In this conversation, Victoria Loorz speaks with beloved author, priest, and theologian Barbara Brown Taylor about her forthcoming book, Coming Down to Earth, and the shift that happens when religious people stop looking "up and away" for the sacred and begin paying attention to the living world right beneath our feet. During the solitude of the pandemic, Barbara found herself listening more deeply to the 175 acres of land where she lives in rural Georgia, eventually realizing that rather than simply caring for the land, the land had been caring for her all along.

They move through the wholeness that includes the harshness of the living world, from a brown thrasher taken by a hawk to Darwin's parasitic wasp, resisting a sentimental spirituality in favor of one "saved by the whole-truthness" of what is. Falling in love with a place, Barbara reflects, means entering its suffering as well as its beauty, learning from decomposition and nurse logs and irrepressible new growth what seminary never taught: how to release a rescuing, storybook God and be initiated, instead, more deeply into reality itself.

Connect with Barbara:

• Website: barbarabrowntaylor.com
• Upcoming book: Coming Down to Earth: On Being Embraced by the Soul of a Place

Connect with the Center:

• Website: wildspirituality.earth
• Victoria's Website: victorialoorz.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Linktree: linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality
• Instagram: @center_for_wild_spirituality

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz speaks with Dr. Thomas Arentzen, a Norwegian author and docent in Church History at Lund University, whose work uncovers a forgotten Christian tradition where trees, birds, and the more-than-human world were understood not as the backdrop to human salvation, but as active participants in the sacred life of creation. Thomas specializes in ecological perspectives in (and on) the Christian world, and is the author of the newly released The Gospel of Trees.

Together, they explore the mysterious dendrites, early Christian monks who lived in trees, along with saints praying alongside cypresses, birds singing hymns to God, and ancient visions of all creation joined in a cosmic liturgy. Recovering our kinship with the living world, Thomas shares, is not something new but a return to Christianity's own roots. Faith becomes not something practiced apart from creation, but a way of belonging within a community of life where all beings share in the praise of God.

Connect with Thomas:

• Website: sanktignatios.org/dr-thomas-arentzen
• Book: The Gospel of Trees by Thomas Arentzen
• Book: Byzantine Tree Life: Christianity and the Arboreal Imagination by Thomas Arentzen, Virginia Burrus & Glenn Peers 

Mentioned in the episode:

• Film: Silent Friend
• Book: The Overstory by Richard Powers
• Film: Disclosure Day
• Individual: Margaret Wheatley
• Organization: Mystical Theology Network
• Organization: Dumbarton Oaks Garden
• Book: Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard
• Book: The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
• Wiki: Saint Christina the Astonishing
• Book: Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods by Julia "Butterfly" Hill
• Mark 8:22-25 Jesus Heals a Blind Man at Bethsaida

Connect with the Center:

• Website: wildspirituality.earth
• Victoria's Website: victorialoorz.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Linktree: linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality
• Instagram: @center_for_wild_spirituality

Timestamps:

• 00:00 - Introduction
• 05:28 - Interview Begins
• 08:05 - The Pull To Place
• 10:27 - Christianity's Relationship with Trees
• 15:05 - Synchronicity of Emerging Fields
• 17:16 - The Dendrites
• 23:26 - Is Religion Only A Human Enterprise?
• 27:27 - The Worldview of Kin and Neighbor
• 36:47 - Countering Many Fundamentalisms
• 39:20 - Shifting Attention
• 44:08 - Drawn Next to the Birds
• 46:15 - Wild Invitation
• 49:23 - Credits

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz speaks with the Dr. Lisa Dahill, Director of the Center for Transformative Spirituality at Hartford International University.  Lisa is a eco-theologian and internationally recognized Bonhoeffer scholar, whose work explores what becomes possible when the walls between God and world begin to dissolve. After years teaching worship and liturgy within seminary walls, an encounter with fresh bear tracks in the snow transformed not only Lisa's relationship with the living world, but her understanding of Christianity itself.

Together, they explore Bonhoeffer's provocative claim that God and world are not two realities but one. Lisa, author of the forthcoming Jesus in the Earth: Rewilding Christian Spirituality, offers a radical vision of faith, not as escape from the world, but as a way of inhabiting reality more fully.

