Grounded

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 Paulin...

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, B...

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…

Chapters

00:00 Grounding Questi...

“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 a...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 th...

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...

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 professo...