Excavations with Connie Chen

On this episode of Excavations, I'm joined by Mattie Mae, PhD candidate at the University of St. Andrews and Bible scholar specializing in gender and sexuality in the New Testament. We talk about what "childlike faith" actually meant in the world Jesus lived, who gets called childlike and why, and how that same language has been used to infantilize disabled people in church spaces....

This Excavations episode is a threesome on the sacred erotic convened by Tamice. Connie sits down with Tamice and Gary to excavate the erotic as root work, as power, as what the body already knows. Audre Lorde said the erotic is power. This episode says Jesus is Lorde. Dr. Tamice Spencer-Helms Dr. Gary Green   Support the show Topics: eroticism, spirituality, power, root work, feminine energy, kin...

What does it mean to live by Christian ethics without God at the center? What happens when Marxist theory meets the bars of Rikers Island, the wards of outpatient psychiatric care, and the walls of San Quentin? In this episode of Excavations, Connie sits down with Chris Alfonso (Jean-Paul Fartre), a Marxist scholar, organizer, and abolitionist, to trace the surprising theological architecture insi...

What happens when you stop apologizing for your body and start reading it as sacred text? In this episode of Excavations, I sit down with Ciarra Jones (@thegardeningtheologian) to talk about what it actually means to reclaim the body after religious trauma. We go deep on queer sexual ethics, the theology of pleasure, disability justice, Eve as liberator, and why so much of Christian tradition has...

What happens when desire meets doctrine and neither will back down? In this episode of Excavations , Connie Chen sits down with Colten Barnaby for a wide-ranging, unfiltered conversation about the tangled roots of faith, sexuality, and identity. They dig into what it means to grow up Christian with a body full of desires you've been taught to distrust, how worshiping a male God shapes the way...

Join Connie Chen and Dr. Tamice Spencer-Helms for a rich conversation exploring hospice work as a powerful metaphor for helping whiteness face its own death and transformation. Together, we reflect on the sacred interconnectedness of birth and death, the vital role of embodiment in spiritual practice, and the possibility of resurrection that emerges when we embrace grief, ritual, and our shared hu...

From the perspective of an Asian American artist, I explore the Instagram blackout designed to prompt reflection and amplify black voices after the death of George Floyd. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, please consider leaving a review here on iTunes and supporting me on Patreon .  If you would like to suggest topics for future episodes or send in comments, please email excavationspodcas...

Welcome to the inaugural episode of Excavations, where I share my response to a photo I stumbled upon on April 9th, 2020 and have not been able to look away from since. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, please consider leaving a review here on iTunes and supporting me on Patreon .  If you would like to suggest topics for future episodes or send in comments, please email excavationspodcast@...