Welcome to In Sacred Spaces, a three-episode series in which we visit spaces around New York City that are sacred to specific communities. For this episode, we’re at St James Presbyterian Church and talking with its pastor, Reverend Derrick McQueen. Derrick explains how spiritual grace can give oppressed people a sense of their own sacred value.
The spaces we visit in this series include historic Black churches in Harlem as well as the Chelsea Piers, a gathering place for members of the ballroom scene. There are many kinds of Black churches in the United States, with hundreds of years of history. Ballroom is a community of mostly queer and trans performers from Black and Latinx backgrounds, originating in Harlem.
Join us as we walk around these sacred spaces with the people who love them. We discuss their personal journeys with spirituality, and how the spaces they’ve chosen to inhabit connect to longer histories of civil rights, women’s equality and queer and trans liberation.
We hope these conversations will connect with your own experiences, whether you identify as LGBTQ+, as a Christian, or as part of any other religious or spiritual community – or none at all. If you can, we encourage you to listen to this podcast while walking around a place that is sacred to you.
Our podcast team includes people with diverse religious backgrounds and a range of racial, sexual and gender identities. You can find out more about the team and the project at our website, insacredspacespodcast.com.
We hope these episodes will inspire you to reflect on your own unique relationship to spiritual experience. Throughout each episode, we’ve included musical interludes composed by Stone Butler, that give you some private moments to meditate on what you’ve heard.
In Sacred Spaces was produced by Olivia Branscum, Colby King, Aya Labanieh and Milan Terlunen, with musical compositions by Stone Butler and technical support from Evan Li and Ana Maria Rodriguez.
Thanks to our speakers, and to the church and ballroom communities, for inviting us into their spaces. Thanks also to María González Pendás and Chris Chang for their mentorship, and to Humanities NY and Columbia’s Heyman Center for the Humanities for their support.