The Holy Wild
with Victoria Loorz
A new podcast from the Center for Wild Spirituality
Conversation as it was understood thousands of years ago as the relationality that holds together -- is at the core of wild spirituality. Restoring the Great Conversation with the wind, the wild beings, the creeks and ivy plant climbing the brick walls, as Thomas Berry insisted, is our pathway toward not only re-sacralizing our relationship with Earth, but restores our capacity to listen in reciprocity to the voices have been silenced by the dominant culture. The very voices -- human and more than human -- which bear the wisdom we desperately need at this time.
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Podcasts are conversations. Listening in on conversations with real people who are remembering what it means to be in conversation with the holy and alive world. Episodes include conversations with scientists and theologians, authors, gardeners and activists, indigenous elders and community leaders, pastors and therapists—people who’ve dared to listen and respond to a call of the holy wild. These are people who are remembering that we actually can restore this broken conversation. Which is exactly what we need at this time to welcome in this new, more compassionate story…. a story already alive and woven into our souls.
Upcoming Episodes
4/5 · Introducing The Holy Wild
A conversation with Victoria and podcast producer Stephen Henning, exploring the vision for the show and the wild spirituality movement itself. Why is it so important to remember how to talk to trees and hummingbirds at this time of collapse and unraveling?
4/19 · Brian McLaren
At the threshold of a collective and pervasive sense of ecological and cultural doom, Brian McLaren, public theologian and author of many books including his latest timely work, Life After Doom, offers a pathway through to a new story of deeper kindness and interconnection.
5/3 · Justine Huxley
Justine Huxley is director of the Kincentric Leadership Institute, which is focused on how we need to re-weave our species back into the wider web of life in order to meet the many levels of crises we face. It will take a new paradigm of leadership.
5/17 · Monica Gagliano
What do you think the 2% of old growth forests have to say to us about our current global unraveling? Biologist Monica Gagliano, author of my new favorite book, Thus Spoke the Plant, shares about her scientific research about plant communitcation: how plants speak to one another with sound and how she has and we all can can enter into intimate conversation with plants and trees.
5/31 · Four Arrows
An intimate conversation with Four Arrows, Don Trent Jacobs, who has studied and written about the need to learn from and transition to a worldview embedded in most Indigenous cultures that is nearly opposite to the dominant capitalistic way of seeing the world as opportunity for profit: Equality rather than hierarchy, sacred relationship with Nature rather than utlitarian objectification. His book, Restoring the Kinship Worldview, offers wisdom from Indigenous voices for rebalancing life on Earth.
6/14 · Alec Loorz
If you've read Victoria's Church of the Wild book, you've learned about her son, Alec, and his journey through climate activism as a teenager. This episode is a conversation between mother and son about the transition from activism to relationship and why it matters to begin with the foundational spiritual practice of reconnection to and falling in love with your Place.
6/28 · Gary Nabhan (Br. Coyote)
Gary is a Franciscan, farmer, advocate for the oppressed, and prolific author. In this friendly conversation, Gary shares several unexpected and loving practices for deepening into relationship with your place, as a sacred companion.
7/5 · Charles Stang
Professor of early Christian thought at Harvard Divinity School and Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions, this conversation will focus on how sacred connection with the alive world has been part of religious paradigm but eventually obscured by Empire and patriarchal agendas.
7/19 · Valerie Luna Serrels
Sisters Valerie and Victoria wrote the Field Guide to Church of the Wild as a way for people to gather with others in their community and restore sacred conversation with their place...as church. Director of the Wild Church Network, Valerie shares her experience with hundreds of wild church leaders and the emerging practices of the growing wild church movement.