The Kinship Collective with Mark Fields

What if Mary didn't consent to Christmas?  What if when the angel approached her, honoring her with the awe and wonder that they did, and she said "NO"? This week we have a really meaningful conversation with Dr. Christy Bauman. Christy is an author, teacher and psychotherapist. A mother of 4, fierce dreamer and passionate about advocating for women. She spends most of her time researching an...

What do you do when the label and the beliefs that used to describe you well, no longer hold up for you? This week we have an exploratory conversation with Savannah Rae Carreno, an incredible sista who researches the impacts of American religion and founded Please Elaborate. We talk about her hospitable upbringing and her decision to no longer identify as Christian. Then we think about Paul and hi...

We all really want justice that transforms communities and makes things equitable and enjoyable for everyone! This week we have a meaningful conversation with PhD candidate Phill Allen Jr., who researches and writes on issues at the intersection of theology, ethics, race and culture. We talk about his newest book “The Prophetic Lens- The Camera and Black moral agency from MLK to Darnella Frazier”...

Every human needs a place to call home, a place they belong to that also belongs to them, whether they own it or not. This week we had an incredible conversation about housing equity with Michelle White.  After Michelle obtained her Juris Doctorate from Rutgers she served the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, eventually focusing on several housing related roles.  Michelle is n...

We have all chosen to hide our flaws rather than be fully seen at one point or another.  Many of us have matured to a point where we chose to be fully seen and fully loved instead of putting on a mask to gain conditional acceptance.  Our guest this week shares her story. This week we had an incredible conversation about disability with Liz Staszak. Liz shared with us her experience of gr...

What if you followed that passion in your heart two steps forward?  What would those two small steps be and what could be the outcome? This episode is about the dignity and compassion that is unleashed when we follow our compassion in the face of fear! Sammy Hammork started the Precious Kids Center by caring for one child with disabilities in Kenya. Her organization now serves hundreds of kid...

What does it really mean that God has “a plan” for our lives? Is it disempowering? Does knowing God has a plan give us more agency and creativity, or does it disempower us as we wait for God’s movement? This week we get to hang with Kendall and Deven Hollimon. Two young professionals who share their journey of faith and how their Christian beliefs have evolved after high school in the real world o...

Empathy and solidarity for us look like listening to the voices of our sisters experiencing this moment and following their lead as they define reality and invite us to fight alongside them. This week we get to hang with Angela Lee, she's a pastor and the executive director of Harambee Ministries. Angela shares her own experience of having an Abortion at 23, what she’s feeling around the overturni...

The word “homosexual” didn’t find its way into any translations of the Bible until 1946. This episode we get to talk with Sharon "Rocky" Roggio who is the executive producer and director of “1946 The Movie”, a documentary about when the word homosexuality was first translated into the Bible and how.  Rocky shares some of her story in the entertainment industry and about the personal fortitude...

It feels impossible to let others into the deepest places in our lives, the places where we feel they wont understand us, can't be with us, or won't be for us.  This gets even more impossible when it's something as innate and core to our identity as our sexuality. This week Candice Czubernat, the Founder of "The Christian Closet" and licensed Therapist, joins us again (check out episode 18) t...

Harmful understandings and practices of who God is make us question our ability to trust in our encounters with God.  These harmful beliefs about God also undermine who we are and make us question ourselves!  This episode's guest talks about his journey of theological evolution and how he measures whether or not something is aligned with God. Mark Chase is an Episcopal Priest, poet, writ...

Many of us have faced experiences in life that call the way we see everything into question. Some experiences cause us to question the very nature of who God is and force us to re-cognize who we are, how we can heal and how we show up in the world. This week Ines Velasquez-McBryde invites us into the trauma of losing her mother in a plane crash when she was a child and how that and the subsequent...

