Explore every episode of the podcast Grounded

Is Black beauty culture just about what we buy? Or is there something much deeper happening when Black women get dressed, do their makeup, lay their edges, and show up in the world?

Inspired (more triggered because it PMO) by a viral conversation between Nara Smith and Emma Grede about why they wouldn't spend their money on a Birkin bag, I'm asking what we miss when we reduce Black women's relationships to beauty and fashion to consumption, wealth, and materialism.

From Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's work on respectability politics in the Black Baptist Church to Kayla Renée Wheeler's scholarship on the Nation of Islam's beauty politics, we're exploring how Black women have historically used beauty and fashion to negotiate political power, challenge white beauty standards, and articulate their own visions of Black womanhood.

Then, we're bringing the conversation into the present with two thinkers I LOVE: Dr. Kiy and the Zorine Truly (aka the Hoochie Historian). Through Black feminine cultural mysticism and hoochie history, they help us think about Black beauty culture as a kind of secret language between Black women and femmes. If you know, you know!

Chapters

00:00 Teaser

00:36 Welcome & Where I'm Finding Grounding

3:37 Is Beauty Culture More Than What We Buy? 12:16 Not Buying a Birkin is Not Relatable...

19:18 Respectability Politics & Political Access in the Church

23:05 The Nation of Islam & "Black Is Beautiful"

29:20 The Secret Language Between Black Femmes: Black Feminine Cultural Mysticism and Hoochie History

REFERENCES

Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Wheeler, Kayla Renée. “Becoming the ‘Mothers of Civilization’: Constructing Black Beauty and Sartorial Modesty in the Nation of Islam.” Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty 16, no. 1 (2025): 59–76.

Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “Ironies of a Saint.”

Dr. Kiy (@pinkiysensei) — Black feminine cultural mysticism (thefemininecitation.com) and the intellectual significance of Black women's beauty and aesthetic practices.

Zorine Truly (@thee_hoochie_historian) — The Hoochie Historian; Black feminine aesthetics, hoochie culture, and Black women's cultural expression.

What happens when you recognize spiritual lessons in Black feminist theory?

* And pardon my voice, I am losing it this week*

This week on Grounded, we're back to a 1:1 conversation, and I'm thinking about what Black feminist theorists have taught me about spirituality, how we see the world, and what it means to be human.

But before we get there, I'm also thinking through something a little more personal: why, as someone who studies religion and spirituality, I sometimes hesitate to speak about my own spiritual life without grounding myself in scholarship. What does it mean to move between being a scholar of spirituality and someone who is actively trying to live a spiritual life? And why am I so worried about sounding like a guru? 😭

Inspired by Jenn M. Jackson's Black Women Taught Us, I'm sharing two lessons from Black feminist thinkers whose work has fundamentally changed how I understand and inhabit a spiritual life. We get into Christina Sharpe's In the Wake and what it means to see the unseen, not just in a metaphysical sense, but in the histories, structures, and forces that shape our everyday lives. Then we turn to Sylvia Wynter, whose work challenges us to rethink what it means to be human and imagine ways of living beyond the values that have historically dehumanized Black people.

This is the first of what I'm hoping will be more conversations about what Black women have taught me about living a spiritual life.

Chapters

00:00 — Teaser: Is Black Feminist Theory Spiritual?

00:49 — Welcome to Grounded + Finding Grounding in Burnout

07:01 — Why I Worry About Sounding Like a Guru

17:11 — Lesson 1: Seeing the Unseen | Christina Sharpe

26:13 — Lesson 2: Imagining New Ways of Being Human | Sylvia Wynter

References mentioned

Carter, J. Kameron. The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystic Song. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023.

Jackson, Jenn M. Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism. New York: Random House, 2024.

Pollan, Michael. A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness. New York: Penguin Press, 2026.

Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.

What if some of the practices we associate with modern spirituality have much longer histories in the Muslim world?

This week, I'm joined by content creator, educator, and one of my favorite people to learn from on the internet, Shaif (@hotboyshaif), to ask: What do Islam + modern spirituality have in common?

We get into the histories of astrology, crystals, spirit possession, Sufism, and other practices that complicate the distinctions we often make between Islam and modern spirituality. But we also spend a lot of time thinking about a question at the heart of Religious Studies: What makes something a religion in the first place?

Shaif shares why he prefers to think about Islam as a living tradition and a way of life rather than simply a religion. We talk about the colonial histories of the category of religion, why I think we need better language than “cult,” and how colonialism, reform movements, and globalization have shaped what many of us now understand as Islam.

And, of course, we get into Muslimness. Who gets to decide what makes someone a “real Muslim”? What happens when the Islam you inherited doesn't look like the Islam someone else insists is authentic? And how might studying the history of your own tradition actually deepen your relationship to it?

One of my favorite parts of our conversation is thinking about how much of what gets dismissed as “cultural Islam” is part of a much longer history of Muslim spiritual and intellectual life. And what possibilities open up when we understand traditions as living, changing, and continuously being made.

Chapters

00:36 — Where Are You Finding Grounding?

5:14 — Islam & Modern Spirituality

13:48 — On the Word 'Cult'

22:08 — Black Muslims Labeled a 'Cult'

24:26 — Response to the Videos

36:47 — Hadith & Debate in Islam

44:29 — 'You're Not a Real Muslim'

59:19 — Where to Find Shaif

References

Anidjar, Gil. “Secularism.” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 1 (Autumn 2006): 52–77.

Asad, Talal. “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam.” Qui Parle 17, no. 2 (2009): 1–30.

Kugle, Scott Siraj al-Haqq. Homosexuality in Islam: Critical Reflection on Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2010.

McCloud, Sean. Making the American Religious Fringe: Exotics, Subversives, and Journalists, 1955–1993. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Find + Support Shaif

Shaif (@hotboyshaif) is a New York based content creator, educator, and 12th-grade history teacher with a background in Religious Studies. His public-facing educational content explores Islamic history, spirituality, cultural commentary, and popular culture.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hotboyshaif/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@hotboyshaif

What if astrology, magic, and the occult aren’t as outside of Islam as we’ve been taught to think?

This week, I’m joined by astrologer and student of the Islamic occult sciences Blaze-Maximus Al-Hakimiyya (@AstroByMax) to ask: Where do Islam + the occult meet?

