Rural Remix

In this episode of Beyond the Clock, Ash and Anna are joined by Allie Redhorse Young, a Diné activist, storyteller, and founder of Protect the Sacred, a movement dedicated to empowering Native youth, strengthening civic engagement, and protecting Indigenous culture, rights, and sovereignty. Over the last six years, Protect the Sacred has grown into a movement that places culture, ancestral knowledge, and intergenerational relationships at the heart of community action. In this conversation, we explore what becomes possible when civic engagement asks people to return more deeply to who they are rather than translate themselves into systems that were never designed for them. Allie shares how Protect the Sacred has drawn upon storytelling, ceremony, horse medicine, and initiatives like Ride to the Polls to reconnect Native young people with their culture and the wisdom of their elders while creating new pathways for participation and leadership. We also wrestle with deeper questions, like who do we fail to recognize as leaders, and what futures become possible when we learn to see the gifts, wisdom, and ways of knowing that our dominant systems have overlooked or misunderstood? Allie asks us to consider how ancestral ways of knowing might help us remember what leadership can be and imagine what it could become.

This spring, the community media organization Black By God: The West Virginian challenged West Virginia artists to write a lyrical love letter to the state, breathing new life into the state’s hip hop scene.
You can check out more of the Dear West V. song submissions at this link.

In the final episode of this Rural Faith Initiative, Rev’d Claire Brown and Rev’d Whitney Kimball Coe discuss how diversity and celebration of gender and sexuality fit into the bigger picture for affirming churches in the rural South. This research and these stories have been collected by Brown, an Episcopal priest in rural Tennessee.
Host Whitney Kimball Coe is the director of the Rural Faith Initiative, a project of the Center for Rural Strategies.

This episode explores points of conflict and areas of collaboration between affirming churches and those neighboring faith communities that might not agree on human sexuality and gender. How do these communities find each other, come into conversation, or not with each other? The Rev’d Claire Brown and The Rev’d Whitney Kimball Coe discuss observations from Rev. Brown’s research and visits to LGBTQ+ affirming churches in the rural South. This research and these stories have been collected by Brown, an Episcopal priest in rural Tennessee.
Host Whitney Kimball Coe is the director of the Rural Faith Initiative, a project of the Center for Rural Strategies.

This month marks the four year anniversary of the 2022 flood that devastated parts of southeast Kentucky. In Letcher County, the memory of the flood still cuts deep. It was one of the hardest hit counties, where residents experienced widespread damage and even loss of life. To commemorate the flood, community members are creating a public mosaic. The project is proving to be an opportunity for storytelling, memory-keeping, and even healing.

This episode explores the considerations of care, safety, and visibility for welcoming congregations and looks at how they share their community welcome in often oppositional cultural and political climates. Rev'd Whitney Kimball Coe talks with Rev'd Claire Brown about what she observed in her research and church visits with LGBTQ+ affirming churches in the rural South.

How are the values of Southern hospitality and Christian welcome practiced in LGBTQ+ affirming churches in the rural south? Drawing on real-life examples from churches in Mississippi and North Carolina, The Rev’d Claire Brown shares stories and observations of hospitality and welcoming for LGBTQ+ people in churches she visited during her research on affirming churches in the rural South. Rev’d Brown found that it goes beyond official theological positions and into the simple practices of church hospitality. This is a conversation with the director of the Rural Faith Initiative, Whitney Kimball Coe.

What does it look like to build and sustain an LGBTQ+ affirming church in the rural South? The Rev.’d Claire Brown visited and spoke with more than a dozen such churches to find out. More LGBTQ+ people live in this region than any other part of the country, and in this first episode of a series of conversations, Rev’d Brown talks with the director of the Rural Faith Initiative, Rev’d Whitney Kimball Coe, about the ways these communities of faith defy cultural and religious stereotypes by living out their inclusive values.

The Rural Faith Initiative is a program of the Center for Rural Strategies. We know churches and faith communities are essential institutions in rural communities. RFI provides media training, accompaniment, and facilitation tools to faith leaders and faith-based orgs, supporting their efforts to build stronger, kinder, more just communities.

In this episode of Beyond the Clock, Ash and Anna are joined by Tim Z. Hernandez, an award-winning author, poet, and filmmaker whose work has spent decades recovering stories that history tried to forget. Raised in California's San Joaquin Valley by migrant farmworker parents, Tim describes himself as a "shepherd of stories," someone called to follow narratives wherever they lead. In this conversation, Tim, Ash, and Anna discuss the relationship between memory, place, naming, and visibility as Tim reflects on his lifelong commitment to recovering erased histories, the courage required to follow a story into unfamiliar creative territory, and the responsibility of telling stories that open dialogue rather than deepen division. Tim grounds this conversation in his research on locating the victims of the 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos Canyon, the incident made famous by Woody Guthrie’s song of the same name, which is chronicled in his books, All They Will Call You, and the sequel, They Call You Back. All They Will Call You is now a full-length documentary film project and you can find more info at www.timzhernandez.com.

When weather-related disasters occur, communities are affected in uncountable ways. We know all too well how climate disasters physically impact communities. Events like hurricanes and wild fires can destroy property, devastate the landscape, and claim lives. What might be less obvious is how a community’s cultural practices are affected. When Hurricane Helene tore through western North Carolina in September of 2024, one group of ballad singers felt the effect of the storm on their tradition.