In this episode, I talk with Rev. Dr. Starlette Thomas about Baby Suggs’ Clearing in Beloved and what it teaches us about sacred refusal, liberation, and finding truth beyond white theology.

In a world that asks us to hide and contort, womanism gives us permission to refuse. Womanist theology emerged as a sacred, embodied “no”—an expansion and correction of Black Liberation Theology, rooted in the lived realities, resistance, and revolutionary truth-telling of Black women.

Baby Suggs’ Clearing was modeled after the Hush Harbor—a clandestine site of spiritual fugitivity where enslaved Africans, under the cover of night, followed intuition and the hidden messages in the trees to gather in secret. The Hush Harbor is at the radical root of the Black church.

Hip-Hop is one of today’s modern hush harbors—a sacred space where Black people gather through sound, movement, and storytelling to practice radical truth-telling, embodied freedom, and honest grappling with the flesh. Like the clandestine hush harbors of our ancestors, Hip-Hop becomes a site of fugitivity, intuition, and communal expression that refuses erasure. Through theopoetics, we trace how bars, beats, cyphers, and movement function as ritual—making meaning, naming reality, and imagining otherwise worlds.

This episode explores how people are building sacred projects, spaces, and technologies rooted in alternative intelligence and survival. Think of it as a mixtape—our guests sharing their own experiences and practices of resurrection in their lives and 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?