Connect with Lisa:

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: Hartford International University for Religion & Peace - Faculty: Lisa Dahill
• Website: HIU Ecological Programs and Initiatives
• Yale Article (pdf): Rewilding Christian Spirituality: Outdoor Sacraments and the Life of the World
• Article: An Emerging Eco-Christology 
• Article: On Predation, Eucharist, and the Resurrection 
• Book: Reading From The Underside of Selfhood: Bonhoeffer and Spiritual Formation
• Book: Eco-Reformation: Grace and Hope for a Planet in Peril
• Website: Lisa's Academia Page

Mentioned in the episode:

• Holy Wild Episode: Awakening a Forest Sense: Grief, Mystery, and the Reformation of Faith with Michael Ellick

Connect with the Center:

• Website: wildspirituality.earth
• Victoria's Website: victorialoorz.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Linktree: linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality
• Instagram: @center_for_wild_spirituality

Timestamps:

• 00:00 – Introduction
• 04:10 – Interview Begins 
• 06:21 – The Land Who Raised Lisa 
• 08:23 – The Bear 
• 09:23 – "Suddenly I Am the Bear" 
• 11:27 – Jesus Dissolving 
• 13:47 – Horizontal Transcendence 
• 16:57 – Bonhoeffer 
• 18:13 – There's Only One Reality 
• 23:42 – It's Time for Christianity to Evolve 
• 29:06 – Creating Wild Sanctuary 
• 32:38 – Courage to Be Honest 
• 35:36 – A Change in Leadership 
• 37:51 – Predation 
• 41:24 – Resurrection 
• 47:07 – Programs at HIU 
• 49:36 – Wild Invitation 
• 51:36 – Credits 

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz speaks with Daniel K. Epstein, photographer, author, and founder of Portraits in Faith, a twenty-six-year project of environmental portraiture and spiritual interviews spanning 500 people across 30 countries. Portraits in Faith is a traveling exhibit, a process of conversation-ing with people very different than you, and a nonprofit committed to sacred listening which leads to a conscious understanding that there is no "other." Daniel has devoted his life to asking people how they encounter mystery, meaning, doubt, love, and the sacred. His work demonstrates how sacred listening itself can become a practice of healing in a polarized world.

Daniel reflects on growing up Jewish in the American South, the personal crisis that cracked open his understanding of faith, and the questions that have guided hundreds of conversations across cultures and traditions. Victoria and Daniel sit with the tension between the particular and the universal, what the wild teaches us about trust and belonging, and why learning to truly see one another may be one of the most vital spiritual practices of our time.

Connect with Daniel:

• Website: portraitsinfaith.org
• Youtube: @portraitsinfaith
• Exhibit Info: portraitsinfaith.org/exhibit

Mentioned in the episode:

• Portraits In Faith Interview with James Finley: God Is All and All Is Love
• Retreat Center: Ghost Ranch
• Book: The Coming of the Cosmic Christ by Matthew Fox
• Book: The Universal Christ by Richard Rohr
• Organization: The Center for Action and Contemplation
• Musical Artist: Netanel Goldberg (Spotify)
• Book: The Death of the Mythic God by Jim Marion

Connect with the Center:

• Website: wildspirituality.earth
• Victoria's Website: victorialoorz.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Linktree: linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality
• Instagram: @center_for_wild_spirituality

Timestamps:

• 00:00 – Introduction
• 04:07 – Interview Begins 
• 07:12 – The Calling Behind Portraits in Faith
• 11:34 – The Portraits in Faith Format 
• 16:19 – Going Beyond "The Other" 
• 17:53 – Warmth and Competence 
• 19:15 – The Particular and the Universal 
• 23:57 – Portraits in Faith
• 29:05 – Sacred Listening 
• 34:12 – Dialogue Across Exclusive Truth Claims 
• 40:16 – Beholding the Other with Wisdom 
• 45:09 – What Gives You Hope? 
• 48:13 – Wild Invitation 
• 49:50 – Credits

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz speaks with Jean Golicz, Ed.D., retreat leader, writer, wild swimmer, and Seminary of the Wild Earth graduate whose doctoral research explores how place shapes our relationship with the holy. Raised in a Celtic family of fishermen and swimmers along the waters of Connecticut, Jean spent a lifetime near water—yet it wasn't until her year in the Seminary of the Wild Earth cohort invited her into relationship with a particular beloved that water became not simply a place to swim, but a teacher, guide, and spiritual practice.

Together, they trace Jean's path from competitive swimmer to cold-water pilgrim, from bridge builder to portal, and from going with the flow to becoming it. Cold water, she discovered, made her porous—permeable to the living world in ways she hadn't expected, and to the costs of transformation: the relationships that can't survive the person you're becoming, and the grace of learning, after a lifetime of rescuing, to simply witness and hold. At its heart, this episode explores what becomes possible when we stop standing beside the flow of life and allow ourselves to become part of it.

