Grounded

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 Time03:40 — The Classroom Exercise: What Would You Do With These Verses?06:04 — Disagreement Is Part of Religious Tradition10:50 — Feminist Edges of the Qur’an14:16 — Strategy #1: Is the Past the Past?19:14 — Strategy #2: Sacred Texts Have Contradictions20:25 — 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.--[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.Chapters00:00 — Teaser: What Are GLP-1 Ads Actually Selling?00:31 — Welcome to Grounded01:28 — Finding Grounding: Learning How to Be Unstressed03:36 — What I Learned From Seeing 5 GLP-1 Ads a Day07:45 — Why GLP-1 Marketing Feels Different From Earlier Weight-Loss Marketing17:50— You Go Looking For Info, And Are Told Not To Trust Your Body22:24 — GLP-1 Marketing Has Become Its Own Content Genre & ITS BORINGReferences 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 GroundedGrounded 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.Chapters00:00 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 SpiritualWorks ReferencedW. 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 Program00:42 — What I’m Finding Grounding In: Intellectual Play06:29 — How TF Do You Get Into Grad School?08:37 — How to Identify the Right PhD Program14:56 — How Interdisciplinarity Works in Grad School20:08 — You HAVE to Cold Email25:23 — 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). Chapters00:00 — 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