New Episode: In Conversation with Jamie Lee Finch

I caught up with Jamie Lee Finch on the latest episode:

Here’s how I start the show:

“I want to set the stage for what we’re going to talk about today. Over the past week or so, there’s been a bit of….unrest…in our part of the internet. There was a lot of dust kicked up by a course that was announced by Josh Harris. This was a deconstruction course that he was offering, for $275 or for free if you signed up with your email and gave a code. There was a lot of pushback, fairly immediately, because he is Josh Harris, and he wrote IKDG, and he was essentially marketing to people he helped harm. To his credit, he took down the course quickly. But what’s ensued since has been a bit more complicated, as the discourse has shifted (as it does) to something else entirely. The focus has moved on to somehow focus almost entirely on women, including women of color.

Now I want to fully acknowledge that Jamie and I are both white, which comes with all manner of white privileges that we can and have worked to offset. We also come from white evangelicalism, which has its own forms of white supremacy to divest from specifically. But we’re still going to try and talk about why things like these moments of drama happen, and why these cycles of commentary occur: what is general to the types of conversations we have now, and what is particular to post-evangelical spaces and the sorts of traumas that are activated.

In this case, there’s been broader discussion about who should profit from their work and how, who needs or deserves defending, who has “authority” to speak on these matters, and the “sense of belonging” in a community.

Capital, reputation, and community are all entangled in one another online, and that plays out from time to time. But we're going to do our best to speak to this in this moment, as two people who've been 'operating' in this space for a while. This is one conversation among many.”

We talk about a lot in this conversation, and it’s too much to fit in one post—but we do our best in this extra-length episode.

We also talk about Jamie’s upcoming course, Your Body Is A Person. Registration closes on 8/31/21, so be sure to check this out soon.