Listen to the full conversation for a special discount code for the upcoming September Seminary of the Wild Earth journey. Curious to learn more? Join Victoria for one of the final discernment calls on Wednesday, June 24 at 12pm PT and experience the pulse of the cohort for yourself, or book a 1:1 conversation with a guide here. 

Mentioned in the episode:

• Book: On the Mystery Discerning Divinity in Process by Catherine Keller
• Paper: Solastalgia: the distress caused by environmental change by Glenn Albrecht

Connect with the Center:

• Website: wildspirituality.earth
• Victoria's Website: victorialoorz.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Linktree: linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality
• Instagram: @center_for_wild_spirituality

Timestamps:

• 00:00 Introduction
• 05:21 Interview Begins
• 07:30 The Theological Calling
• 09:47 Ingesting Nature As Transformative Theology
• 12:34 Cold Water Swimming
• 15:53 A Way Other Than Competition
• 17:24 Interpersonal Challenge to Worldview Shift
• 19:15 Sacred Yes and Sacred No
• 20:06 Seminary Experience
• 24:49 Seminary Language
• 27:25 Bridges and Portals
• 31:48 Flow and Feminine
• 34:06 A Space Free of Judgment
• 37:26 A Space Full of Safety
• 39:15 Inherent Discomfort
• 41:12 Routine, Ritual, and Rhythm
• 43:49 All Ages
• 47:15 Solastalgia
• 49:33 The Loss Is Part of The Beauty
• 52:16 Informed Invitation to Intervention
• 56:04 Awakening Is Happening
• 57:57 Wild Invitation
• 59:20 Credits

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz speaks with Alexandra "ahlay" Blakely, singer-songwriter, communal grief tender, and community organizer, and the creator of WAILS: Songs for Grief, an album recorded with 200 voices entirely dedicated to grief, inspired by whales and Francis Weller's five gates of grief. Drawing from the lineages of movement song, Dagara grief ritual, and a lifelong relationship with whales, Alexandra has spent years developing her practice at the intersection of collective mourning, ancestral remembrance, and the emerging movement for the rights of nature.

Together, they explore what it means to grieve what we love as an act of reverence — and what it takes to carry that grief without being destroyed by it. Alexandra reflects on the land and water that raised her, the dreams that called her home after eleven years in Mexico, and a vision of multi-species liberation rooted in the belief that humans belong to this earth — and have a role within it urgently worth reclaiming.

Audio note: Alexandra's world was very alive during this recording. You will hear sounds of planes, cars, and dogs.

Content Warning: Discussion of suicidal ideation starting at 28:01 to 28:29. Please listen with kind care for yourself.

Connect with Alexandra:

• Website: healingattheroots.com
• Album: WAILS: Songs for Grief
• Featured Song: All The Places
• Featured Song: Sacred Wild One

Mentioned in the episode:

• Movie: Free Willy
• Movie: Whale Rider
• Colleague: Linda Thai
• Colleague: Laurence Cole
• Wiki: the Dagaaba people
• Colleague: Joanna Macy
• Book: Is A River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane
• Colleague: César Rodríguez-Garavito
• Colleague: Lyla June
• TedX Talk: 3000-year-old solutions to modern problems - Lyla June
• Book: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Colleague: Francis Weller
• Book: The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller
• Poem: Sweet Darkness by David Whyte

Connect with the Center:

• Website: wildspirituality.earth
• Victoria's Website: victorialoorz.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Linktree: linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality
• Instagram: @center_for_wild_spirituality

Timestamps:

• 0:00 – Introduction 
• 3:44 – Interview Begins 
• 8:08 – Love For Whales 
• 10:55 – Grief Medicine 
• 11:54 – Alexandra's Movements Music 
• 13:35 – Song: All The Places
• 18:30 – Ancestral Memory 
• 19:54 – An Ecosystem of Action 
• 24:01 – Multi-Species Liberation 
• 30:41 – Song: Sacred Wild One
• 33:53 – We Grieve What We Love 
• 43:05 – Alexandra's Wild Edge 
• 45:31 – Wild Invitation 
• 49:44 – Credits

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz speaks with Jon Young, award-winning wildlife tracker, storyteller, mentor, and author of influential books including What the Robin Knows. Since 1979, Jon has researched a single theme: why do some social groupings of people consistently facilitate deep nature connection, while others do not? Drawing from Indigenous wisdom traditions, mentoring lineages, and his own lifelong relationship with the living world, Jon has spent decades exploring how humans cultivate deep connection with nature, self, and community.

