Welcome to In Sacred Spaces, a three-episode series in which we visit spaces around New York City that are sacred to specific communities. For this episode, we’re gathered at the Chelsea Piers with members of the ballroom House of Louboutin: Iman, Ciara, Kalik and Shai, as well as Colby, who’s been part of the In Sacred Spaces team since the beginning. All five of them are LGBT individuals who grew up in Baptist churches. Some are now leaders in the Ballroom community and others are advocates for social justice. You can learn more about each of them on our website. They share their reflections on our first two episodes, as well as how they personally relate to grace, love, motherhood and community.









The spaces we visit in this series include historic Black churches in Harlem as well as the Chelsea Piers, a gathering place for members of the ballroom scene. There are many kinds of Black churches in the United States, with hundreds of years of history. Ballroom is a community of mostly queer and trans performers from ​​Black and Latinx backgrounds, originating in Harlem.



Join us as we walk around these sacred spaces with the people who love them. We discuss their personal journeys with spirituality, and how the spaces they’ve chosen to inhabit connect to longer histories of civil rights, women’s equality and queer and trans liberation.



We hope these conversations will connect with your own experiences, whether you identify as LGBTQ+, as a Christian, or as part of any other religious or spiritual community – or none at all. If you can, we encourage you to listen to this podcast while walking around a place that is sacred to you.



Our podcast team includes people with diverse religious backgrounds and a range of racial, sexual and gender identities. You can find out more about the team and the project at our website, insacredspacespodcast.com.



We hope these episodes will inspire you to reflect on your own unique relationship to spiritual experience. Throughout each episode, we’ve included musical interludes composed by Stone Butler, that give you some private moments to meditate on what you’ve heard.



In Sacred Spaces was produced by Olivia Branscum, Colby King, Aya Labanieh and Milan Terlunen, with musical compositions by Stone Butler and technical support from Evan Li and Ana Maria Rodriguez.



Thanks to our speakers, and to the church and ballroom communities, for inviting us into their spaces. Thanks also to María González Pendás and Chris Chang for their mentorship, and to Humanities NY and Columbia’s Heyman Center for the Humanities for their support.

Welcome to In Sacred Spaces, a three-episode series in which we visit spaces around New York City that are sacred to specific communities. For this episode, we’re at Grace Congregational Church of Harlem, with Pastor Nigel Pearce and his wife, First Lady Lisa Pearce. Nigel and Lisa discuss how acting with love shapes everything from their renovation of the church building to the spiritual values of their community.









The spaces we visit in this series include historic Black churches in Harlem as well as the Chelsea Piers, a gathering place for members of the ballroom scene. There are many kinds of Black churches in the United States, with hundreds of years of history. Ballroom is a community of mostly queer and trans performers from ​​Black and Latinx backgrounds, originating in Harlem.



Join us as we walk around these sacred spaces with the people who love them. We discuss their personal journeys with spirituality, and how the spaces they’ve chosen to inhabit connect to longer histories of civil rights, women’s equality and queer and trans liberation.



We hope these conversations will connect with your own experiences, whether you identify as LGBTQ+, as a Christian, or as part of any other religious or spiritual community – or none at all. If you can, we encourage you to listen to this podcast while walking around a place that is sacred to you.



Our podcast team includes people with diverse religious backgrounds and a range of racial, sexual and gender identities. You can find out more about the team and the project at our website, insacredspacespodcast.com.



We hope these episodes will inspire you to reflect on your own unique relationship to spiritual experience. Throughout each episode, we’ve included musical interludes composed by Stone Butler, that give you some private moments to meditate on what you’ve heard.



In Sacred Spaces was produced by Olivia Branscum, Colby King, Aya Labanieh and Milan Terlunen, with musical compositions by Stone Butler and technical support from Evan Li and Ana Maria Rodriguez.



Thanks to our speakers, and to the church and ballroom communities, for inviting us into their spaces. Thanks also to María González Pendás and Chris Chang for their mentorship, and to Humanities NY and Columbia’s Heyman Center for the Humanities for their support.

Welcome to In Sacred Spaces, a three-episode series in which we visit spaces around New York City that are sacred to specific communities. For this episode, we’re at St James Presbyterian Church and talking with its pastor, Reverend Derrick McQueen. Derrick explains how spiritual grace can give oppressed people a sense of their own sacred value.









