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This paper reads the 2025 case of Adriana Smith, a Black woman in Atlanta declared brain dead at nine weeks pregnant and maintained on life support under Georgia's abortion restrictions until the fetus could be delivered. Thinking with Delores Williams and Jennifer Morgan, I argue that Georgia abortion law functions as a contemporary partus sequitur ventrem: fetal cardiac activity determines the legal obligations that organize the pregnant body such that death does not produce legal finality. This condition names the outermost form of what this paper terms gender deferred: not the elongation of a single deferred end but the recursive production of the conditions under which rest and resolution are perpetually foreclosed. Williams and Morgan together reveal that the grammar of divine providence and the grammar of racial-reproductive law are structurally homologous, such that the question is not whether God assumed Black women's condition but whether the grammar of divine futurity retains coherence when the law has already occupied it.
This theoretical paper explores AI-guided spiritual practice as a site where Black theological time and Black interiority are reimagined as a galactic terrain. Drawing on Black theology, womanist thought, and Black studies, it argues that an AI spiritual practices app does more than “optimize” reflection; it becomes a starship interface through which Black subjects navigate inner space as cosmic space. Against histories that have confined, surveilled, and extracted Black time, the paper frames Black interior life as a boundless, unmasterable cosmos—replete with dark matter, wormholes, and fugitive constellations of memory, grief, and joy. Algorithmic personalization, pattern recognition, and conversational guidance are read ambivalently: as attempts to chart and domesticate this interior galaxy, and as tools that can be hacked to map new routes of escape, communion, and rest. Ultimately, the paper asks how Black theological visions of liberation might engage AI to honor Black interiority as irreducibly divine.
Capitalist time logics emergent in “run-of-show” worship formats deform congregants away from God's unrestrained inhabitation. The praise break, conversely, as a dynamic sonic grammar operating through plural temporalities, breaks these time logics. Drawing on Moten's account of Black aesthetic practice's capacity to exceed dominant epistemologies, the paper argues that the run-of-show format operates within the logic of re-lease while the praise break enacts release. Re-reading the telos of Paul’s theology of worship in 1st Corinthians as love against ‘decency and order’, this paper suggests that the praise break re-instantiates the creative conditions of genesis in a world that forecloses Black bodies into capitalist time. From the ring shout to the praise house, the praise break emerges from communities enduring together, maintaining fidelity to a God who has maintained fidelity to them across antiblack time. Here the community clears and God quickens – in the break, in the black, in the beginning.
This paper critically examines the Black Pentecostal and Holiness tradition of “tarrying for the Holy Ghost” through the lens of Black liberation theology and the theological concept of time. Rooted in Acts 1:8, where believers are instructed to wait for the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit, tarrying has historically functioned as a communal spiritual practice of prayerful anticipation. Within the Black Church, this ritualized waiting has signified hope, preparation, and divine empowerment for witness. Yet the practice also raises critical questions about ecclesial authority, agency, and spiritual validation. Who determines when the Spirit has been received, and how does the language of waiting shape the experiences of congregants, particularly women and young converts? This study interprets tarrying as both liberative anticipation and regulated spiritual delay. By interrogating the temporal structure of tarrying, the paper explores how spiritual longing, institutional authority, and communal formation intersect, proposing a re-reading of tarrying as active preparation for Spirit-empowered liberation and prophetic witness.