The Holy Wild with Victoria Loorz

Today, we offer a FEED SWAP episode from our friends at the Climate Changed podcast, from the BTS Center.
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In a time of "polycrisis" and systemic collapse, it is easy to feel unmoored by the intensity of the slipstream, the cascades of crises in which we are caught. In this episode, Autumn Brown sits down with Zen Master and Native Hawaiian teacher Norma Wong to explore a different way of being. Together, they discuss the move from individual leadership to collective accompaniment, the importance of reconnecting to our "source ways," and how imagining a future is...

REBROADCAST: While Victoria is working hard to submit her new book for publication, we bring forward the very first published interview of the Holy Wild with Four Arrows (Don Trent Jacobs).

Explore the newly free library of Wild Weavings offered at wildspirituality.earth. It includes over 70 eco-spiritual practices led by Seminary of the Wild guides and graduates to nourish your call of the Holy Wild and deepen your wild spirituality.

And, follow along with the all new Substack at victorialoorz.substack.com!

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In this moving episode of The Holy Wild, V...

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz speaks with Father Pete Nunnally, Episcopal priest, author of Catching Hope, and founder of Water and Wilderness Church, a Wild Church community along the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. Pete’s early encounters with the sacred in nature shaped everything, even when he didn’t know it. Water and Wilderness Church is what happened when he finally recognized what he’d been trying to recreate all along.

Pete shares the spiritual wisdom of reading the beach: how the breaks in a sandbar reveal where the fish actually are, and how the disrup...

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz reconnects with her old seminary classmate, author Tony Jones, whose book God of Wild Places explores hunting, conservation, and a deeper reckoning with the cycles of life and death that connect us to the living world. After losing his marriage, home, and church career in his forties, Tony found refuge outdoors, where a new spirituality slowly replaced the faith he had once known inside church walls.

Together, they reflect on what our disconnection from land, food, and death has cost us, and widen the conversation to the collapse of institutional Christianity itself...

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.
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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...

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 hi...

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...

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...

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. L...

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...

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 pa...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 s...

In this one-year anniversary episode of The Holy Wild, Victoria Loorz is joined by producer Stephen Henning for a reflective conversation marking the close of Season One and the threshold of what’s next. Together, they revisit the heart of the podcast, sacred conversation as a living practice, and explore how a year of dialogue has deepened their understanding of relationship with the more-than-human world. Along the way, they reflect on the challenge of language itself, and how learning to speak, however imperfectly, about encounters with the holy and the wild is part of restoring those relationships.

Th...

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz speaks with Daniel Cooperrider, writer, ecotheologian, and pastor of Flicker Wild Church in Madison, Wisconsin, and author of Speak with the Earth and It Will Teach You and the forthcoming Live Each Season as It Passes. Daniel reflects on what he calls his lifelong “ecological conversion” and on the growing Wild Church movement, which is reimagining wild spiritual with community through outdoor gatherings rooted in the land, the seasons, and relationship with the more than human world.

Together, they explore what it means to practice a “liturgy of the land” through outdoor spiritua...

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz speaks with legal scholar César Rodríguez-Garavito, founding director of MOTH (More Than Human Life) at NYU School of Law and a leading voice in multispecies justice. César has led landmark climate change, rights of nature, and Indigenous rights cases, including serving on the Science Panel for the Amazon and as an expert witness before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Together, they delve into César’s collaboration with Project CETI, which uses AI and non invasive technologies to study sperm whale communication. They explore the audacious possibility that whales...

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz connects with speaker, writer, and mentor Mac Macartney, founder of Embercombe, a UK educational charity and 50-acre retreat and rewilding site dedicated to the flourishing future of all species. In Victoria’s words, Mac is one of our generation’s true elders. He speaks from decades of lived apprenticeship, shaped by not fitting the dominant culture, by failure that became a gift, and by a lifelong search for home. His voice carries the embodied wisdom of someone who has moved through exile, betrayal, and the seduction of power, and chosen integrity.

Mac refl...

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz is joined by Barnaby Steel, artist and co-founder of Marshmallow Laser Feast, an experiential art collective devoted to awakening the senses and expanding perception through multisensory exhibits. Together, they explore how art, science, and imagination engage the illusion of separation, and how even controversial technologies like AI might be held in ways that deepen relationship rather than fragment it. In a time when technology often distracts and numbs, the conversation asks a different question: what if our tools could help us remember how to sense, feel, and belong in relationship?

Barnaby reflects...

