What should a spiritual space make you feel?

This week, I’m joined by the incredible Rev. Ryan Lindsay Arrendell, the founder and pastor of Salt and Light Ministries DC to think about what it means to build and find religious + spiritual spaces that nourish.

Rev Ryan is doing something I find so awe-inspiring: building the kind of church she wants to exist. At Salt and Light, that means a space organized around radical acceptance, where addiction, mental illness, incarceration, abortion, sexuality, or any of the experiences we’re often taught to carry shame around do not make you any less loved by God or any less lovable.

And our conversation goes everywhere. We talk about building a church as a Black queer woman, hearing from God and following divine intuition, finding the altar wherever you are, and Rev’s experience observing Ramadan and attending Jummah. We also get into what to look for when finding a spiritual community: transparency. You shouldn’t have to guess whether all of you will be welcomed somewhere.

Rev. Ryan helped me think about church beyond the building, worship beyond Sunday morning, and how to find and build spiritual spaces that actually nourish us.

Follow + Support Salt and Light:

Instagram: @SaltandLightDC

Website: tinyurl.com/saltlightdc

Rev. Ryan Lindsay Arrendell is a preacher, writer, Emmy Award-winning journalist, and graduate of Yale Divinity School. She is the founder and pastor of Salt and Light Ministries in Washington, DC. Salt and Light currently gathers for monthly worship and community programming, and will celebrate its one-year anniversary on November 1.

Mayor Mamdani was publicly disinvited from 9/11 memorial services, and his dad wrote a book that helps us understand why.

We’re thinking about a framework that has shaped how scholars think about Islam, terrorism, and American politics for more than twenty years: Mahmood Mamdani’s Good Muslim, Bad Muslim. Mamdani argues that the distinction between “good” and “bad” Muslims doesn’t actually have much to do with religion, despite terrorism so often being framed as an outcome of religious belief. Instead, the goalpost moves according to Muslims’ relationship to U.S. and Western political interests, both domestically and abroad.

And, of course, there’s something pretty incredible about revisiting that argument now, as Mamdani’s own son, Zohran Mamdani, is navigating what it means to be a Muslim elected official who remains unapologetic about his Muslim identity while being critical of the political establishment.

We get into the post-9/11 origins of the “good Muslim/bad Muslim” framework, Juliane Hammer’s work on gendered Islamophobia, and then go further back to Malcolm X to think about another historical moment when someone who critiqued American politics, domestically and abroad, was also rendered a “bad Muslim.”

Both Mamdanis help us see that who gets rendered a “bad Muslim” tells us much less about Islam than it tells us about power, politics, and who is allowed to critique the United States.

Chapters

00:00 — Teaser: Why Mamdani Will Always Be a “Bad Muslim”

00:38 — Where I’m Finding Grounding: Being Back Home

02:52 — Who Is a Good Muslim? Who Is a Bad Muslim?

03:59 — Mamdani’s Dad Told Us This 20 Years Ago

07:03 — Who Gets to Be a “Good Muslim”?

10:55 — Gendered Islamophobia

15:05 — The First “Bad Muslim” People’s Mayor of NYC: Malcolm X

21:20 — Rahma Duwaji + the Moving Goalpost of the “Good Muslim”

24:58 — Where I’m Looking for Grounding Right Now

References:

Mamdani, Mahmood. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. New York: Pantheon Books, 2004.

Hammer, Juliane. “Center Stage: Gendered Islamophobia and Muslim Women.” In Islamophobia in America: The Anatomy of Intolerance, edited by Carl W. Ernst, 107–144. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.

Wallace, Mike, and Louis E. Lomax. The Hate That Hate Produced. WNTA-TV, 1959.

[Islamophobia, Islam in America, Muslims in America, Zohran Mamdani, Malcolm X, good Muslim bad Muslim, Mahmood Mamdani, religion and politics, gendered Islamophobia, Black Muslims, Nation of Islam, and post-9/11 Islam]

What do people do when they don’t agree with scripture? Especially when a sacred text, or the way it has been interpreted, doesn’t align with their own sense of justice, equality, or human flourishing?

This week, I’m taking you into my Intro to the Study of Islam classroom to think about that question. I start with an exercise I give my students using two passages about slavery, one from the New Testament and one from the Quran, and the little “gotcha” moment that happens when I ask them to imagine building a society based on those texts. Because the point is to get them to see that sacred texts don’t simply tell people what to do. People give sacred texts meaning.

From there, we get into Aysha Hidayatullah’s Feminist Edges of the Qur’an and some of the strategies Muslim feminist theologians have used when interpretations of the Quran don’t align with their commitments to gender justice, including historical contextualization, holistic reading, and the Tawhidic paradigm.

Ultimately, I’m thinking about something I really want my students to leave my classes understanding: critique, disagreement, struggle, and debate are not necessarily departures from religious traditions. They are part of how religious traditions are made, sustained, and transformed.

And maybe disagreeing with scripture is a much more religious thing to do than we think.