Blaze takes us into a history of Islam and the occult sciences that complicates the idea that astrology, magic, divination, and Islam have always existed in opposition to one another. We talk about what it means that Islam takes the unseen for granted, the difference between licit and illicit magic, and how colonialism + modern reform movements helped change the way many of us understand the occult in the first place.

We get into astrology in the medieval Islamicate world, geomancy as the “science of the sands,” divination, bibliomancy, the astrology embedded in everyday life, and the possibility that some of us are already engaging practices connected to the occult sciences without thinking of them that way.

One of my favorite parts of our conversation is thinking about astrology as an intellectual tradition. Blaze walks us through a history of astrology that decenters Europe and instead takes us through Baghdad, Cairo, Alexandria, Timbuktu, Marrakesh, Delhi, and the larger Afro-Asiatic world. We talk about what gets lost when astrology becomes a consumer product rather than something we actually study, inherit, debate, and learn in community.

Chapters

00:00 — Teaser: Lifestyle Astrology vs. an Intellectual Tradition

00:59 — Welcome to Grounded + Meet Blaze-Maximus Al-Hakimiyya

03:13 — Where Blaze Is Finding Grounding

04:39 — Where Do Islam + the Occult Meet?

12:39 — Magic Is All Around Us

19:31 — How Blaze Discovered Astrology

28:32 — Old Astrology vs. New Astrology

37:59 — Geomancy + Divination

44:56 — Building Intellectual Life in Community

48:53 — Where Do You Start Studying the Occult Sciences?

56:14 — Where to Find + Support Blaze

References

Abū Maʿshar. The Great Introduction to Astrology. Edited and translated by Keiji Yamamoto and Charles Burnett. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2019.

Ali, A. “Head on History.” Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/headonhistory/about

Chireau, Yvonne P. Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Saif, Liana. The Arabic Influences on Early Modern Occult Philosophy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Zadeh, Travis. Wonders and Rarities: The Marvelous Book That Traveled the World and Mapped the Cosmos. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023.

Find + Support Blaze

Blaze-Maximus Al-Hakimiyya is a professional astrologer and student of the Islamic occult sciences whose work specializes in pre-modern astrological traditions from the Hellenistic and medieval Islamicate worlds.

Find Blaze as @AstroByMax across social media.

AstroByMax: Website, Readings + Classes: https://astrobymax.com/

Support Blaze on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/astrobymax?utm

When I was a little girl, I was CONVINCED my magic was just around the corner. Like at any moment my hands were going to start sparkling, some unseen being was going to reveal itself to me, and I was going to discover that I had magical powers.

Turns out, magic was a part of the world, I just coulldn’t see it then.

This week, I’m thinking with Yvonne Chireau’s Black Magic about what magic actually looks like in everyday Black religious life. We get into the history of conjure + hoodoo, rootworkers, mojo bags, divination, healing and harming practices, and why the distinction between “magic” and “religion” has never mapped neatly onto Black religious history. Chireau’s work traces how conjure and Christianity have historically operated alongside and through one another, including as sources of protection and spiritual power.But we also get into the little things. The kinda things I talked to my students about this week. Don’t put your purse on the ground. Don’t let somebody sweep your feet. Honey on the tongue. Throwing salt when the vibes are off. All the things you might have heard growing up without ever thinking of them as having a relationship to conjure, hoodoo, or Black religious history.

And finally, I’m thinking about one of my favorite things magic gives us: a different way of imagining our relationships with higher powers. What if relationships with the unseen can also be collaborative, conspiratorial, and a way of asserting agency in a world where so much is outside of our control?Basically, lil Iman was right. The magic did come. I just didn’t know it would look the way it did.

Chapters

00:00 — Teaser: I Built an Altar in Elementary School 😭

00:38 — Finding Grounding: Feeling Hopeful About the World

03:54 — I Always Thought My Magic Was Coming

11:07 — What’s the Difference Between Magic and Religion?

23:55 — What Does Magic Look Like in Everyday Life?

30:09 — A Different Way to Think About Higher Powers

34:04 — The Magic Did ComeReferencesARC

References

Southeast: https://arc-southeast.org/

Chireau, Yvonne P. Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Manigault-Bryant, LeRhonda S. Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

Greene-Hayes, Ahmad. "Hair, Roots, and Crystal Balls: Archival Viscerality, Black Conjuring Traditions, and the Study of American Religions." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 91, no. 4 (2023): 798-819.

Stewart, Lindsey. The Conjuring of America: Mojos, Mermaids, Medicine, and 400 Years of Black Women's Magic. Hachette UK, 2025.

Wells-Oghoghomeh, Alexis. The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021.

Wells-Oghoghomeh, Alexis. "Engendering Slave Religion: Methodology Beyond the Invisible Institution." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 90, no. 3 (2022): 579-598.

Pop culture: Monaleo, “Sexy Soulaan”; Sinners (2025).

What should a spiritual space make you feel?

This week, I’m joined by the incredible Rev. Ryan Lindsay Arrendell, the founder and pastor of Salt and Light Ministries DC to think about what it means to build and find religious + spiritual spaces that nourish.

Rev Ryan is doing something I find so awe-inspiring: building the kind of church she wants to exist. At Salt and Light, that means a space organized around radical acceptance, where addiction, mental illness, incarceration, abortion, sexuality, or any of the experiences we’re often taught to carry shame around do not make you any less loved by God or any less lovable.

And our conversation goes everywhere. We talk about building a church as a Black queer woman, hearing from God and following divine intuition, finding the altar wherever you are, and Rev’s experience observing Ramadan and attending Jummah. We also get into what to look for when finding a spiritual community: transparency. You shouldn’t have to guess whether all of you will be welcomed somewhere.

Rev. Ryan helped me think about church beyond the building, worship beyond Sunday morning, and how to find and build spiritual spaces that actually nourish us.

Follow + Support Salt and Light:

Instagram: @SaltandLightDC

Website: tinyurl.com/saltlightdc

Rev. Ryan Lindsay Arrendell is a preacher, writer, Emmy Award-winning journalist, and graduate of Yale Divinity School. She is the founder and pastor of Salt and Light Ministries in Washington, DC. Salt and Light currently gathers for monthly worship and community programming, and will celebrate its one-year anniversary on November 1.

