Can I Get a Witness?

Danielle Marck

Can I Get A Witness, a podcast hosted by Danielle Marck featuring curated conversations featuring the witness of Black Christian faith leaders, writers and tastemakers.

Episodes

  1. Aug 3

    Can I Get a Witnees: Dr. Sarita on Grieving, Healing, and Making Peace with Mother Wounds

    In this episode of Can I Get a Witness?, Danielle Marck sits down with Dr. Sarita for a conversation that moves from the sacred shifts of a Philly childhood to the harder terrain of her new book. She talks candidly about the seasons she was tested to choose obedience over opportunity, walking away from a Broadway callback, later turning down a six-figure law firm offer that would have meant abandoning her PhD. "This is not the footprint I want you to leave in the earth," she remembers hearing in the middle of a busy copy room. It's the through-line of her story: discerning not between good and evil, but between the good and the God. From there, the conversation turns to the heart of the book: The silence around mother wounds, and why so many people don't believe they have permission to name that pain The "religious hypocrite mother," revered in the church house but never quite present at home Why the book opens with a Negro spiritual, and what it means to grieve with the body before the intellect The unaddressed aftershocks: people-pleasing, indecision, and the fear of becoming the parent you swore you'd never be What biblical honor actually requires of an adult child, and what it never requires: your safety or your dignity Letting go of the "fantasy mother" so you can finally see, and love, the one you actually have This is a conversation for anyone who has felt the ache of being motherless while their mother is still breathing, and anyone who needs to hear that saying ouch is not the same as being ungrateful. Dr. Sarita closes with a vision of legacy that starts at home, a witness her own children and husband could testify to before anyone on a stage or a screen ever could. Press play. Bring tissues. Come tell the truth.

  2. Jun 1

    Unglamorous Faithfulness: A Conversation with Pastor Carl Day on North Philly, Prison, and Building Culture That Lasts

    Some people are formed by their environment. Pastor Carl Day decided to go back and change his. Born and raised in North Philadelphia, Carl grew up with an absent father, a teen mother carrying two boys, and a neighborhood shaped by poverty, drugs, and violence. He was intelligent. Ambitious. Competitive. And for a long time, those gifts found the wrong address. By 22, he was in a county jail cell facing an attempted murder charge with a half-million-dollar bail. What happened next is the kind of testimony that doesn't fit neatly into a salvation trope. It wasn't just a prayer that turned his life around. It was a pastor who refused to count him out. It was a jail chaplain who handed him a theology book. It was young men on his block calling him "Rev" before he called himself anything. In this episode of Can I Get a Witness?, Danielle Marck welcomes Pastor Carl Day, founder of Culture Changing Christians and Beat the Block, pastor of Culture Changing Christians Worship Center in Philadelphia, and one of the most clear-eyed voices in the city on what it actually takes to change culture. The conversation is raw, honest, and long overdue. They talk about: What it means to grow up "intelligent, ambitious, and competitive" in an environment designed to redirect those gifts toward destruction The pastor who saw something in Carl before Carl saw it in himself What jail gave him that the streets couldn't: a theology, a calling, and men who needed him to mean it The hidden cost of faithfulness, including an epilepsy diagnosis at 30 that changed everything Why the current generation of young people is more brilliant than we give them credit for Why marches and hashtags alone are an antiquated playbook, and what innovative activism actually looks like What Beat the Block is building, and why paying young men to develop themselves is discipleship, not charity The legacy he wants to leave: not a name on a building, but a movement that moves without him This episode is for anyone who has wondered if their worst season was wasted. Pastor Carl would tell you: nothing is wasted when God is the one doing the accounting.

About

Can I Get A Witness, a podcast hosted by Danielle Marck featuring curated conversations featuring the witness of Black Christian faith leaders, writers and tastemakers.