The spaces we visit in this series include historic Black churches in Harlem as well as the Chelsea Piers, a gathering place for members of the ballroom scene. There are many kinds of Black churches in the United States, with hundreds of years of history. Ballroom is a community of mostly queer and trans performers from ​​Black and Latinx backgrounds, originating in Harlem.



Join us as we walk around these sacred spaces with the people who love them. We discuss their personal journeys with spirituality, and how the spaces they’ve chosen to inhabit connect to longer histories of civil rights, women’s equality and queer and trans liberation.



We hope these conversations will connect with your own experiences, whether you identify as LGBTQ+, as a Christian, or as part of any other religious or spiritual community – or none at all. If you can, we encourage you to listen to this podcast while walking around a place that is sacred to you.



Our podcast team includes people with diverse religious backgrounds and a range of racial, sexual and gender identities. You can find out more about the team and the project at our website, insacredspacespodcast.com.



We hope these episodes will inspire you to reflect on your own unique relationship to spiritual experience. Throughout each episode, we’ve included musical interludes composed by Stone Butler, that give you some private moments to meditate on what you’ve heard.



In Sacred Spaces was produced by Olivia Branscum, Colby King, Aya Labanieh and Milan Terlunen, with musical compositions by Stone Butler and technical support from Evan Li and Ana Maria Rodriguez.



Thanks to our speakers, and to the church and ballroom communities, for inviting us into their spaces. Thanks also to María González Pendás and Chris Chang for their mentorship, and to Humanities NY and Columbia’s Heyman Center for the Humanities for their support.

Reading today is typically silent - whether reading a book in a library or reading messages on our phones, we don’t expect the activity to be noisy. At most, we expect the sound of a page quietly turning. But Andrew Albin is interested in the medieval period, when books made all kinds of sounds. Medieval books were noisy: they crackled and creaked, and were usually read aloud (even in private). Andrew argues that we should think of medieval books not just as objects to look at, but as a kind of musical instrument that needs a reader to bring its sounds to life.

When you think about historical reenactment, you probably think about reenacting Civil War battles or performing a character at a Renaissance fair. But Catherine Grant is interested in artists who use reenactment to ask questions about the history of feminist and queer activism, and the role of artists in political life. By reenacting and remixing scenes from history, these artists revive stories from the past that might illuminate the present in surprising ways. Beyond the realm of art, Catherine wants us to recognize the power of performing repeated actions in our everyday lives.

We may think of reading and writing as opposite activities, but there’s a long history of people reading with blank books by their side so they could write out their favorite passages as they went. Deidre Lynch is interested in what these homemade books can tell us about the people who filled them up. Like someone’s Pinterest board or Tumblr blog today, these curated collections of words told a story about a person’s individual identity. Beyond that, they could also tell the story of relationships within a social group, with many people contributing extracts to a single book.

In the Bible, the Apocalypse is the end of the world as we know it, but it’s also the beginning of a new one. Jennifer Wilks argues that major catastrophes can be apocalyptic in the same way. A disaster like Hurricane Katrina or the COVID-19 pandemic can shed new light on the world’s social inequalities, which makes it easier to imagine them changing. Jennifer thinks that post-apocalyptic fiction can play a role in this process, by allowing us to think ahead about times of disaster so we can act to make things better when the moment comes.

Music can tell stories in a variety of ways: operas and musicals have characters and plots, a song can tell a short story, and even music without words can take listeners on a journey. But Randall Eng is interested in using unexpected texts like photocopier manuals and legal pamphlets to produce musical compositions that tell new stories. By cutting up and rearranging these existing texts – also known as “found texts” – he wants to repurpose the original words to transform their meanings and convey new messages.

During the Cold War, the US and Chinese governments didn’t drop bombs on each other, but they did drop translated works of literature. In fact, national governments put a lot of effort into creating translations that covertly served their political agendas. In the case of the US, this meant emphasizing values like freedom and self-reliance, with which they hoped to win the hearts and minds of Chinese readers. But while propaganda is meant to convey one simple message, Lamyu Maria Bo argues that literature can’t be reduced to a single meaning – and meanings multiply even more in translation.

A one-sided relationship is a bad relationship, right? Not necessarily, says Elaine Auyoung. She’s interested in what are called parasocial relationships, where we know and care a lot about someone but they don’t directly engage with us – like a celebrity, for example, or even a fictional character. While parasocial relationships are often thought of as inferior to regular person-to-person relationships, Elaine argues that they have a unique value. Precisely because there’s no reciprocation, parasocial relationships can allow us to engage with other people’s experiences without the obstacles of social anxiety or self-centredness.

What we notice about someone else’s language is less to do with language itself than with our perception of the person’s social status. This happens with kids in classrooms too, where teachers police the language of students with lower social status, while students with higher social status can say the exact same thing and nobody notices. This double standard can lead to Black students and bilingual students of color in particular being put into remedial classes that aren’t meant for them, preventing them from progressing academically. Nelson Flores wants an education system - and a world - that does justice to the many valid ways people use language.

Chronic pain is pain that lasts for months, years or even a lifetime, and doctors have a hard time understanding it. Not only is it sometimes impossible to cure, but doctors also tend to fixate on bodily pain and not address the ways pain is also psychological and emotional. In fact, Travis Chi Wing Lau argues that this attitude goes back to the ways doctors have been trained since the eighteenth century to observe outer bodily symptoms and discount patients’ subjective experiences. Turning to Travis's poetry, we discuss why we need poets as well as doctors to understand pain.

You may have noticed that music has been sounding more chilled out recently, with softer voices, slower tempos, and fewer instruments. From famous artists like Taylor Swift to background music for working and studying to, chill vibes are all around us. But Robin James argues that chill isn’t just a style, it also has political implications. Chill music creates a mood that helps us be more effective at work, allowing us to manage our state of mind for maximum productivity even as our working lives become ever more precarious.

The classic image of a reader is someone alone with their eyes on a book, ignoring the world around them. But Janice Radway argues that the communities we’re in can shape what we read and how we read. Reading is not something that only takes place in our individual minds, but an activity that influences and is influenced by our social world. From prison reading groups to caregivers who read to get a break from their domestic duties, people read with agendas and desires they share with others in similar situations.

When you picture a cheerleader, you probably imagine a woman. But in the early twentieth century, cheerleading was all done by men. Frank Guridy argues that the association of cheerleading with women is due to the growth of the sports industry, which has drawn ever more diverse people into sports previously dominated by elite white men. But increased diversity in the sports industry has also meant increased exploitation. Nonetheless, while the industry is exploitative, sports themselves don’t have to be: cheerleading is just one example of how sport can be a tool of survival and self-actualization for marginalized people.

Do you want to live a predictable life? Can great art ever be predictable? Most people would probably say no to both, but Caroline Levine thinks predictability is more valuable than we usually recognize. Predictability is like putting on your own oxygen mask before helping others: we need to cover the essentials, like shelter and a stable work schedule, in order to achieve our grander ambitions. But predictability isn’t just useful in our personal lives. Whether it’s reliable access to childcare or a unifying protest chant, predictability can also help us in collectively creating social change.

Why do we click with some works of art and not others? Why does it bother us when we feel deeply connected to a song, painting, movie or book that our friends don’t connect with? Rita Felski uses the word attunement for this process of ‘clicking’, and she’s interested in how unpredictable it is. It’s tempting to try and predict in advance what art you will or won’t attune to, but it’s important to remember that art always has the potential to surprise you -- even years after you first experience it.

When you think of an expert or specialist, you might picture a scientist with a lab coat and test tubes. Science likes to claim that its knowledge applies everywhere - like gravity or evolution - which makes scientific knowledge superior to local knowledge about one specific place. But Paige West points out that in practice scientists rely heavily on local people’s knowledge, for example the specialist knowledge that indigenous people in Papua New Guinea have about the fish, plants and ecosystems of their area. In fact, such local knowledge has proven to be crucial for successfully combating major problems like climate change.

What’s happened to reading during the COVID-19 pandemic? Some people are too busy or stressed to read, while others are reading more than ever but in different ways. Leah Price is interested in historical precedents for what we’re experiencing now, from anxieties about catching diseases from library books to the fantasy of reading as refuge from the world. History shows that reading is affected by people’s working lives - some can’t read because they have to work, others read because they can’t work. COVID-19 is transforming the way we work, so reading too will change - but not necessarily for the worse.

Images of protest have a visceral power to grab our attention. Colin Leach has been studying how we react to different kinds of protest images. For example, an image of many police holding down one protester and an image of many protesters facing off against a few police convey very different messages about who has the power. Both protesters and police have an agenda for how they want to be represented, and this is as old as photography itself. But online news and social media bombard us with more protest images than ever before, so it’s more important than ever to understand their visceral power.