Together, they explore the lost art of mentoring and the ancient discipline of bird language as a doorway back to the connected mind. Jon reflects on the grandmothers and elders who shaped him, his decades of work with Indigenous communities including the Naro people of the Kalahari, and a vision from his annual self-reflection practice — one that carries an urgent message from future generations about what this moment is asking of us.

Connect with Jon:

• Website: jonyoung.org
• Book: What The Robin Knows

Mentioned in the episode:

• Book: Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv
• Book: The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller
• Book: Guiding Lights by Eric Liu

Connect with the Center:

• Website: wildspirituality.earth
• Victoria's Website: victorialoorz.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Linktree: linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality
• Instagram: @center_for_wild_spirituality

Timestamps:

• 00:00 — Introduction
• 03:59 — Interview Begins
• 05:07 — The Land Who Raised Jon
• 08:08 — An Enclaved Family
• 12:06 — Grandmotherly “Tricks”
• 14:10 — 10 Year Old Jon Meets Tom Brown
• 18:46 — The Naro People
• 22:34 — The Lifetime of Mentoring
• 26:37 — The 5 Needs For Mentorship
• 28:04 — The 10 Stones of Connection
• 36:24 — Needed Reflection
• 37:56 — Deep Bird Language
• 45:58 — Restoring Our Connective Capacity
• 49:05 — The Message from Future Generations
• 53:41 — Wandering Invitation
• 55:49 — Credits

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz speaks with Dr. Martin Shaw, mythologist, storyteller, wilderness rites-of-passage guide, and author of seventeen books, including his latest New York Times bestseller, Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us. Dr. Shaw is the director of the Westcountry School of Myth and founder of the Oral Tradition and Mythic Life courses at Stanford University.

Together, they explore the tension between wildness and discipline, myth and religion, exile and return. The conversation wanders through Dartmoor folklore, Orthodox liturgy, the role of beauty and ritual in a disenchanted age, and the deep hunger many people feel for forms of spirituality rooted in mystery, embodiment, and the living world. Martin reflects candidly on what has quietly shifted in him since reconnecting  with the Christian story the spiritual consequences of disconnection from land, and a story that didn’t make the final cut of his book — one that illuminates the challenge of this moment: how to ride the "age of the wolf" with courage and faith.

Connect with Martin:

• Website: drmartinshaw.com
• Website: schoolofmythopoetics.com
• Book: Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us
• Book: Scatterlings

Mentioned in the episode:

• Book: The Great Emergence by Phyllis Tickle
• Video: Ivan and the Grey Wolf

Connect with the Center:

• Website: wildspirituality.earth
• Victoria's Website: victorialoorz.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Linktree: linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality
• Instagram: @center_for_wild_spirituality

Timestamps:

• 00:00 — Introduction
• 06:03 — Interview Begins
• 10:56 — Re-exploring The Old Stories
• 13:47 — Living Fidelity of Place
• 18:24 — Discipline of the Wild
• 20:42 — What’s Our Current Story?
• 24:41 — The Age of the Wolf
• 28:31 — The Religious Has a Place
• 31:22 — Eastern Orthodox Expressions
• 34:06 — How Jesus Changes Love
• 39:05 — Martin’s Wild Threshold
• 42:03 — Wild Invitation
• 43:36 — Credits

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz speaks with Dr. Peter Kalmus, astrophysicist-turned-climate scientist, NASA researcher, author, and activist. Peter's radical integrity has taken him from searching for gravitational waves to growing his own food, refusing to fly for twelve years, and chaining himself to doors in acts of civil disobedience.

Together, they explore the layers of grief that come with truly loving a planet in crisis and the spiritual disconnection underlying ecological destruction. What does it mean to love the planet not as a cause but as a being? What might it look like to move from the urgency of fixing into the slower, harder work of reconnection? The conversation also wanders into meditation, ego death, the empathy required to grieve a forest, and the strange fertility of not knowing — inviting us to consider that staying in the unknowing may itself be a spiritual practice. This conversation is for anyone sitting with the unknowing of this moment, and wondering if that might, somehow, be exactly where they need to be.

