This is the Bama podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co-host, Brent Billings. Today we are joined by a cat armist author of Obolita Faith. Her earliest theological formation came from her grandmother and ultimately inspired her to tell the stories of those we find on the margins.

She teaches people to reflect on the obelitas in their lives and shows us how to live out this kind of faith on a daily basis. So, cats, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here.

And if you want to add anything at all to my introduction that is a very condensed version of what you're all about, so tell us a little more about yourself in your own words.

Sure. So, I received a Master of Divinity and a Master of Arts in Theology from Fuller Seminary. A couple years ago, and I'm currently at Vanderbilt, studying now under Dr. Sagovia and kind of focusing on post-colonial biblical studies and things like that, which there's a lot that goes into that.

I'm also a new mom, and so I've just been, you know, figuring out this whole raising a human thing, which has been so hard and so fun and just so completely life changing.

So, yeah, just trying to get my bearings as I continue to move forward and just my work. I also finished the manuscript to my second book.

So, just doing some taking some time off after a lot of writing and a lot of studying.

That's beautiful. Somebody linked something you tagged or something, somebody said, hey, can't just mention Bama, and she's a really cool voice. You ought to check this out.

So, I remember jumping over on Twitter and finding some stuff and thinking, man, I think at that point maybe you're, and maybe you still do some freelance writing with some different magazines and journals and that kind of stuff.

And I was like, oh, this is really great. I love this. And so I've been following you from a distance cap. This is the first time we've gotten to actually chat today.

And just really, yeah, I just really enjoyed. I've been learning from you, and you've been teaching me so much. And it's been just been really good and refreshing.

And I know other people, students of mine have been connected and influenced by your work. And it's just been super good. So can you can you tell us cat a little bit about.

What you do, like you do a lot of things, but tell us about kind of like what you do and how that intersects with what the world needs. What's this intersection between who cat is and what God's doing in the world.

Yeah, thank you for asking. And thank you so much for your just encouraging words. So I think, you know, actually you and I do a lot of the same things in that I really want to make theology, spirituality, the Bible accessible.

I want folks, particularly folks in my community, you know, I'm Cuban American originally from Miami. And so I speak very much through that lens as someone who was raised as my culture being the dominant culture, you know, being a Cuban from Miami means that, you know, the predominantly, most of the people who surrounded me growing up were Cuban America, and if not Latino, Latina, Latina.

And so yeah, so I really I think it's important to make theology accessible to folks and just kind of invite folks into what it means to read the Bible or understand their faith through the lens of my people or my culture, you know, which is going to look different and and it's going to feel different.

And it's going to land differently than maybe the way that many of us were taught in seminaries, including myself, you know, I have a couple degrees, I've been to seminary and that's really where a lot of this was sparked from it.

I felt like most of my classes and a lot of what I was learning just I didn't resonate with it, you know, I felt further from God after taking, you know, Bible classes and taking all these sort of theology classes.

I've literally felt like I knew, you know, I didn't I feel I felt like I knew God less, right.

So yeah, so I feel like I feel really passionate about communicating sort of, you know, just my, you know, the lens through which I understand God and the lens through which I understand scripture and communicating that to folks.

And I've done that in different ways, you know, I I've worked actually in campus ministry.

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