In this episode of the Untidy Faith Podcast, I sit down with Kat Armas for a conversation about what “empire” actually means once you strip away the buzzword—and why decolonizing your bookshelf and diversifying it are not the same project.

Topics Covered

* How empire shifted from a ruler over his own people to an ambition that metastasized, and why the US is an imperial state even without an emperor

* Why the Bible’s language is so imperial, including Heaven itself, and what that tells us about the people writing it

* Who gets to decide what counts as wisdom, and what changes when you notice wisdom in Scripture is a woman shouting in the street

* Why empire has no imagination (it’s been running the same tired playbook since Rome) but we do

* The Quechua hummingbird story that reframes what meaningful resistance actually looks like

Timestamps:01:00 Why “Empire” and “Decolonize” Became Buzzwords04:00 A Working Definition of Empire07:00 How Imperial Ideology Gets Woven Into Faith13:00 The Bible Isn’t an Anti-Imperial Manifesto16:00 What Cuban American Formation Reveals That Western Readings Miss21:00 Empire Begins as Story, Then Calcifies Into Systems26:00 Imagine Smaller: The Hummingbird Drop31:00 Empire Doesn’t Just Live Out There, It Lives In Us37:00 Why Liturgy Is Subversive42:00 Finding Kat’s Work