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz is joined by Rachel Fleming, climate scientist, former Environment Agency policy advisor, writer, educator, and part of the Animate Earth founding circle. Together they explore modern animism, the remembering of the “common wild tongue,” and what it means to rebuild intimacy with a living, intelligent world. Rachel shares her journey bridging climate science, holistic ecology, and spiritual practice, reflecting on the limits of purely technical or policy-based responses to ecological collapse. Through stories of place, trees, and faithful return, the conversation traces the long human exile from belonging and the quiet emergence of a diff...

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...

In this conversation, author of Earth and Soul: Reconnecting Amid Climate Chaos, speaker, retreat leader and longtime spiritual formation guide Leah Rampy joins Victoria Loorz to explore spirituality as a lived relationship to the natural world—where trees are kin, not symbols, and reciprocity replaces extraction. Leah reflects on her journey from corporate life into a decolonizing spirituality & leadership rooted in ecological belonging, sharing stories of black walnut trees, Wild Church as a practice of community and communion, and the slow unlayering of protective armor. Together, they reflect on how awe and grief must be held together, how the de...

In this conversation, Certified Soul Level Animal Communicators and grief-intuitive coaches from The Animal Communication Collective (ACC)—Julie Hirt, Karen Dendy Smith, and Meredith Tollison—offer a vivid picture of animal communication as a soul-to-soul exchange that restores trust, deepens wholeness, and opens doorways to healing and transformation. They demystify why losing an animal often breaks us open more than losing a human, explore how animals help surface grief we have long buried, and share stories from clients who continue receiving guidance through images, humor, sensations, and inner knowing even after their animals have crossed the veil. The trio also...

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 an...

Biologist, biosemiotician, philosopher, and author of Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology, Andreas Weber, PhD, joins Victoria Loorz for a heartfelt conversation about reality as a sacred, living process of relationship - the continual desire to give life and what the heart knows as love. Together they explore how trauma causes us to forget our wholeness and how true healing is an act of remembering. Drawing on Sufi mysticism and the writings of Erich Fromm, Weber describes love as “the interest in the aliveness of the other” and names this time of global unraveling as a painful yet essential gift...

In this episode of The Holy Wild, Scottish author and activist Alastair McIntosh explores the spiritual, historical, and ecological roots of our collective crisis of belonging. Grounded in the history of the Highland Clearances, he offers this chapter of Scotland’s past as a lens for understanding global patterns of displacement, from the enslavement of African peoples to the colonization of Indigenous lands and the refugees of our own time. He reveals how being unsettled from land fractures psyche and soul. Mcintosh invites a path toward compassion through the Scottish wisdom of Caledonian antisyzygy, the capacity to hold opposites. He...

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz and pastor-activist Michael Ellick explore the lifelong dance between wilderness, spirit, and faith. Michael shares stories of his mystical childhood in the forests of Washington—his first teacher in wonder and interconnection—and how that early “forest sense” eventually brought him through disillusionment with the church into a deeper, embodied Christianity. Together they reflect on grief, reciprocity, and the call to live as part of creation rather than separate from it. From the undulating forest floor to Holy Saturday’s sacred grief, from ancient language to feminine images of the divine, this dialogue traces a hopeful...

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz and Dr. Forrest Inslee explore how Christian faith is expanding beyond human-centered concerns into a vision of beloved community that embraces all of creation. Drawing from his work with Circlewood and the Earthkeepers podcast, Forrest shares stories of churches learning to “listen to the land,” embrace ecological discipleship, and practice what he calls co-powerment—partnership rooted in humility and reciprocity. Together, they reflect on how theology, community development, and lived experience can guide us toward a new story: one where spirituality is woven through relationship with soil, water, creatures, and the wider web of life.<...

In this episode of The Holy Wild, Victoria Loorz and Dr. Sheri Kling explore how personal trauma, dreamwork, and encounters with the natural world can become gateways into deeper wholeness and divine relationship. Sheri weaves process theology and Jungian psychology into lived stories of synchronicity, butterflies, and sacred encounters that remind us we are co-creators in an unfolding cosmos of meaning. What emerges is an invitation to trust the flow of becoming, where even separation is part of the holy dance that leads us back into connection with Earth, Spirit, and one another.

Dr. Sheri D. Kling...

