I am excited to share a new publication that sprang from the Africana Digital Humanities Institute Fellowship I had last year through Arizona State University! Thank you, Dr. Erika Gault, for accepting this work into your special issue about how Black Christianity is evolving. In this paper, “The Good News: How the Gospel of anti-respectability is shaping Black Millennial Christian podcasting,” I wrote about the historic links between the Black clergy and the Black Press. Did you know that many of the time-honored Black newspapers of the 19th and 20th centuries were founded by the two largest Black Christian religious bodies? Leaders of the African Methodist Episcopal and the National Baptist Convention denominations launched hundreds of publications in the Antebellum years, throughout Reconstruction and at the height of the so-called “New Negro” movement of the early 1900s. This meant that the Church’s ideologies on purity, temperance and Black respectability influenced Black political thought on these matters. Today, this is changing though. In this case study, I wrote about three Black women Christian podcasters who embrace a new editorial tone, of anti-respectability. D. Danyelle Thomas of Gospel for the Culture, Candice Marie Benbow of Red Lip Theology, and Simone Brown and Seretha Collins of The Clean Ears Show believe that liberatory content must be authentic and truthful first, rather than assimilative. I found that these women believe that speaking more freely about contemporary matters, such as Black Lives Matter or Black sexuality, may not endear them always to church elders, but they believe their podcasts give them space to explore what it truly means to be an African American believer today. Check it out! These women were fantastic interviews.

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