The Holy Wild with Victoria Loorz

September and the Autumn Equinox have arrived and found us at the Center for Wild Spirituality in a season of both deep contemplation and action. The Crow Cohort of the Seminary Of The Wild is beginning our two year journey together while Victoria finishes the draft of her next book. So we've chosen to re-release a pair of our favorite episodes from our inaugural season, starting today with our dear friend, Randy Woodley.
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In this conversation with Victoria Loorz, Randy Woodley shares stories from his Cherokee lineage, his mother’s deep communion with plants and animals, and his decades of land based ministry at Eloheh Farm. Together they explore why many today stand on the "inside and outside edges" of the Christian story, the collapse of institutional religion, and how Creator often works through seasons of chaos. Woodley describes this era as a time of composting, where old systems break down so more relational and grounded ways of being can emerge. He invites listeners to let go of rigid categories and doctrines and return to what he calls our original human vocation: co-sustaining the community of creation through simple acts of love, reciprocity, and right relationship, where meals become communion, tending becomes prayer, and all beings are kin.
Rev. Dr. Randy Woodley, Ph.D., is a farmer, activist scholar, speaker, teacher, and Indigenous wisdom keeper whose work spans spirituality, justice, culture, racial diversity, regenerative farming, and our relationship with the Earth. 

Connect with Randy: 
Book: Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days of Reconnecting with Sacred Earth
Book: How Western Christian Got It Wrong (Out now!)
Substack: @rwoodley7
Personal Website: randywoodley.com
Eloheh Website: eloheh.org
Mentioned in the episode:
Documentary: The Year The Earth Changed
Connect with the Center:
Website: wildspirituality.earth
Victoria's Website: victorialoorz.com
Email: hello@wildspirituality.earth
Linktree: linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality
Instagram: @center_for_wild_spirituality
Timestamps:
00:35 – Introduction
07:10 – Interview Starts
08:49 – The Land Who Raised Randy
10:43 – Academy Experience
12:18 – Eloheh
13:25 – Bridging Across the Edges
15:44 – Widespread Abandonment of Institutionalized Western Religion
19:40 – Replacing the Programs with Relationship
24:31 – Co-Sustainers
27:41 – Finding New Language
31:50 – Becoming Rooted
36:08 – Repairing the Separations
38:32 – Seeds Are Our Treasure
40:04 – The War on Indigenous Lands
42:33 – Create Human Rights for the Earth
44:15 – Sacred Clowns
46:49 – Sacred Invitation

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
Book: Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others
Mentioned in the episode:
Book: Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Book: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Book: When God Was A Bird: Christianity, Animism, and the Re-Enchantment of the World by Mark I Wallace 
Podcast: Liturgies, Myth, and the Age of the Wolf with Martin Shaw - The Holy Wild with Victoria Loorz
Connect with the Center:
Website: wildspirituality.earth
Victoria's Website: victorialoorz.com
Email: hello@wildspirituality.earth
Linktree: linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality
Instagram: @center_for_wild_spirituality
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
04:24 Interview Begins
05:35 Coming Down To Earth
08:33 The Wild Loving Back
10:47 Saved by the Wholeness of the World
13:09 Learning What We Couldn't In Church
18:54 Reading as We Write
21:09 What Is Emerging For The Christ Tradition?
24:45 Theology Worries
28:53 Interreligious Dialogue
29:57 How The Wild Ones Experience The Holy
34:12 That Which Connects
36:46 What Do These Words Even Mean?
41:41 Darshan
43:06 Barbara's Next Invitation
45:16 Wild Invitation
46:20 Credits

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: hello@wildspirituality.earth
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: ldahill@hartfordinternational.edu
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: hello@wildspirituality.earth
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: hello@wildspirituality.earth
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