Chapters:

00:00 — Teaser: What Do You Do When You Disagree With Scripture?

01:55 — Finding Grounding: Taking Things One Day at a Time

03:40 — The Classroom Exercise: What Would You Do With These Verses?

06:04 — Disagreement Is Part of Religious Tradition

10:50 — Feminist Edges of the Qur’an

14:16 — Strategy #1: Is the Past the Past?

19:14 — Strategy #2: Sacred Texts Have Contradictions

20:25 — Strategy #3: Can Humans Be Gods?

References

Talal Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” Qui Parle 17 no .2 (2009): 1-30.

Aysha Hidayatullah, Feminist Edges of the Qur’an. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Kathryn Lofton, “Religion,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, edited by Sarah Hammerschlag (University of Chicago Press, 2025), 349-365.

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[religion, scripture, sacred texts, Bible, Quran, Islam, Christianity, religious studies, Quran interpretation, Biblical interpretation, disagreeing with scripture]

Is it my manifest destiny to lose 40 pounds in 3 weeks?

I started keeping track. And on average, I get 5 GLP-1 ads DAILY. When I started really paying attention to them, I noticed that what they were selling me wasn’t just the normal skinny = health = beauty formula. A formula Sabrina Strings’ research shows has been used to racialize Black bodies for centuries. Instead, its promise to me was: You’ll finally be who you’ve always been meant to be. And that is where my scholar of religion brain starts kicking in. Because whenever you start talking about destiny and who someone has always been meant to be, you’re talking about religion, especially American religion.

This week, I’m thinking through three things that being inundated with GLP-1 advertising has taught me: what these ads reveal about our ideas of becoming and the self and why Serena William’s as the face of Ro is diabolically genius, why its feels spiritually unsettling to my own sense of self + embodied knowledge when the same platforms used to learn+connect are constantly telling me not to trust my body, and how GLP-1 marketing has hard launched an entire genre of social media content organized around being your final form (5 Things I Did To Be XYZ), rather than life as a continual process of becoming. AND IT’S SO BORING.

Chapters

00:00 — Teaser: What Are GLP-1 Ads Actually Selling?

00:31 — Welcome to Grounded

01:28 — Finding Grounding: Learning How to Be Unstressed

03:36 — What I Learned From Seeing 5 GLP-1 Ads a Day

07:45 — Why GLP-1 Marketing Feels Different From Earlier Weight-Loss Marketing

17:50— You Go Looking For Info, And Are Told Not To Trust Your Body

22:24 — GLP-1 Marketing Has Become Its Own Content Genre & ITS BORING

References

Strings, Sabrina. "How the use of BMI fetishizes white embodiment and racializes fat phobia." AMA Journal of Ethics 25, no. 7 (2023): 535-539.

Strings, Sabrina. Fearing The Black Body. New York University Press, 2020.

About Grounded

Grounded with Dr. Iman is a podcast for people who like their big questions grounded in research. Each week, Dr. Iman AbdoulKarim, professor and scholar of religion and spirituality, takes on a question about this human experience we’re all having, finding grounding somewhere between the spiritual and the intellectual.

Expect religion, spirituality, Black thought, culture, history, and whatever else the question requires.

New episodes every Monday.

Why does hearing somebody get read for filth feel so intellectually and spiritually satisfying?

This week, I’m thinking through Jools Lebron’s read of Jeffree Star and asking what a read actually does. What distinguishes it from a reaction, insult, belittling someone, etc.? Because to me, those are their own things, separate from the kind of speaking-truth-to-power, punching up, and critical analysis that makes a read *a read.*

I also think about how there is something spiritual happening here too. We get into the read as catharsis and collective processing, the flow state of reading someone down, and what it might mean to understand that flow as a form of channeling memory, experience, and a part of Black history long before there was a term for it.

Chapters

00:00 Teaser

00:27 Welcome to Grounded

01:03 Finding Grounding: Back in Atlanta

02:20 Jools Lebron vs. Jeffree Star

07:38 What Makes a Read a Read?

11:07 A Read Is Intellectual

15:22 Why a Read Feels Spiritual

Works Referenced

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903).

bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989).

Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t I a Woman?” (1851).

Malcolm X, “Message to the Grass Roots” (1963).

Jools Leabron @joolslebron

—

Grounded with Dr. Iman is a podcast for people who like their big questions grounded in research. Each week, Dr. Iman AbdoulKarim, professor and scholar of religion and spirituality, takes on a question about this human experience we're all having, finding grounding somewhere between the spiritual and the intellectual.

Expect religion, spirituality, Black thought, culture, history, and whatever else the question requires.

This, I’m answering a question I get every year: How do you actually get into a PhD program?

PhD applications, especially in the humanities, can feel like a behind closed doors process. So, I’m sharing the advice people were generous enought to share with me when was applying and what I’ve learned from helping others through the process.