Mayor Mamdani was publicly disinvited from 9/11 memorial services, and his dad wrote a book that helps us understand why.

We’re thinking about a framework that has shaped how scholars think about Islam, terrorism, and American politics for more than twenty years: Mahmood Mamdani’s Good Muslim, Bad Muslim. Mamdani argues that the distinction between “good” and “bad” Muslims doesn’t actually have much to do with religion, despite terrorism so often being framed as an outcome of religious belief. Instead, the goalpost moves according to Muslims’ relationship to U.S. and Western political interests, both domestically and abroad.

And, of course, there’s something pretty incredible about revisiting that argument now, as Mamdani’s own son, Zohran Mamdani, is navigating what it means to be a Muslim elected official who remains unapologetic about his Muslim identity while being critical of the political establishment.

We get into the post-9/11 origins of the “good Muslim/bad Muslim” framework, Juliane Hammer’s work on gendered Islamophobia, and then go further back to Malcolm X to think about another historical moment when someone who critiqued American politics, domestically and abroad, was also rendered a “bad Muslim.”

Both Mamdanis help us see that who gets rendered a “bad Muslim” tells us much less about Islam than it tells us about power, politics, and who is allowed to critique the United States.

Chapters

00:00 — Teaser: Why Mamdani Will Always Be a “Bad Muslim”

00:38 — Where I’m Finding Grounding: Being Back Home

02:52 — Who Is a Good Muslim? Who Is a Bad Muslim?

03:59 — Mamdani’s Dad Told Us This 20 Years Ago

07:03 — Who Gets to Be a “Good Muslim”?

10:55 — Gendered Islamophobia

15:05 — The First “Bad Muslim” People’s Mayor of NYC: Malcolm X

21:20 — Rahma Duwaji + the Moving Goalpost of the “Good Muslim”

24:58 — Where I’m Looking for Grounding Right Now

References:

Mamdani, Mahmood. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. New York: Pantheon Books, 2004.

Hammer, Juliane. “Center Stage: Gendered Islamophobia and Muslim Women.” In Islamophobia in America: The Anatomy of Intolerance, edited by Carl W. Ernst, 107–144. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.

Wallace, Mike, and Louis E. Lomax. The Hate That Hate Produced. WNTA-TV, 1959.

[Islamophobia, Islam in America, Muslims in America, Zohran Mamdani, Malcolm X, good Muslim bad Muslim, Mahmood Mamdani, religion and politics, gendered Islamophobia, Black Muslims, Nation of Islam, and post-9/11 Islam]

What do people do when they don’t agree with scripture? Especially when a sacred text, or the way it has been interpreted, doesn’t align with their own sense of justice, equality, or human flourishing?

This week, I’m taking you into my Intro to the Study of Islam classroom to think about that question. I start with an exercise I give my students using two passages about slavery, one from the New Testament and one from the Quran, and the little “gotcha” moment that happens when I ask them to imagine building a society based on those texts. Because the point is to get them to see that sacred texts don’t simply tell people what to do. People give sacred texts meaning.

From there, we get into Aysha Hidayatullah’s Feminist Edges of the Qur’an and some of the strategies Muslim feminist theologians have used when interpretations of the Quran don’t align with their commitments to gender justice, including historical contextualization, holistic reading, and the Tawhidic paradigm.

Ultimately, I’m thinking about something I really want my students to leave my classes understanding: critique, disagreement, struggle, and debate are not necessarily departures from religious traditions. They are part of how religious traditions are made, sustained, and transformed.

And maybe disagreeing with scripture is a much more religious thing to do than we think.

Chapters:

00:00 — Teaser: What Do You Do When You Disagree With Scripture?

01:55 — Finding Grounding: Taking Things One Day at a Time

03:40 — The Classroom Exercise: What Would You Do With These Verses?

06:04 — Disagreement Is Part of Religious Tradition

10:50 — Feminist Edges of the Qur’an

14:16 — Strategy #1: Is the Past the Past?

19:14 — Strategy #2: Sacred Texts Have Contradictions

20:25 — Strategy #3: Can Humans Be Gods?

References

Talal Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” Qui Parle 17 no .2 (2009): 1-30.

Aysha Hidayatullah, Feminist Edges of the Qur’an. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Kathryn Lofton, “Religion,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, edited by Sarah Hammerschlag (University of Chicago Press, 2025), 349-365.

--

[religion, scripture, sacred texts, Bible, Quran, Islam, Christianity, religious studies, Quran interpretation, Biblical interpretation, disagreeing with scripture]

Is it my manifest destiny to lose 40 pounds in 3 weeks?

I started keeping track. And on average, I get 5 GLP-1 ads DAILY. When I started really paying attention to them, I noticed that what they were selling me wasn’t just the normal skinny = health = beauty formula. A formula Sabrina Strings’ research shows has been used to racialize Black bodies for centuries. Instead, its promise to me was: You’ll finally be who you’ve always been meant to be. And that is where my scholar of religion brain starts kicking in. Because whenever you start talking about destiny and who someone has always been meant to be, you’re talking about religion, especially American religion.

This week, I’m thinking through three things that being inundated with GLP-1 advertising has taught me: what these ads reveal about our ideas of becoming and the self and why Serena William’s as the face of Ro is diabolically genius, why its feels spiritually unsettling to my own sense of self + embodied knowledge when the same platforms used to learn+connect are constantly telling me not to trust my body, and how GLP-1 marketing has hard launched an entire genre of social media content organized around being your final form (5 Things I Did To Be XYZ), rather than life as a continual process of becoming. AND IT’S SO BORING.

Chapters

00:00 — Teaser: What Are GLP-1 Ads Actually Selling?

00:31 — Welcome to Grounded

01:28 — Finding Grounding: Learning How to Be Unstressed

03:36 — What I Learned From Seeing 5 GLP-1 Ads a Day

07:45 — Why GLP-1 Marketing Feels Different From Earlier Weight-Loss Marketing

17:50— You Go Looking For Info, And Are Told Not To Trust Your Body

22:24 — GLP-1 Marketing Has Become Its Own Content Genre & ITS BORING

References

Strings, Sabrina. "How the use of BMI fetishizes white embodiment and racializes fat phobia." AMA Journal of Ethics 25, no. 7 (2023): 535-539.

Strings, Sabrina. Fearing The Black Body. New York University Press, 2020.

About Grounded

Grounded with Dr. Iman is a podcast for people who like their big questions grounded in research. Each week, Dr. Iman AbdoulKarim, professor and scholar of religion and spirituality, takes on a question about this human experience we’re all having, finding grounding somewhere between the spiritual and the intellectual.

Expect religion, spirituality, Black thought, culture, history, and whatever else the question requires.

New episodes every Monday.

Why does hearing somebody get read for filth feel so intellectually and spiritually satisfying?

This week, I’m thinking through Jools Lebron’s read of Jeffree Star and asking what a read actually does. What distinguishes it from a reaction, insult, belittling someone, etc.? Because to me, those are their own things, separate from the kind of speaking-truth-to-power, punching up, and critical analysis that makes a read *a read.*

I also think about how there is something spiritual happening here too. We get into the read as catharsis and collective processing, the flow state of reading someone down, and what it might mean to understand that flow as a form of channeling memory, experience, and a part of Black history long before there was a term for it.

Chapters

00:00 Teaser

00:27 Welcome to Grounded

01:03 Finding Grounding: Back in Atlanta

02:20 Jools Lebron vs. Jeffree Star

07:38 What Makes a Read a Read?

11:07 A Read Is Intellectual

15:22 Why a Read Feels Spiritual

Works Referenced

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903).

bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989).

Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t I a Woman?” (1851).

Malcolm X, “Message to the Grass Roots” (1963).

Jools Leabron @joolslebron

—

Grounded with Dr. Iman is a podcast for people who like their big questions grounded in research. Each week, Dr. Iman AbdoulKarim, professor and scholar of religion and spirituality, takes on a question about this human experience we're all having, finding grounding somewhere between the spiritual and the intellectual.

Expect religion, spirituality, Black thought, culture, history, and whatever else the question requires.

This, I’m answering a question I get every year: How do you actually get into a PhD program?

PhD applications, especially in the humanities, can feel like a behind closed doors process. So, I’m sharing the advice people were generous enought to share with me when was applying and what I’ve learned from helping others through the process.

We (me, myself, I, and you) get into how to identify programs that are actually a good intellectual fit, why I strongly recommend looking for fully funded programs, and why undergraduate reputations don’t necessarily translate to the strongest PhD program in your field. I also talk about navigating interdisciplinarity and figuring out whether a department really supports the kind of scholar you want to become.

Then we get into the MAKE OR BREAK part: you have to reach out to people. Cold emailing current graduate students and potential faculty advisors can completely change your application process.

Finally, we talk personal and research statements, including why you do not need to know exactly what your dissertation will be. What you do need is a clear research question, a sense of where you might look for answers, and an ability to explain why that particular program and its faculty can help you pursue it.

Basically, this is the PhD application primer I wish everyone got before application season.

Chapters:

00:00 — Teaser: How to Get Into a PhD Program

00:42 — What I’m Finding Grounding In: Intellectual Play

06:29 — How TF Do You Get Into Grad School?

08:37 — How to Identify the Right PhD Program

14:56 — How Interdisciplinarity Works in Grad School

20:08 — You HAVE to Cold Email

25:23 — Writing Your Personal + Research Statement

What did my students teach me about teaching?

This week, I’m reflecting on my first semester as a full-time professor and what I learned from finally reading my student evaluations. Can you tell the semester is fast approaching? I’m talking about why teaching really is an art, why my students wanted less lecturing and more hands-on learning, how they somehow ended up wanting *more* assignments, and I’m still committed to high expectations while meeting students where they are. And how that is NOT the same as lowering expectations (especially in an AI reality).

Chapters

00:00 — Teaser: Why I’m Tired of the “Students Just Use AI” Conversation

00:22 — Where I’m Finding Grounding

03:35 — What I Learned From My First Teaching Evaluations

08:50 — Students Don’t Want to Just Be Talked At

12:35 — They Asked for MORE Work???

18:30 — Where Students Wanted Me to Ease Up: Attendance & Hard Readings

It's one of those words people use all the time, thinking they mean the same thing, when that isn’t always the case!

As a scholar of religion who teaches about secularism, I’ve realized the best place to start is by talking about assumptions. This week, I draw on my own journey as a Black Muslim scholar of religion to walk through the kinds of assumptions I encountered throughout college, graduate school, and becoming a professor, and how those assumptions reveal what secularism is and how it functions.

The takeaway is that rather than treating secularism as simply the separation of church and state, it is best understood by paying attention to the "common sense" assumptions that organize our lives and determine whose knowledge really counts.

This conversation is just the start, but one that has deeply reshaped how I understand scholarship, Black thought, and the relationship between spirituality and intellectual life.

Chapters

00:00 — Teaser: Secularism Was Never Meant for Me

00:30 — Grounding in Traveling with the Girls

03:06 — This Week's Question: What Is Secularism?

10:37 — Assumption #1: Outsiders Are Experts, Insiders Know Less

14:55 — Assumption #2: People Want You to Tell Familiar Stories

20:36 — Assumption #3: There Is No Separation Between the Spiritual and the Intellectual

This week, we're answering the question: How do you strengthen your intuition?

Over the past few weeks, we've explored intuition through philosophy, Black thought, and management studies. This week, I wanted to do something different and answer that question through my own life.

I share the three practices that have most transformed my relationship to intuition over the past five years: developing a relationship with myself via journaling, learning to distinguish what I want from what other people want for me, and embracing the conflict that comes from actually acting on what my intuition tells me.

Along the way, I reflect on journaling, therapy, prayer, graduate school, learning to trust myself as a scholar of Black Muslim thought, and why I want all my women and femmes to leave behind the idea that there is redemption in our suffering (which is a huge barrier to developing clear intuition).

This week, we're answering the question: Is intuition a sign of expertise?

Building on last week's conversation about intuition as evidence in psychology, I turn to another field that has spent decades studying intuition: management and organizational learning.