Shame, confusion and frustration can bubble up when we wake up to the harmful colonial ideas about faith and leadership learned simply by existing in Western faith spaces.  Many of our ideas about the kingdom of God have been intermingled with ideas of colonization like leaven working its way through the bread we've learned to make during quarantine.  Marcos Canales joins us this week to...

Sometimes we experience something that changes everything about how we understand God.  It can be reading a book that takes everything you thought about the bible and upends it, like our guest.  It can be experiencing "Church Hurt" and tracing that to harmful beliefs about God and one another.  Our guest describes it as corrupt code in computer software that changes everything. This...

With everything going on at the borders of Poland and Ukraine and continued need to support unaccompanied minors at the border of Mexico and The United States, we reached out to a friend to get a closer narrative to what it means to love our immigrant neighbors.  This week we talk with Lisa Barrios, a close friend and justice advocate focusing on issues of justice at the borders. She shares a...

Marriage is hard... really hard!  Two people enter into a life-long promise to love one another as both people continue to change, grow and become.  Two people bring their whole selves into an incredibly intimate relationship where cultural realities clash and sparks fly.  Our ethnic identities, personalities and family of origin baggage all gets unpacked in the context of marriage....

Several times in this convo the idea that something is understood to be true but never really clearly communicated comes up.  Religion and church can be a place where we experience a lot fo pressure to acquiesce parts of our identity to conform to tenets of White supremacy and heteronormativity just because it's in the air.  What if God is a beacon of diversity and all the diversity we s...

What do you do when Sunday morning church culture and the story it tells is no longer enough? What do you do when you are reconciling passion for Hip-Hop, Beauty Supply Stores, The Divine 9 and Theology?  What do you do when you lose your entire immediate family in one tragic moment?  Our guest this week wrote a book about it and we get right to it! Candice shares about her new book...

What's your purpose? This is a HUGE question, one many of us have trouble articulating and have fears about responding to.  It has implications for where we spend our time, how and what we are hoping to accomplish and most importantly who we hope to become.  Our guest was asked this question and it changed everything! Our guest this week is Dea Jenkins.  She's become an interdiscipl...

As we grow we can find ourselves at odds with some of the people who have helped us get to this point.  The wake of Trump's presidency and George Floyd's lynching have created extraordinary tension in relationships that seemed meaningful.  We have found ourselves drawing new lines in the sand and wondering who will really be with us? Our guest this week is Andre Henry!  He's a proli...

We are flat out asking bigger and better questions.  We have access to so much more information and our relationships are growing more and more diverse in ways that call our understanding of God into question.  However, religion and spirituality are such deeply held beliefs that changing them can be disruptive and disorienting.  Our guest this week is Brandi Miller, the founder and...

George Floyd's murder galvanized many of us to take the work of racial reconciliation more seriously.  The challenge is the work is really long, really up-hill and really hard.  Our guest this week, John Williams, has been at this work for over 30 years.  He is a lawyer, professor, civil rights activist and the Director for the Center for Racial Reconciliation at Fellowship Church....

Whether you've been fired or not, you know the sting of rejection, feeling unaligned with a company you're working for and the tension that can create all around.  Our guest this week shares about how being fired from her job ended up unleashing her into a new dream! Meet April Diaz, she is the Founder and CEO of Ezer + Co. which is a coaching company that's all about activating women to live and...

Danté Stewart is an author, writer, speaker, husband and dad whose voice has been featured on The New York Times, The Washington Post, ESPN's The Undefeated and more.  We sat down with Danté to talk about his book "Shoutin' In The Fire" and he shared about how telling his story instigated new kinds of comparison, anxiety and depression.  Danté shared who and what practices most reorient him to his...

We sat down with Christena Cleveland Ph. D. to talk about her new book "God is a Black Woman".  She shared how her recovery journey with Bulimia led to being able to name the God she needed, expedited her deconstruction and instigated a pilgrimage to know more deeply the Sacred Black Feminine.  Then we reimagined Genesis 16:7-14 and the extraordinary dignity honored in Hagar and the invitation to...