Ep. 9: Spirituality & Social Justice

We discuss the topics of spirituality in relationship with social justice. We have witnessed that the conversation around spirituality is too often focused solely on positive thinking or the idea of love and light. We feel, as well as other scholars and thinkers, that this is a narrow focus and does not take into consideration the structural inequalities at play. Spiritual rhetoric often fails to acknowledge the barrier to access to spiritual resources or modalities. We call our the apolitical and ahistorical grounding of particularly white spiritual spaces. We also recognize that we are not the first to be calling this out, and give credit to the other scholars and practitioners who are doing work in this area. We dive deep into how we have been thinking about this topic for a long time and ultimately try to articulate the need for more complexity and nuance when discussing spirituality. We call for the need to have spirituality be grounded in social justice, and for social justice work to integrate spiritual practices as self-care.

People mentioned in the episode that you should follow:

Layla Saad- http://laylafsaad.com/ - @laylafsaad

Rachel Ricketts- https://www.rachelricketts.com/ - @iamrachelricketts

Susanna Barkataki (not mentioned but does amazing work in this field) - https://www.susannabarkataki.com/ - @susannabarkataki