We (me, myself, I, and you) get into how to identify programs that are actually a good intellectual fit, why I strongly recommend looking for fully funded programs, and why undergraduate reputations don’t necessarily translate to the strongest PhD program in your field. I also talk about navigating interdisciplinarity and figuring out whether a department really supports the kind of scholar you want to become.

Then we get into the MAKE OR BREAK part: you have to reach out to people. Cold emailing current graduate students and potential faculty advisors can completely change your application process.

Finally, we talk personal and research statements, including why you do not need to know exactly what your dissertation will be. What you do need is a clear research question, a sense of where you might look for answers, and an ability to explain why that particular program and its faculty can help you pursue it.

Basically, this is the PhD application primer I wish everyone got before application season.

Chapters:

00:00 — Teaser: How to Get Into a PhD Program

00:42 — What I’m Finding Grounding In: Intellectual Play

06:29 — How TF Do You Get Into Grad School?

08:37 — How to Identify the Right PhD Program

14:56 — How Interdisciplinarity Works in Grad School

20:08 — You HAVE to Cold Email

25:23 — Writing Your Personal + Research Statement

What did my students teach me about teaching?

This week, I’m reflecting on my first semester as a full-time professor and what I learned from finally reading my student evaluations. Can you tell the semester is fast approaching? I’m talking about why teaching really is an art, why my students wanted less lecturing and more hands-on learning, how they somehow ended up wanting *more* assignments, and I’m still committed to high expectations while meeting students where they are. And how that is NOT the same as lowering expectations (especially in an AI reality).

Chapters

00:00 — Teaser: Why I’m Tired of the “Students Just Use AI” Conversation

00:22 — Where I’m Finding Grounding

03:35 — What I Learned From My First Teaching Evaluations

08:50 — Students Don’t Want to Just Be Talked At

12:35 — They Asked for MORE Work???

18:30 — Where Students Wanted Me to Ease Up: Attendance & Hard Readings

It's one of those words people use all the time, thinking they mean the same thing, when that isn’t always the case!

As a scholar of religion who teaches about secularism, I’ve realized the best place to start is by talking about assumptions. This week, I draw on my own journey as a Black Muslim scholar of religion to walk through the kinds of assumptions I encountered throughout college, graduate school, and becoming a professor, and how those assumptions reveal what secularism is and how it functions.

The takeaway is that rather than treating secularism as simply the separation of church and state, it is best understood by paying attention to the "common sense" assumptions that organize our lives and determine whose knowledge really counts.

This conversation is just the start, but one that has deeply reshaped how I understand scholarship, Black thought, and the relationship between spirituality and intellectual life.

Chapters

00:00 — Teaser: Secularism Was Never Meant for Me

00:30 — Grounding in Traveling with the Girls

03:06 — This Week's Question: What Is Secularism?

10:37 — Assumption #1: Outsiders Are Experts, Insiders Know Less

14:55 — Assumption #2: People Want You to Tell Familiar Stories

20:36 — Assumption #3: There Is No Separation Between the Spiritual and the Intellectual

This week, we're answering the question: How do you strengthen your intuition?

Over the past few weeks, we've explored intuition through philosophy, Black thought, and management studies. This week, I wanted to do something different and answer that question through my own life.

I share the three practices that have most transformed my relationship to intuition over the past five years: developing a relationship with myself via journaling, learning to distinguish what I want from what other people want for me, and embracing the conflict that comes from actually acting on what my intuition tells me.

Along the way, I reflect on journaling, therapy, prayer, graduate school, learning to trust myself as a scholar of Black Muslim thought, and why I want all my women and femmes to leave behind the idea that there is redemption in our suffering (which is a huge barrier to developing clear intuition).

This week, we're answering the question: Is intuition a sign of expertise?

Building on last week's conversation about intuition as evidence in psychology, I turn to another field that has spent decades studying intuition: management and organizational learning.

I explore an argument I found really compelling: that intuition is often the outcome of expertise. In other words, the people we think of as "intuitive" are frequently drawing on years of disciplined observation, tacit knowledge, and experience.

But as a scholar of religion and Black intellectual history, I’m also interested in where that understanding falls short. What happens when intuition is understood only as something that comes out of experience + expertise… and not forms of knowledge beyond the self? Like higher powers, ancestors, the unseen, Allah, the divine, etc.

Chapters

00:00 — Grounding in Knowing Who You Are When Things Go Left

10:58 — This Week's Question: Is Intuition a Sign of Expertise?

13:09 — Intuition as Creative Insight

16:42 — Intuition as an Outcome of Expertise

27:40 — What's Missing? Spirituality and Intuition

32:30 — Prof in the Park Announcement

RSVP for Prof in the Park 7/30 @ Prospect Park: https://partiful.com/e/PEwdmeIc0rwTtByx9tHH?c=OZ0f4dpM

Reference

Dörfler, Viktor, and Fran Ackermann. "Understanding intuition: The case for two forms of intuition." Management learning 43, no. 5 (2012): 545-564.