This week, scholar Christopher W. Hunt discusses his recent book Jimmy’s Faith: James Baldwin, Disidentification, and the Queer Possibilities of Black Religion. This conversation originally took place September 16, 2025 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

This episode is presented in conjunction with the American Writers Museum’s new special exhibit American Prophets: Writers, Religion, and Culture. This exhibit and programming series explores the profound ways writing reflects and influences our understanding of religion. American Prophets is now open!

More about Jimmy's Faith:

The relationship of James Baldwin's life and work to Black religion is in many ways complex and confounding. What is he doing through his literary deployment of religious language and symbols?

Despite Baldwin's disavowal of Christianity in his youth, he continued to engage the symbols and theology of Christianity in works such as The Amen Corner, Just Above My Head, and others. With Jimmy's Faith, author Christopher W. Hunt shows how Baldwin's usage of those religious symbols both shifted their meaning and served as a way for him to build his own religious and spiritual vision. Engaging José Esteban Muñoz's theory of disidentification as a queer practice of imagination and survival, Hunt demonstrates the ways in which James Baldwin disidentifies with and queers Black Christian language and theology throughout his literary corpus.

Baldwin's vision is one in which queer sexuality signifies the depth of love's transforming pos-sibilities, the arts serve as the (religious) medium of knitting Black community together, an agnostic and affective mysticism undermines Christian theological discourse, "androgyny" troubles the gender binary, and the Black child signifies the hope for a world made new. In disidentifying with Christian symbols, Jimmy's Faith reveals how Baldwin imagines both religion and the world "oth-erwise," offering a model of how we might do the same for our own communities and ourselves.

DR. CHRISTOPHER W. HUNT is Assistant Professor of Religion at Colorado College, and received his PhD from the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. Hunt’s work considers the relevance and meaning of Black religion for those on the margins or considered outside of traditional religious spaces.

This week, three writers of romance—Sajni Patel, Scarlett St. Clair, and Helene Wecker—discuss the role of religion in the romance genre. This conversation originally took place July 10, 2025 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

This episode is presented in conjunction with the American Writers Museum’s new special exhibit American Prophets: Writers, Religion, and Culture. This exhibit and programming series explores the profound ways writing reflects and influences our understanding of religion. American Prophets is now open!

About the writers:

SAJNI PATEL is an award-winning author of romance and young adult novels and is perhaps best known for her debut, The Trouble with Hating You. Her works have appeared in numerous Best of the Year and Must-Read lists from Cosmopolitan, Teen Vogue, Apple Books, Audiofile, Tribeza, Austin Woman, NBC, Insider, and many others. Her critically acclaimed YA dark fantasy, A Drop of Venom, from Disney Hyperion/Rick Riordan Presents fuses the Medusa myth with Indian mythology in what Booklist calls “a furious, action-packed fantasy” and Publisher’s Weekly calls “urgent and vital.”

#1 New York Times bestselling author SCARLETT ST. CLAIR is a citizen of the Muscogee Nation and the author of the Hades X Persephone Saga, the Adrian X Isolde series, fairytale retellings, and When Stars Come Out. She has a master’s degree in library science and information studies and a bachelor’s in English writing. She is obsessed with Greek mythology, murder mysteries, and the afterlife. Her newest book is Terror at the Gates.

HELENE WECKER is the author of The Golem and the Jinni and The Hidden Palace. Her books have appeared on The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle’s bestseller lists, and have won a National Jewish Book Award, the VCU Cabel Award, the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, and a Mythopoeic Award. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

This week, scholar Thomas A. Tweed discusses his new book Religion in the Lands that Became America. A sweeping retelling of American religious history, Tweed shows how religion has enhanced and hindered human flourishing from the Ice Age to the Information Age. Tweed is joined by fellow Indigenous Studies professor John N. Low. This conversation originally took place November 10, 2025 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

AWM PODCAST NETWORK HUB

This episode is presented in conjunction with the American Writers Museum’s new special exhibit American Prophets: Writers, Religion, and Culture. This exhibit and programming series explores the profound ways writing reflects and influences our understanding of religion. American Prophets is now open.

More about Religion in the Lands that Became America:

Until now, the standard narrative of American religious history has begun with English settlers in Jamestown or Plymouth and remained predominantly Protestant and Atlantic. Driven by his strong sense of the historical and moral shortcomings of the usual story, Thomas A. Tweed offers a very different narrative in this ambitious new history. He begins the story much earlier—11,000 years ago—at a rock shelter in present-day Texas and follows Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, transnational migrants, and people of many faiths as they transform the landscape and confront the big lifeway transitions, from foraging to farming and from factories to fiber optics.

Setting aside the familiar narrative themes, he highlights sustainability, showing how religion both promoted and inhibited individual, communal, and environmental flourishing during three sustainability crises: the medieval Cornfield Crisis, which destabilized Indigenous ceremonial centers; the Colonial Crisis, which began with the displacement of Indigenous Peoples and the enslavement of Africans; and the Industrial Crisis, which brought social inequity and environmental degradation. The unresolved Colonial and Industrial Crises continue to haunt the nation, Tweed suggests, but he recovers historical sources of hope as he retells the rich story of America’s religious past.

About the speakers:

THOMAS A. TWEED is the Harold and Martha Welch Professor of American Studies and professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. A past president of the American Academy of Religion, he is editor of Retelling U.S. Religious History and author of Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion and Religion: A Very Short Introduction.

JOHN N. LOW received his Ph.D. in American Culture at the University of Michigan, and is an enrolled citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians. He is also the recipient of a graduate certificate in Museum Studies and a Juris Doctorate from the University of Michigan. He earned a BA from Michigan State University, a second BA in American Indian Studies from the University of Minnesota, and an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago.

Professor Low previously served as Executive Director of the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian in Evanston, Illinois, and served as a member of the Advisory Committee for the Indians of the Midwest Project at the D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library, and the State of Ohio Cemetery Law Task Force. He has presented frequently at conferences including the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA)), American Society for Ethnohist...