I explore an argument I found really compelling: that intuition is often the outcome of expertise. In other words, the people we think of as "intuitive" are frequently drawing on years of disciplined observation, tacit knowledge, and experience.

But as a scholar of religion and Black intellectual history, I’m also interested in where that understanding falls short. What happens when intuition is understood only as something that comes out of experience + expertise… and not forms of knowledge beyond the self? Like higher powers, ancestors, the unseen, Allah, the divine, etc.

Chapters

00:00 — Grounding in Knowing Who You Are When Things Go Left

10:58 — This Week's Question: Is Intuition a Sign of Expertise?

13:09 — Intuition as Creative Insight

16:42 — Intuition as an Outcome of Expertise

27:40 — What's Missing? Spirituality and Intuition

32:30 — Prof in the Park Announcement

RSVP for Prof in the Park 7/30 @ Prospect Park: https://partiful.com/e/PEwdmeIc0rwTtByx9tHH?c=OZ0f4dpM

Reference

Dörfler, Viktor, and Fran Ackermann. "Understanding intuition: The case for two forms of intuition." Management learning 43, no. 5 (2012): 545-564.

This week we're answering the question: What are two ways of understanding intuition?

As I begin writing a book chapter on intuition, I am getting right on how different fields actually define the term. Drawing on philosophy, Black feminist thought, and religious studies, I explore two distinct understandings of intuition I’ve encountered so far.

First, I introduce a philosophical conversation that understands intuition as *evidence* or a form of perceptual knowledge that helps explain how we arrive at beliefs before we have empirical proof.

Then, I turn to Black thought, where intuition becomes something much more than evidence. Through thinkers like Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, Louise Little, and Alea Lovely, I argue that intuition is also a method: a disciplined practice, a cultivated mode of knowing, and a way of making decisions in a world where dominant ideas of evidence have often been used to deny Black people's realities of things (and justify their dehumanization).

At the heart of this episode is a bigger question: What happens when intuition isn't just something you have, but something you practice and develop?

Chapters

00:00 Teaser

0:12 - Grounded in Navigating Adult Friendships

9:15 - Two Different Ways of Understanding Intuition

12:28 - Intuition As Evidence Conversation in Philosophy

15:09 - Intuition as Perceptual Knowledge

20:41 - Intuition as Method

References

Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000).

Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984).

Wilfred Little, "Our Family From the Inside: Growing Up with Malcolm X." Contributions in Black Studies 13, no. 1 (1995): 7–47. (Originally delivered as a lecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on April 18, 1995.)

https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cibs/vol13/iss1/2/

Mark Moffett, "Intuition as Evidence: An Introduction," in The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evidence, edited by Maria Lasonen-Aarnio and Clayton Littlejohn (New York: Routledge, 2021).

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Intuition":

https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/intuition/

Alea Lovely, Spiritual Shit podcast:

https://www.thelovelyalea.com/

Episode brought to you by me hating on haters of my fav podcast and a 100-year-old Black nationalist newspaper.

This week, we’re thinking about what it means to change your mind. And why doing so in public is one of the most important Black intellectual traditions we have IMO. I start by reflecting on my own relationship to honesty, embodied knowledge, and what I've been learning through living with a changing body with insulin-resistant PMOS. From there, I ask a bigger question: Why are people suspicious of folks changing their minds?

Drawing on haters in the comments of one of my fav pods (Pour Minds), the history of The Crusader newspaper, Malcolm X, and Audre Lorde, I show how changing your mind isn't intellectual inconsistency, it's intellectual honesty and a part of the U.S. Black intellectual tradition.

Chapters

00:00 — Teaser: Why Changing Your Mind Is Your Intellectual Inheritance

00:22 — Grounding in PMOS

05:01 — Why Changing Your Mind Is Your Intellectual Inheritance

15:33 — Malcolm X: An Example of Changing in Public

References:

Alston, Ashanti. “Be Careful of Your Man-Tones! Gender Politics in Revolutionary Struggle.” Interview by Hilary Darcy. Interface: A Journal for and About Social Movements 2, no. 1 (May 2010): 22–35.

Lorde, Audre. “Learning from the 60s.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984.

The Crusader. 1918–1922

Pour Minds (hosts Lex P and Drea Nicole)

This week has me pondering time travel.

Not the sci-fi kind. But the kind that happens when one develops intellectual relationships with people and ideas from the past.

I explore what it means to not just think *about* the past, but with it. Drawing from my own work as an intellectual historian, I share how developing a relationship with a single question can become a time traveling machine (of sorts). My questions (or Roman Empire as they say interwebs) are around Black women's spiritual and intellectual lives and the role of embodied knowledge in religious meaning-making. I think you should have your own too! And once you do, I discuss what I think really gets one jetting across space-time (intellectually, that is).

Chapters

0:00 Teaser

0:22 Grounding in Being Alone

3:36 Grounding Question: How to Time Travel

8:20 What I Think Is the Best Way

15:04 Desecularizing Time

18:09 So You've Got Your Question, Found Some Answers, Now What?

References

Ahmad Greene-Hayes, Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion-Making in Jim Crow New York. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025.

Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.

This week, we have a listener question! A lovely listener from Canada asked: What are your thoughts on Black Muslims making Islamic decisions?

To answer, I take a step back and ask a different question: What makes a decision Islamic in the first place?

I talk about what scholars call a "lived religion" approach to Islam and turn to Shahab Ahmed's What Is Islam? to think through how Muslims make meaning in conversation with revelation, tradition, and their lived realities. From this perspective, what makes something Islamic is not necessarily the outcome of a decision, but the meaning-making process itself. Why? Because the Islamic tradition has always contained contradictions, competing interpretations, and multiple ways of understanding what it means to live as a Muslim.

Of course, we also turn to Dr. Kayla Renée Wheeler's concept of "hegemonic Islam" to think about how race and gender shape who and what gets recognized as authentically Islamic, and why Black Muslim practices are often measured against anti-Black and gendered assumptions about the tradition.

Then, I spend time thinking with the one and only Dr. amina wadud as an example of Black Muslim decision making. Through her Tawhidic paradigm and her willingness to "just say no" to certain verses, dominant interpretations, and norms, wadud offers a powerful egalitarian framework for making meaning within the tradition and imagining more just Muslim futures.

