Insights: Kythe Heller

Insights is an interview show featuring members of the ARC community. This week our guest is Kythe Heller, a poet, scholar, and interdisciplinary artist.

Kythe is a poet, essayist, interdisciplinary artist and doctoral student in the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University, with a secondary field in Critical Arts and Media Practice. Her interdisciplinary academic research draws upon traditional Islamic, Judeo-Christian, Buddhist, and Indigenous mystical training and intellectual traditions, aesthetic theory and practice, existential-phenomenological anthropology, contemporary political theory and social, environmental, and technological philosophies. A guiding question is: In what ways can our efforts become sites of evolution, sites of resistance, parts of an array of realizing new social and ecological relationships by considering how to use language and creative practice to radically change our way of being in the world?

More information about Kythe is available at kytheheller.com.

Insights: Jon Gill

Insights is an interview show featuring members of the ARC community. This week our guest is Jon Ivan Gill, an ARC member, MC, and philosopher of religion, process studies, and hip-hop.

Jon is a lecturer in English at Pomona College, and a lecturer at California State University, Dominguez Hills, Norco College, and Claremont School of Theology, teaching philosophy, religious studies, and theology. In the fall of 2020, Jon will start as Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Mn. He has written on Afrofuturism, religion, hip-hop, philosophy, poststructuralism, atheism, and creative writing. He is also a hip-hop musician and rapper performing under the name Gilead7, a part of a rap collective called Tomorrow Kings, and co-owner of Serious Cartoons Records and Tapes in San Bernardino, CA. His most recent book, Underground Rap as Religion: A Theopoetic Examination of a Process Aesthetic Religion, was released in 2019. Gill recently completed editing of a student volume on Afrofuturism and philosophy of religion, to be released in the fall of 2020.

Insights: Phillip Allen

Insights is an interview show featuring members of the ARC community. This week our guest is Phillip Allen, who was scheduled to be a presenter at Theopoetics 2020.

Phillip is the founding pastor of Own Your Faith Ministries, a non-denominational church community in Santa Clarita, CA. He is currently a Ph.D. student in Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary, a poet/spoken word artist, a professor, and a documentary filmmaker. His documentary short film "Open Wounds" debuted in Los Angeles in January 2020. More about Phillip can be found at philallenjr.com.

Insights: Max Yeshaye Brumberg-Kraus

Insights is an interview show featuring members of the ARC community. This week our guest is Max Yeshaye Brumberg-Kraus, an ARC member, a 2019 ARC Emerging Leaders Fellow, poet, playwright, and performing artist.

Brumberg-Kraus (they/them or he/him) lives in Saint Paul, MN. They are the co-founder of the House of Larva Drag Co-operative, performing as drag persona Çicada L’Amour, producing both small acts and full-length queer performances since 2014. He has performed at the Guthrie Theatre, Pangea World Theatre, 20% Theatre, In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre, and the Rochester Arts Center. From 2017 through 2018 Brumberg-Kraus was a fellow with Pangea’s Arts Organizing Institute. As a scholar, Brumberg-Kraus's area in queer temporality, queer and feminist theology, cosmology, mythopoetics, ancient tragedy, midrash, embodiment, and reception theory.

Insights: Julie Wan

Insights is an interview show featuring members of the ARC community. This week (4.30.2020) our guest is Julie Wan, an ARC member, writer, and community builder.

Julie writes essays, memoir, travelogue, food stories, and other forms of literary nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Arts and Letters, The Washington Post Magazine, and on public radio's The Splendid Table, among others. She is the nonfiction editor of The EcoTheo Review and a co-founder of Vita Poetica, which connects artists of faith in the DC area and cultivates spiritual development through the arts. She lives in Maryland with her husband and two children.