Christopher Hunt (they/them or he/him)
share your spiritual biography in 10 words, or less:
Former Christian and now unapologetically blackqueer agnostic.
where are you turning for soul nourishment / joy / aliveness?
I find spiritual nourishment in a few places. The first is natural spaces, like the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. As I engage in activities like wildlife tracking and off-trail hiking, I feel a profound sense of grounding and awe. Embedding myself in natural spaces has allowed me to reconnect to the sacred in life-changing ways. I also find nourishment in queer community, whether through dating, partnerships, friendships, and family.
what is a text you hold sacred?
One text that has become sacred to me is James Baldwin’s final novel Just Above My Head. This text reminds me again and again of the sacred nature of blackqueer sexuality and connection.
what is a spiritual practice currently sustaining you?
As mentioned previously, one spiritual practice I cultivate is the art of wildlife tracking. I understand the practice as the cultivation of a kind of “deep sight,” as I learn the patterns and lifeways of my nonhuman kin.
how would you describe the work you feel called to do in this world (even if it is not the work you get paid for)?
I feel called to affirm life, which is a multifaceted commitment. Affirming life means that my life, scholarship, and relationships should always be about the work of recognizing and honoring the beauty and ultimate worth of the being in front of me (human or nonhuman). This also means resistance to any politic, movement, policy, ideology that seeks reduce the other to object, to commodity, to “thing.”
knowing that none of us “has it all together,” what is one question you are wrestling with, or bit of wisdom you are struggling to enflesh in your daily life?
I’m struggling against hopelessness in our current political moment. However, one thing I learn from James Baldwin and discuss in depth in the third chapter of my book Jimmy’s Faith: James Baldwin, Disidentification, and the Queer Possibilities of Black Religion, is the necessity of actively choosing hope, despite how bleak things appear. I choose to believe that we can build movements to resist the interlocking systems of oppression fueled by capitalism, cisheteronormativity, anti-blackness, climate-change, and colonialism (to name only a few of the realities we are facing). Everyday is a struggle for me to truly believe and internalize the idea offered by Baldwin that we can in fact be “better than we are.”
who is one elder / ancestor / mentor whose guidance you draw from? what is one piece of wisdom they have offered?
It’s so difficult to choose one ancestor, elder, or mentor. The folks that immediately come to mind are ancestors like Pauli Murray, Audre Lorde, Vernell Bransford (my grandmother), James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni and far too many others to name! All of these people remind me, again and again, that unflinching truth-telling, both to oneself and to others, is the only thing that makes life truly possible. It’s the only way we get, and remain, free.
what’s one oppressive untruth you are practicing unlearning / divesting from?
Inspired by black studies scholarship, I’m divesting from the idea of “the human” as an organizing category, given its roots in colonial and anti-black logics. How might we imagine ourselves, to borrow from the work of my dear friend Ashon Crawley, “otherwise” than this white European concept?
what is one thing you wish were required listening / viewing? (please link to the song, poem, art piece, podcast, etc.)
Everyone should check out the work of Ingrid Yuzly Mathurin, one of the most talented artists I’ve ever come across (https://www.ingridyuzlymathurin.com/). Her work offers such a rich expression of the vibrancy of black life, and I’m so fortunate that one of her paintings graces the cover of my book.
any of your website and/or social media handles you’d like us to include / highlight?
