The Holy Wild with Victoria Loorz

Join author and founder of the Center for Wild Spirituality, Victoria Loorz, as she explores the possibilities of restoring beloved community and sacred conversation with All That Is: human and more-than-human.

The Holy Wild with Victoria Loorz is a religion podcast hosted by Victoria Loorz, with 38 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Victoria Loorz hosts The Holy Wild with Victoria Loorz, a religion show with 38 episodes published.

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  The Holy Wild with Victoria Loorz

  REBROADCAST: Refugia Faith, Creating Sanctuary & Finding Home with Debra Rienstra

  Sep 19, 202655 minS2

  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. ======= In this conversation, Debra Rienstra, PhD, author of Refugia Faith and professor of English at Calvin University, joins Victoria Loorz to explore refugia , a biological term for small pockets of life that survive widespread environmental stress and become sources of regeneration after collapse. Debra invites us to imagine these protected pockets are also in our communities as forms of sanctuary amid increasingly uninhabitable social, spiritual, and ecological conditions. Together, they reflect on how small gatherings rooted in love for the land can counter paralysis in the face of global crisis and rewild our sense of vocation and voice. They explore the spiritual risk of loving places we may not own or keep, while naming how restoration begins through intimate, connected acts of care that allow life to persist and return. Connect with Debra: Website: debrarienstra.com Book: Refugia Faith: Seeking Hidden Shelters, Ordinary Wonders, and the Healing of the Earth Newsletter: refugianewsletter.substack.com Upcoming Book: Refugia Church (January 2027) Mentioned in the episode: Book: Great Tide Rising: Towards Clarity and Moral Courage in a time of Planetary Change by Kathleen Dean Moore Organization: blackchurchfoodsecurity.net Book: Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization by Bill McKibben Encyclical Letter Laudato Si' of the Holy Father Francis on Care For Our Common Home Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti of the Holy Father Francis on Fraternity and Social Friendship 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: 00:30 — Introduction 04:18 — Refugia 09:28 — Finding My Small Work 12:14 — Deciding the Work Based on Context 15:03 — Examples of Human Refugia 20:51 — From Passivity to Citizenship 24:51 — Loving Places That Are Only Yours for a Time 30:06 — Choosing to Belong 32:29 — Grieving Reality Together 34:48 — Mitigation and Adaptation 40:32 — A Kalo Farmer in Relationship With the Land 43:34 — The Book of Nature & Pantheism Paranoia 47:00 — The Wild Edge 50:33 — Wild Invitation 53:54 — Credits

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  The Holy Wild with Victoria Loorz

  REBROADCAST: Indigenous Wisdom For the Edges of Western Spirituality with Randy Woodley

  Sep 5, 202649 minS2

  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. ======= 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

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  The Holy Wild with Victoria Loorz

  Coming Down to Earth with Barbara Brown Taylor

  Aug 22, 202648 minS2

  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 Mentioned in the episode: 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

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  The Holy Wild with Victoria Loorz

  The Gospel of Trees with Dr. Thomas Arentzen

  Aug 8, 202651 minS2

  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

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  The Holy Wild with Victoria Loorz

  Jesus Dissolving into the Earth: Rewilding Christianity with Rev. Dr. Lisa Dahill

  Jul 25, 202653 minS2

  In this conversation, Victoria Loorz speaks with the Rev. 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 Yale Article (pdf): Rewilding Christian Spirituality: Outdoor Sacraments and the Life of the World Book: Reading From The Underside of Selfhood: Bonhoeffer and Spiritual Formation Book: Eco-Reformation: Grace and Hope for a Planet in Peril Book: Truly Present: Practicing Prayer in the Liturgy Website: Google Scholar Collection 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

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