and didn't feel safe to say.
The more authority we have, the more our reading of a situation becomes the lens everyone else looks through, and the less likely anyone is to tell us they see it differently. The information we most need becomes the information least likely to reach us.
Speaking
Conversations I'm glad to have
For conferences, universities, cultural institutions, faith communities, podcasts, and leadership teams.
- Predatory God
- The relationship with authority and power that teaches people to experience domination, self-erasure, and punishment as love.
- Obedience Isn't Goodness
- How power forms people: what belief, authority, and institutional life teach us to tolerate, and what they keep us from seeing.
- The Futures Our Systems Produce
- Why people rarely create the futures they intend, and how systems produce the ones they get.
- What Are We Capable of Seeing?
- How leaders can see what their organizations make difficult to see, and make better-informed decisions.
- The Worlds We Inherit
- What people and institutions might build differently after being shaped by the systems they inherited.
Advisory
When the same problem keeps coming back
If you or your organization keep running into the same problem, the issue may not be effort or people. It may be the system. Every system produces results, the ones you intend and the ones you don't. I help leaders see the system they're operating inside and identify the conditions producing the problem, not merely respond to its predictable results.
For individual leaders
Strategic Session · 90 minutes
Ongoing Advisory · 3 months
For organizations
Systems Diagnostic · 2–3 weeks
Systems Advisory Engagement · 3 months
I work with mission-driven companies, nonprofits and philanthropies, and individual leaders.
About
About Jo
I was born and raised in Bogotá and studied systems engineering and literature at the Universidad de los Andes. I later earned a master’s degree in ministry. I spent the next sixteen years on the West Coast, most of them in San Diego, before moving to the New York City area, where I live now with my four children.
For nearly two decades, I’ve worked across religious, creative, nonprofit, educational, and philanthropic organizations—as a co-founder, managing partner, executive leader, board chair, strategist, fundraiser, and advisor. Most recently, I served as Senior Director of Development and Alumni Relations at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
Each of those places formed me differently, and so did the institutions I worked inside. Much of my writing starts there: with the distance between what a system promises and what it actually produces, and with what people learn to call normal along the way.
I write about how systems shape people and what we might build differently.
Contact
Invitations and inquiries
For advisory inquiries, podcast and interview requests, speaking invitations, and press, use the form below. Tell me who you are, the organization or audience you represent, and what you'd like to discuss.
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