I’m Not Just Making a Podcast – I’m Making Space

Juana Jordan

I recently read an article about Evan Sharp, co-founder of Pinterest and founder of West Co., in which he said he wanted to craft something he desperately wanted to exist—not simply something he thought the market needed. “You can make something,” Sharp said, “but if you really care about it, you’ll craft it. Craft is the word that, to me, embodies care.”

That language has stayed with me. And confirmed why the crafting of my podcast, In the Processor: Where Grief is Re-imagined, is necessary. Why it is a sacred and holy act.

People are looking for community -- places where they can be fully themselves. For Black women and other marginalized communities, that need is even more urgent. We are searching for spaces where our lived experiences are honored, our voices are amplified, and our truths are received without policing or dismissal.

To tell the truth about our lives and hold one another’s stories with care is its own kind of rebellion, especially in public spaces that reward performance, sharpen critique, and leave so little room for our full range of emotions. Truth-telling, in that kind of world, becomes its own form of resistance.

On a Phygital Fellows trip to Boston University, I was reminded that Howard Thurman, then, the first black dean of Marsh Chapel, used the tools of his time —chapel, preaching, writing, and radio — to carry wisdom into people’s daily lives. Podcasting offers a similar possibility in ours. It can do more than gather an audience; it can help cultivate community, one shaped by return, recognition, and care.

I’m a child who grew up watching the Today Show. When in the early 80s it was led by Bryant Gumbel and Jane Pauley. I still watch it to this day because it is a form of community for me. I am invested in the lives of the reporters and hosts. When host Sheinelle Jones tragically lost her college sweetheart and husband Uche of 17-years to brain cancer, I grieved with her. Prayed for her and her family. Wrote messages of condolences on her Instagram wall. And I tuned in, like a dependable friend, to listen to her tell her story of grief and change. And I felt less alone.

Dr. Melva L. Sampson, Assistant Professor of Preaching and Practical Theology at Wake Forest names the power of podcasting beautifully in her “Digital Insurgent Homiletics” lecture as part of the Presbyterian Lectures at Columbia Theological Seminary in February. She describes podcasting as a form of proclamation that creates shared language and echoes the tradition of long conversations held on porches, at kitchen tables and on late night phone calls. What makes podcasting powerful, she notes, is not only its accessibility, but its intimacy. It allows stories to unfold over time, episode by episode, much like relationships do. In a fragmented world, that kind of sustained presence matters.

It matters especially because so many people are living with the wounds of disconnection. As Dr. Yolanda Pierce reminds us in “The Wounds are the Witness Black Faith Weaving Memory into Justice and Healing,” when traditional spaces of ritual and belonging have been diminished or lost, people are left asking tough questions: Where will we go to celebrate? To mourn? Who will help us hold our stories when our ground shifts and our life breaks open?

That is why this podcast feels necessary to me. It is more than just a digital platform. It is an attempt to make room – for grief, for truth-telling, for memory, for re-imagining, for the kind of listening that helps people feel less alone. It is a way of building the kind of community many of us are searching for.

And in this season, a podcast is doing that for me.