Connect with Peter:

• Website: peterkalmus.net
• Book: Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution by Peter Kalmus
• Substack: Climate Human

Mentioned in the episode:

• Movie: Don't Look Up

Connect with the Center:

• Website: wildspirituality.earth
• Victoria's Website: victorialoorz.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Linktree: linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality
• Instagram: @center_for_wild_spirituality

Timestamps:

• 00:00 — Introduction
• 05:16 — Interview Begins
• 09:07 — The Choice To Not Fly
• 12:50 — Integrity Through Life Experiment
• 15:54 — Layers of Integrity Under Systems
• 17:11 — Civil Disobedience
• 22:33 — Unmoored
• 23:52 — The Discipline of Meditation
• 26:09 — Disconnection Belongs In The Cycle
• 28:12 — The Holy Local Tribe
• 30:20 — Aging Into Eldership
• 33:18 — Grounding Practices
• 39:33 — Loving Kindness For Yourself
• 42:57 — Trail Encounter with the Universe
• 45:36 — Encounter with Ego Death
• 48:51 — Expansive Meditation Encounter
• 53:08 — Wild Invitation
• 54:50 — Credits

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz speaks with Dr. Vanessa Wijngaarden, social anthropologist and founder of ANICOM, a European research project exploring intuitive interspecies communication across cultures and contexts. Vanessa reflects on her years living with Maasai communities in East Africa, where immersive fieldwork cracked open a radically relational way of seeing the world, rooted in the cosmology of Osotua, a word meaning "umbilical cord," in which who you are is defined entirely by your relationships. 

Together they explore what it might mean if animals, land, and the more than human world have something urgent and necessary to say to us right now, and whether we still have the capacity to hear them. Vanessa's research brings together indigenous knowledge holders, professional animal communicators, and hard scientists to ask whether other beings might be participants in knowledge making rather than objects of study. The answers emerging are surprising, humbling, and full of hope — and why recovering our ancient capacity to truly listen across species may be one of the most profound spiritual and scientific invitations of our time.

Connect with Vanessa:

• Vanessa's Website: vanessawijngaarden.com
• ANICOM's Website: anicom.uliege.be
• Film: Maasai Speak Back (Trailer)
• Article (osotua): Wijngaarden, V. & Paul Nkoitoi Ole Murero. 2023. Osotua and decolonizing the academe: Implications of a Maasai concept. In: Curriculum Perspectives 43(Suppl 1): 33-46. Special Issue: Narrowing the Gap Beyond Tokenism: Transdisciplinary Search for Innovative Approaches in the Integration of Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Epistemologies in Higher Education. DOI : 10.1007/s41297-023-00190-2. Abstract and full text
• Article: Wijngaarden, Vanessa In print. Secularization and decolonization of the academe: In conversation with African faiths and knowledges. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Decolonising Knowledge in Africa.
• Article (lion and cat): Wijngaarden, Vanessa 2023. Interviewing animals through animal communicators: Potentials of intuitive interspecies communication for multispecies methods. In: Society and Animals 32 (5/6): 519-539. DOI: 10.1163/15685306-bja10122. Full text

Mentioned in the episode:

• Wiki: Maasai Mara
• Book: The Little Soul and the Sun by Neale Donald Walsch

Connect with the Center:

• Website: wildspirituality.earth
• Victoria's Website: victorialoorz.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Linktree: linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality
• Instagram: @center_for_wild_spirituality

Timestamps:

• 00:00 — Introduction
• 03:58 — Interview Begins
• 05:39 — The Land Who Raised Vanessa
• 08:30 — Osotua
• 11:19 — Building Trust in Relationship
• 16:56 — Humpback Whale Encounter
• 17:52 — Wallaby Encounter
• 18:26 — Fasting During Deer Encounter
• 20:23 — Normalizing Relationship
• 21:13 — Research in Animal Communication
• 25:17 — Starting with the Experiential
• 26:31 — Unseparating Professional and Personal
• 31:05 — ANICOM
• 34:44 — Lion Says
• 36:09 — The Theme of the Alive World
• 38:38 — Intuitive Interspecies Communication or IIC
• 39:23 — Conversation with a House Cat
• 43:08 — Restoration of Trust and Earth Power
• 51:01 — Victoria Falls Tourists
• 54:12 — Wonder in the Mountains
• 55:24 — Elephant Encounter
• 57:24 — Changing the Ethics of Relational Research
• 61:39 — Reciprocity of Approach
• 66:03 — Next Threshold
• 68:51 — Real and True
• 71:49 — Wild Invitation
• 74:38 — Credits