Chapters

00:00 Teaser: What Makes Something Islamic?

00:27 Grounded in Knowing My Why So I Don't Feel Cringe

09:16 Listener Question: What Are Your Thoughts on Black Muslims Making Islamic Decisions?

10:11 What Makes Something Islamic?

19:23 Hegemonic Islam

24:55 amina wadud & Tawhidic Paradigm

32:35 — Muslima Theology: What Happens When You Disagree with the Norm?

38:24 — Why Crave Simplicity When There is the Capacity for Complexity?

Ahmed, Shahab. What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.

wadud, amina. Qur'an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

wadud, amina. Inside the Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006.

Hidayatullah, Aysha A. Feminist Edges of the Qur'an. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Wheeler, Kayla Renée. “All Americanists Are Christian, All Muslims Are Brown, but Some of Us Are Brave: Conclusion.” American Religion 2, no. 1 (2020).

I’m talking the talk and walking the walk this week by channeling an episode on channeling. I explore two questions that have become central to how I think about channeling, knowledge, and purpose: What do I desire to know more about? And what desires to be known through me?

Along the way, I discuss my experience as an academic advisor and helping students identify their intellectual passions, intuition as method, and moments when research reaches back.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Teaser: Wanna Channel?

00:32 Finding Grounding in the Flow

02:28 What Is Channeling? 2 Questions

11:37 What Is Your Medium

15:49 Intuition as Method

19:46 How to Vonnect with Me

REFERENCE

Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories, Duke University Press, 2021.

Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects, Duke University Press, 2007.

Episode 1: Where Do You Know From?

Episode 4: Listener Question: How to Make a Writing Practice (or Any Practice) Spiritual

This week, I’m thinking about self-determination: one of the most important concepts in Black political, intellectual, and spiritual life!

Starting from a moment of personal reflection on feeling caught in an ebb rather than a flow, I explore what it means to determine the potentiality of your own being according to your own sense of things. Moving between Black intellectual history and my own life, I trace how self-determination has taken different forms across Black thought, from struggles for community control over schools to Black nationalist visions of independent nations.

Thinking with the histories of Ocean Hill-Brownsville, the Republic of New Afrika, and Black Power era organizing, I reflect on why self-determination has never meant just one thing and why every attempt to live a self-determined life is necessarily messy, unfinished, and full of trial and error.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Teaser

00:27 Grounding in the Ebb and Flow of Life

04:07 - What is Self-Determination?

07:01 - Two Different Takes on Self-Determination in 1968: The Republic of New Afrika and Ocean Hill-Brownsville

19:01 - Self-Determination as a Lived Practice

30:05 - Self-Determination as Trial and Error

References:

Getachew, Adom. Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019.

Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.

For a good read on the religion of Black Power, I would recommend: Corbman, Marjorie. Divine Rage: The Religious and Political Dimensions of Black Power. New York: NYU Press, 2025.

For more on Ocean Hill-Brownsville, I recommend listening to School Colors, a podcast about race, education, and the struggle for community control in Brooklyn during the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis:

https://www.schoolcolorspodcast.com/brooklyn

This week, I’m reflecting on graduation, wanting to be a good ancestor, and a question that has been sitting heavily with me lately: How do you cope when ancestors disappoint us?

Starting from my own experience walking across the graduation stage and thinking about the intellectual ancestors who made my work possible, I move into a conversation about what happens when the people who shaped us also disappoint us. What do we do when an ancestor says something isolating, harmful, or contradictory to the liberatory futures we hoped to find when we went looking for and thinking with them? How do we sit with disappointment without reducing entire movements to individual lifetimes or demanding ideological perfection from people who were also trying to survive?

Chapters:

00:00 Teaser: Ancestral Disappointment

00:15 Grounding in Graduation & Feeling Different

05:39 How to Not Be Pissed Off at Your Ancestors

15:04: Coping with Ancestral Disappointment: Two Frameworks

References Mentioned:

Cooper, Anna Julia. A Voice from the South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Onaci, Edward. Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

Sorett, Josef. Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

For my note on the myth of charismatic leaders making and breaking religious movements, see: Richardson, James T. 2021. “The Myth of the Omnipotent Leader: The Social Construction of a Misleading Account of Leadership in New Religious Movements.” Nova Religio 24 (4), 11–25.

This week on Grounded with Dr. Iman, I’m thinking about writer’s block, perfectionism, AI, and one of the questions that most transformed my intellectual and spiritual life: What counts as knowledge?

Starting from my experience revising my first accepted journal article, I reflect on why mistakes in other people’s work have unexpectedly become grounding for me in a moment obsessed with perfection and polished performance. From there, I move into Black feminist epistemologies and alternative modes of knowing, thinking with Patricia Hill Collins, Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Kara Keeling, Safiya Bukhari, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

Together, we think about intuition, dreams, lived experience, gut feelings, whisper networks, and “what your mama said” as forms of knowledge that challenge dominant ideas about expertise, legitimacy, and truth.

Chapters

00:00 Grounding in Other People’s Mistakes & Processing Feedback

06:14 What Counts as Knowledge?

09:55 Who’s Knowledgeable?

19:50 Alternative Modes of Knowing to Rely On

29:18 Closing: I’m Graduating

References Mentioned:

Bukhari, Safiya. The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison, and Fighting for Those Left Behind. New York: Feminist Press, 2010.

Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. "Prophecy in the Present Tense: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee Pilgrimage, and Dreams Coming True." Meridians 12, no. 2 (2014): 142-152.

Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: New York University Press, 2020.

Keeling, Kara. The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.

This week, I’m joined by cultural critic, researcher, and creator Tahirah (@sincerelytahiry) for a conversation on what counts as knowledge, burnout, and why Black women are often expected to be everything for everyone.

We talk about Tahirah’s own spiritual and intellectual journey into this work. The conversation is grounded in her recently published, gorgeously written, and deeply vulnerable piece, “A Dying Star,” and explores what using the sun as a metaphor for Black women’s lived experiences reveals about care, labor, and exhaustion.

Our convo moves between questions at the heart of religious studies, Black feminist thought, and Islamic intellectual traditions: Are feelings a form of knowledge? What does it mean to trust your intuition? And who gets to decide what is considered “real” knowledge?

