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. We talk about Internal Family Systems therapy and what it looks like to do inner child work through an IFS lens, and how it has shaped our relationships with ourselves and with God.

Guest: Mattie Mae Motl
https://www.instagram.com/mattiemaemotl?stkn=dDRiYnE4NXg0a293

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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

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Topics: eroticism, spirituality, power, root work, feminine energy, kink, biblical stories, embodied spirituality, divine energy, liberation spirituality, authenticity, divine multiplicity, attunement, shadow work, pleasure, honesty, divine energy, vulnerability, attention, attunement, divinity, flow, breath work, play, embodiment, sacredness, neuroscience, spirituality

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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 inside radical thought.

They explore the structural parallels between Hegel's dialectic and Christian eschatology, why Jesus might be history's most compelling militant communist, the difference between Marxism as critique and Marxism as state religion, and how theory fails the moment it stops meeting people where they are.

This episode is for anyone who has ever felt the gap between what institutions profess and what they practice. And for anyone trying to keep the faith, in whatever language that takes.

Topics include: liberation theology, abolition, Marxist philosophy, Hegel, Paulo Freire, CLR James, prison organizing, sacred encounter, agnosticism, dialectical materialism, embodied pedagogy, No Brooklyn Jails.

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