The Black Modern Mystic Podcast

In this episode, I sit down with Rev. Dr. Starlette Thomas to journey into the heart of Baby Suggs’ Clearing in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The Clearing is more than a scene—it is a sanctuary of sacred refusal, a site where Black bodies reclaim their worth and where truth blooms beyond the reach of white theology.

Together, we explore how Baby Suggs’ sermon of self-love, embodied liberation, and communal healing continues to instruct us on what it means to resist, to remember, and to reimagine the sacred on our own terms.

In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Gary F. Green II and Dr. Amey Victoria Adkins Jones for a deep and necessary exploration of womanism as a holy refusal. Born from the lived wisdom and sacred insurgency of Black women, womanist theology refuses the distortions that the world—and the church—place upon Black bodies.

When society demands our contortion, womanism calls us back to our truth, our dignity, and our divine complexity. Together, we trace how womanist thought expands, critiques, and completes Black Liberation Theology through an embodied spirituality rooted in survival, joy, and revolutionary truth-telling.

Before the sanctuary, before the steeple, there was the Hush Harbor—hidden in the woods, humming with the breath of fugitives who refused to surrender their souls. Baby Suggs’ Clearing echoes this lineage of secret gathering and wild liberation.

This episode features Afrofuturist worldbuilder Nya Abernathy and elder Leroy Barber, guiding us into the deep roots of Black spiritual imagination.

We explore Hip-Hop as a contemporary hush harbor—a space where Black communities engage in embodied critique and spiritual creativity through sonic, lyrical, and kinetic practice. As with the historic hush harbors of enslaved Africans, Hip-Hop provides a fugitive terrain where Black people can gather, express truth, devise alternative epistemologies, and cultivate communal resilience.

In this episode, we join Nick George the Poet and Professor X to explore how bars, beats, cyphers, and choreography become ritual technologies. Through a theopoetic lens, we trace how Hip-Hop names reality, makes meaning, heals wounds, and imagines otherwise worlds.

In this episode, we delve into the ways our guests are constructing sacred architectures—projects, spaces, and ritual technologies grounded in alternative forms of intelligence and the survival strategies of Black communities.

Imagine this mashup as a mixtape: each guest offering a unique contribution, a lived practice of resurrection that animates their scholarship, creativity, and liberatory work.

Across these conversations, we’ve uncovered Resurrection Technology—the practices, intuitions, communities, and creative forms that are helping us build something new rather than trying to force new life into systems that cannot hold it. In this closing episode, our guests turn toward one another to ask the essential question:

Where do we go from here?