Follow the brilliant Tahirah on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Substack @sincerelytahirah and read "A Dying Star" here!

Chapters

00:00 Opening & Introducing Tahirah

00:28 Where Are You Finding Grounding Right Now?

07:07 From Pre-Law to Purpose (Where it Started)

16:00 Trusting Your Intuition and Inner Voice?

26:30 “Identity Politics” or Real Knowledge? Who Gets Dismissed

39:10 The Inspiration Behind “A Dying Star”

42:54 Why Are Black Women Expected to Be the Sun for Everyone Else?

Why do we feel spiritually stuck… even when life is going well?

In this episode, I open up about something I didn’t expect to be encountering post-PhD: feeling spiritually understimulated.

No books or reading, just a check-in on what happens when stillness can lead to feeling disconnected, unfocused, and even bored sometimes.

Things I am thinking about…

1. Why do we associate spiritual growth with struggle and suffering?
2. How can routines be a means of reconnecting?
3. Why boredom and stillness might actually be necessary for growth?

Chapters

00:00 Grounding Question: Why Do We Think Spiritual Growth Has to Be Stressful?

00:30 Opening

01:11 Feeling Spiritually Understimulated

“Why ‘Start With Yourself’ Is a Myth”

What if the idea that success and wealth “start with yourself” is actually a myth?

This week, I'm bringing a religious studies lens to the self-help industry and break down the buzz and backlash around Emma Grede’s Start With Yourself. I use it as a case study to think about how myths work and how the American Dream continues to sell individual success as the solution to structural problems.

I argue that Grede’s message reflects a gendered and racialized version of success often marketed to Black women and women of color, what I think of as the millennial-coded myth of the pick-me.

From there, I turn to Black thought and the Black Nationalist Movement, specifically the Republic of New Afrika, to explore alternative visions of success beyond capitalism and self-making. I close by thinking at the intersections of the spiritual and the intellectual as I try to define what success looks like in this new career chapter I am presently in.

Chapters

00:00 Opening

00:40 Grounding in My Own Version of Success

02:30 How Myth Functions

06:28 Emma Grede & the Myth of the Pick Me

15:06 A Vision of Success Beyond Capitalism

References

Kees W. Bolle, “Myth: An Overview,” Encyclopedia of Religion (2005)

Imari Obadele, Foundations of the Black Nation (1975)

There’s so much talk about the divine feminine out there. So what’s divine about being femme?✨

This week, we turn to Audre Lorde and Ashley Coleman Taylor to get a sense of what is divine about the Black femme through a Black queer and religious studies lens.

We talk about A LOT.

What’s the difference between popular culture takes and social media discourse on the divine feminine and Lorde and Coleman’s theorizing about the Black femme as divine? A lot. Most of the time, the girls are not talking about the same thing. And we get into how a lot of talk about the divine feminine defines itself over and against the Black femme embodiment like that of the rap girls (Sexyy Red, Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, etc.).

I explore how Lorde and Coleman Taylor’s work offer a beautiful and capacious understanding of the divine femme! You’ll have to listen for that! And how this definition also opens up a third option for how people answer questions about being Muslim and queerness.

Chapters

00:00 Opening

00:40 Grounded in the Baddie Routine

03:34 Grounding Question: What Is Divine About the Black Femme

05:51 Who Is the Black Femme

14:02 Divine: A relentless commitment to becoming on your own terms

References

Coleman Taylor, Ashley. "Religio-erotic Experience and Transoceanic Becoming at the Shoreline in Audre Lorde’s Zami." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 91, no. 3 (2023): 680–697.

We’ve got another listener question! 💌 This week’s: What do Muslims mean when they say, “I fear no one but Allah?”

Drawing on my research on Black Muslima thought and history, I turn to two thinkers who have given the saying meaning within the context of U.S. anti-Blackness, imperialism, and gender violence: Safiya Bukhari and Amina Wadud.

I discuss how the phrase has been a rallying call to struggle against tyranny and oppression, an action-oriented understanding of what it means to be Muslim and embody Islamic monotheism.

Chapters

00:00 Opening

00:40 Grounded in the Fact That It Is That Deep

04:59 Listener Question: What Do Muslims Mean When They Say, “I Fear No One but Allah?”

07:53 Safiyah Bukhari’s Escape from Prison

15:43 Fearing No One, Not Even Snakes

20:46 Amina Wadud and the Tawhidic Paradigm

26:40 Closing

References:

Bukhari, Safiya. The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison & Fighting for Those Left Behind. The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2010.

Churchill, Ward. Cointelpro Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States. South End, 2002.

Husain, Atiya. No God but Man: On Race, Knowledge, and Terrorism. Duke University Press, 2024.

Wadud, Amina. Qur'an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective. OUP US, 1999.

Wadud, Amina. “Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam.” Praktyka Teoretyczna 08 (2013): 249–262.

Why I think studying religion is a social good…

Bet you thought I was gonna say something like “it helps you understand the diversity of the world.” WRONG. If you’ve been here for a while, you know DEI speak ain’t got a place here.

Now that I’ve got your attention.

The study of religion…

Is the study of what people do and the meaning they give to those actions. And once you know that, then you begin to see how power and authority are cultivated, maintained, and resisted in this world.

You understand how myths work, you begin to see how systems hold power over you by selling you fiction they market as truth.

You understand how rituals work, you begin to see that the most impactful social movements and thinkers have all ritualized resistance in some way.

You understand how authority works, you start moving in a way that aligns with what you think should have authority over your life, not what you’re told should have.

You understand how knowledge is produced, you start producing your own and finding meaning + purpose in knowledge they’ve told you has none.

The study of religion is a social good because it helps one see the world as it is and turns your attention to all the possibilities of what it could be.

It’s the study of critique not rooted in despair or ambivalence. It’s the study of how the spiritual AND the material are one and the same. It’s the study of how the status quo is maintained and resisted.

Chapters

00:00 Welcome

00:40 Grounding in my own answers

01:59 Why is it important to study religion + spirituality?

05:15 Myth of the Millennial Pick Me

12:04 Rituals that give the everyday meaning

15:10 Authority to move how YOU wanna move

21:25 Knowledge also comes from within

References

Ali, Tazeen M. The Women’s Mosque of America: Authority and Community in US Islam. NYU Press, 2022.

Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1978).” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (2020): 53–59.

Pérez, Elizabeth. “Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions.” In Religion in the Kitchen. New York University Press, 2016.

Episode 3: What’s the Difference Between Religion and Spirituality

Episode 4: Listener Question: How to Make a Writing Practice (or Any Practice) Spiritual

How can you see the unseen? And does it matter if you don’t “believe” in it, as a scholar of religion?

This week, I’m thinking through how we, as scholars of religion (yes, that includes you if you’re listening), come to see and engage the unseen, regardless of whether we “believe” in it or can perceive it through our physical senses.

I also share how I encounter and draw on the unseen in my own intellectual work and practices, and what this has taught me about a much broader, more embodied understanding of the unseen. One that goes beyond flickering lights, things flying across rooms, or haunting silhouettes.

Follow me on socials @imanabdk for more of my thinking on the unseen.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction

00:40 The unseen tested me

02:26 What is the unseen?

03:28 Does it matter if I believe in the unseen?

05:58 Stop trying to arbitrate the real

12:21 Beyond ghosts

14:00 My encounters with the unseen

18:50 Broadening what we consider the unseen

Works referenced:

Ahmad Greene-Hayes, “Hair, Roots, and Crystal Balls: Archival Viscerality, Black Conjuring Traditions, and the Study of American Religions,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 91, no. 4 (2023): 798–819.

Amira Mittermaier, Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (University of California Press, 2010).

Safiya Bukhari, The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison & Fighting for Those Left Behind (The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2010).

We've got our first listener question!

How did you make your writing practice feel like a spiritual practice?

I break down three ways I made the dissertation writing practice feel like a spiritual practice: thinking about writing as channeling, ritualizing the whole thing, and working in some collective accountability.

I've NEVER been motivated by the kind of disposition that says "get up and grind," "show you're the smartest," "dominate the field you are in," or "be the best." It works for some people, just not me. But what has always helped me tap into the kind of discipline I needed in this moment was seeing the task before me as a challenge for obtaining spiritual depth. You mean I’ll get to know myself better through this practice? Develop a deeper connection to my ancestors? Think about my work as part of a larger tradition? Now that I will get up and do every day.

Works referenced:

For my reference to "archival ancestors," see Ahmad Greene-Hayes Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans (University of Chicago Press, 2025).

For my reference to "ancestrally responsible work," check out the amazing public, artistic, and scholarly work of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, including Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (Penguin, 2024).

For my note on getting started with ancestor veneration, I learned so much from Ehime Ora's Spiritu Come From Water: An Introduction to Ancestral Veneration and Reclaiming African Spiritual Practices (Hay House, 2025) and JuJu Bae's The Book of Juju: Africana Spirituality for Healing, Liberation, and Self-Discovery (Sterling Ethos, 2024).

What's the difference between religion and spirituality? This is the second most frequently asked question I get as a scholar of religion, next to “Oh, so you're a minister.” And to be honest, folks tend to be disappointed by my answer to both.

When it comes to the religion versus spirituality question, that is often because my answer focuses less on defining the terms and more on the question itself. I am fascinated by what is really going on in people’s thought worlds when they want me to distinguish between religion and spirituality in the first place.

This week, I'm thinking through my own experiences alongside Robert A. Orsi’s Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton University Press, 2005).

If you like the episode, don’t forget to share it with a friend and follow me @imanabdk on socials.

I have a very complex, sometimes maybe a little too intense, relationship I have had with time. One that left me extremely skeptical of the saying "we're our ancestors' wildest dreams" when I first heard it. I’m coming to this reflection during the cross-over episode that is Ramadan intersecting with Black History Month, which has got me thinking its time to heal my own relationship to time.

This week, I'm finding grounding in a beautiful concept written about by Alexis Pauline Gumbs: dream time. This idea really changed how I think about my responsibility to, as they say, use my time wisely.

Follow me @imanabdk on socials for more at the intersections of the spiritual and the intellectual!

--

I did the reading so you don't have to, but as always, I'd love to hear what you think about it too! Send me a DM or comment on the show directly on Spotify.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Prophecy in the Present Tense: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee Pilgrimage, and Dreams Coming True,” Meridians 12, no. 2 (2014): 142–152.

Welcome to the Grounded podcast with your host, Dr. Iman. This is a space where the intellectual meets the spiritual. I'm a professor, scholar of religion, and someone trying to find her footing. I will introduce you to the people, discussions, and schools of thought that have changed how I see the world. Together we'll seek clarity, not in passivity or bypassing, but in intuition, critique, and imagination. Some episodes are just me reflecting on where I'm finding my footing. Others draw more closely from my own research on religion and spirituality, tracing where I've seen others find theirs. And sometimes we're joined by experts, friends, and even you, the listeners, learning with each other and seeking rootedness together.

In this episode, you can hear me talking about the very new season of life that I am in and how I'm finding grounding in abeautoful question asked by Katherine McKittrick and Eugenia Zuroski, where do you know from?

---

References

I did the reading so you don't have to, but of course I want you to too ;)

Zuroski, Eugenia. "Where Do You Know From?: An Exercise in Placing Ourselves Together in the Classroom." MAI: Feminism (2020).

If you’re anything like me, you want your big-idea, smart podcasts to have some soul and life to them. But when you go looking for that in the more “woo-woo” corners, it can feel like everyone is promising to change your life or sell you something. And it doesn’t always feel grounded in the kind of research and intellectual work that makes spirituality feel real.

So I’ve got something for you.

Welcome to the Grounded Podcast with your host, Dr. Iman. This is a space where the intellectual meets the spiritual. I’m a professor, a scholar of religion, and someone learning how to find her footing in real time.

I’ll introduce you to the people, conversations, and schools of thought that have changed how I see the world. Together, we’ll seek clarity not through passivity or bypassing, but through intuition, critique, and imagination.

Some episodes are just me reflecting on where I’m finding my footing. Others draw from my research on religion and spirituality, tracing where I’ve seen others find theirs. And sometimes we’re joined by experts, friends, and even you, the listeners, learning with each other and seeking rootedness together.

So wherever this takes us, I’m really glad you’re here.

Let’s get grounded.