ABOUT DaMisha
Womanist Theologian | Chaplain | Founder, Daughters of the Yam
My first spiritual home was not a church. It was my father. He was the one who planted faith in my body before any institution tried to name it. The church became an extension of that foundational love—a place where my formation deepened, where faith took on language and community and ritual. And then, at seventeen, I was given a choice no one should have to make: my body or my belief. I chose my body. I walked away, carrying nothing but the ache of a faith that could not hold all of me.
That leaving was a death. But it was also a seed.
For years I wandered between two worlds—the church that helped shape my formation and the body the church could not name without violence. I know what it feels like to love God and be told that God cannot love you back. I know what it costs to sit in a pew and feel your own flesh become a theological problem. And I know what it takes to refuse that lie.
That refusal became my theology. Touch Me Not Embodiment (TMNE) is the framework I developed to name what the church did to bodies like mine—and to chart the path back to wholeness. It begins in the crisis: the moment a person is taught that their flesh is the enemy of their faith, that desire is danger, that the body must be disciplined into submission. TMNE names that rupture as theological violence. And then it does something the church rarely does—it offers a way home.
Home, in TMNE, is the garden of wholeness—the place where embodiment is not a problem to be solved but a gift to be inhabited. Where sacred desire is not silenced but resurrected. Where Black, queer, and marginalized bodies are not tolerated but celebrated as sites of divine revelation.
Connect with Damisha | damishamoore@gmail.com
Daughters of the Yam—named for the Audre Lorde tradition that insists we nourish ourselves before we can nourish others—is the platform where this theology lives. Through teaching, writing, and communal spiritual care, DOTY creates space for people who have been exiled from faith to come back to themselves. Not back to the institution. Back to their own bodies. Back to the sacred ground they were standing on all along.
I am a healthcare chaplain resident at Atrium Health Carolinas Medical Center and a Doctor of Ministry scholar at Wake Forest School of Divinity. My scholarship lives in conversation with Katie Geneva Cannon, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Eboni Marshall Turman, and Anthony Pinn—thinkers who taught me that the body is not a problem to be managed but a text to be read. My work is not about making the church more inclusive. It is about building something new for those of us who were never meant to survive the old thing.