In this episode of The Holy Wild, Victoria Loorz speaks with Dr. Craig Chalquist as they explore how to live through collapse with open hearts, grounding in love and relationship with Earth. They speak of healing false separations between spirit and matter, human and nature, psyche and place, and how imagination, story, and synchronicity can guide us into deeper belonging. Craig shares how dreams, fiction, and encounters with the more-than-human world invite us into sacred conversation rather than despair. Together they remind us that even in times of unraveling, new stories are already emerging and calling us to co-create...

In memory of Joanna Macy, we offer this recording from a Seminary of the Wild gathering where she spoke with radiant clarity about living through collapse with courage and love. She outlines four ancient ways of seeing the world—battlefield, trap, lover, and self—and invites us into the radical intimacy of belonging to a living Earth as lover and self. With humor and grace, she tells a story from Cosmicomics by Italian author Italo Calvino, in which the universe begins not with a bang, but with a generous offer to make pasta.

Discover Joanna's work at:<...

What does it mean to listen with the Holy Wild? In this episode, Victoria Loorz is joined by Elizabeth Rechter and Deb Metzger—two seasoned spiritual companions and guides in the Eco-Spiritual Direction program from Seminary of the Wild Earth. Together they reflect on the sacred practice of holy listening in partnership with the more-than-human world, sharing stories of reciprocity, grief, and transformation that emerge from deep relationship with Earth. The conversation is both an invitation and a reminder: the wild trusts us, and in return, we are called to trust the holy within and all around us.

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In this episode of The Holy Wild, Victoria Loorz speaks with Sean Ó Gaoithín, the lead gardener at Glenveagh National Park, Irish forest-tender and a third-level Hedge Druid, about his journey of ecological restoration, ancestral reconnection, and spiritual practice. They share how sacred relationship with land is remembered through language, biodiversity, and embodied gestures like Gaia Touch. Together, they explore insights on rewilding efforts in Donegal, the ancient Celtic festivals, declaring peace with nature through prayerful movement, and how despair and hope can both be holy as we return to sacred kinship with Earth.

Connect with Sean:

In this episode of The Holy Wild, Victoria Loorz speaks with her sister and co-author, Valerie Luna Serrels, about the transformative movement of Wild Church. Together they explore how sacred relationship with Earth is being rekindled through embodied spiritual practice, intentional community, and the reclamation of ancient ways of knowing. They reflect on the Field Guide to Church of the Wild, a book they co-wrote to support this growing network, and share insights into the shift from dominance to kinship as a core spiritual calling.

Mentioned in the episode:

In this profound conversation, Victoria Loorz is joined by ethnobotanist, Franciscan brother, and spiritual ecologist Gary Paul Nabhan—also known as Brother Coyote—exploring themes of cultural and spiritual resistance, sacred relationship with the land, and the transformative power of remembering ancient ways. Gary shares stories of his time with Indigenous communities, his recent recovery from a traumatic head injury, and his hope for agrarian sanctuaries in a time of ecological and societal collapse. Inviting us into a re-enchanted worldview grounded in interconnection, reverence, and resilience and concluding with a poetic practice of naming the relationships in the natural worl...

In this episode of The Holy Wild, Victoria Loorz speaks with author and public theologian Brian McLaren about how to live with love, courage, and imagination in the midst of ecological and societal collapse. Rooted in McLaren’s latest book, Life After Doom, their conversation invites us into a deeper spirituality that faces reality without losing hope. Together, they explore how grief, beauty, and small communities of care can become seeds of transformation. It’s a moving, grounded dialogue for anyone longing to walk a path of love—no matter what unfolds.

Mentioned in the episode:

In this moving conversation, Victoria Loorz and Justine Afra Huxley explore kincentric leadership as both an unlearning and an emergence — a return to sacred relationship with Earth and a new way of living as spiritual leaders. Drawing from Sufi tradition, spiritual ecology, and deep listening to the more-than-human world, Justine invites us into a future shaped by kinship, reverence, and co-creation.

Mentioned in the episode:

Connect with Justine:

Connect with the Center:

In this moving episode of The Holy Wild, Victoria Loorz is joined by Four Arrows (Don Trent Jacobs)—Cherokee author, scholar, and Lakota pipe carrier—for a profound conversation centered on reclaiming a kinship-based worldview. Drawing from Indigenous wisdom, never-before-told personal vision stories, and decades of advocacy, Four Arrows shares how restoring sacred relationship with the Earth begins with shifting our deepest ways of seeing and being. May this conversation serve as a powerful reminder that Indigenous worldviews hold essential guidance for healing our fractured relationship with the more-than-human world.

Mentioned in the episode: