The Holy Wild with Victoria Loorz
Aug 22, 2026 · 48 min · 11 segments
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…
You're listening to a podcast from the Center for Wild Spirituality.
And this is a conversation with human beings who are restoring sacred conversation with all beings.
It's a podcast for the edge walkers, those who walk along the edges between an old story of dominance and separation and this emerging new and yet very ancient story that's grounded in kindred relationship with earth.
It does take humility and deep listening and allowing yourself to fall in love again with our holy and wild earth.
It's easy to be excited about rewilding your spirituality when you're encountering a wild deer who chooses to trust you with their little fawns, like that black-tailed deer I named Mary, like she did when I was writing Church of the Wild in Bellingham.
It's easy to feel closer to God and full of gratitude and love when you get to witness a newborn seal growing up right in front of your window, like I do now in the little Manzanita Bay where I live.
It's easy to feel the sacred nature of nature when you're thrust into awe in the presence of towering cedar trees or a glorious sunset, or you can witness the return of thousands of white geese or trumpeter swans.
But what about when you're filled with grief and rage, when you witness the scars of deforestation, or you dread when you imagine the future, what the climate reality is going to be like for your children? Or how you feel disgust when you accidentally run into remains of an animal half eaten by another one, decomposing before surrendering to the soil.
Or how about when you smell the mouse urine inside your kitchen cabinets, like I do now, that won't go away even after we fix the hole beneath the oven where they got in.
It's so much harder to hold on to the inherent sacred reality of reality when you consider predation It's harder to hold that earth is sacred even when she is violated.
The sacred is not just present when it fits our image and our desire for reality to be a certain way.
Because once you fall in love with a place, your own home habitat that you share with multiple creatures, you begin to belong to everything that happens there.
The death and the predation and the disease and decomposition and the climate disruption even.
When you fall in love, you take on the joys and also the griefs of your beloved.
In my conversation with my guest today, she said something that captures this beautifully.
She said perhaps she hasn't been saved by the beauty of the world so much as by its wholeness, the wholeness of the world.
The things that we wish wouldn't happen as well as the things that we're fighting against.
All of it makes me wonder how accepting the wholeness of the world as holy might help us accept the wholeness, the uncomfortable and disagreeable parts of ourselves as holy too.
And in case you don't know her, she is one of our most beloved spiritual writers, an Episcopal priest, or at least she was before she left church, and a retired professor of religion.
She now describes herself as a farmhand on the land that she loves in the foothills of the Appalachians.
Join me as we share and talk about her new book and all that is involved in it.
Barbara Brown Taylor, thank you so much for taking time to join us today, especially around the topic that has been central to you, at least for the last few years, probably your whole life.
So grateful that you've taken the time to write this next book that's coming out soon.
When I found you, we were introduced through a mutual friend and it was like finding a first cousin.
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You're listening to a podcast from the Center for Wild Spirituality.
And this is a conversation with human beings who are restoring sacred conversation with all beings.
It's a podcast for the edge walkers, those who walk along the edges between an old story of dominance and separation and this emerging new and yet very ancient story that's grounded in kindred relationship with earth.
It does take humility and deep listening and allowing yourself to fall in love again with our holy and wild earth.
It's easy to be excited about rewilding your spirituality when you're encountering a wild deer who chooses to trust you with their little fawns, like that black-tailed deer I named Mary, like she did when I was writing Church of the Wild in Bellingham.
It's easy to feel closer to God and full of gratitude and love when you get to witness a newborn seal growing up right in front of your window, like I do now in the little Manzanita Bay where I live.
It's easy to feel the sacred nature of nature when you're thrust into awe in the presence of towering cedar trees or a glorious sunset, or you can witness the return of thousands of white geese or trumpeter swans.
But what about when you're filled with grief and rage, when you witness the scars of deforestation, or you dread when you imagine the future, what the climate reality is going to be like for your children? Or how you feel disgust when you accidentally run into remains of an animal half eaten by another one, decomposing before surrendering to the soil.
Or how about when you smell the mouse urine inside your kitchen cabinets, like I do now, that won't go away even after we fix the hole beneath the oven where they got in.
It's so much harder to hold on to the inherent sacred reality of reality when you consider predation It's harder to hold that earth is sacred even when she is violated.
The sacred is not just present when it fits our image and our desire for reality to be a certain way.
Because once you fall in love with a place, your own home habitat that you share with multiple creatures, you begin to belong to everything that happens there.
The death and the predation and the disease and decomposition and the climate disruption even.
When you fall in love, you take on the joys and also the griefs of your beloved.
In my conversation with my guest today, she said something that captures this beautifully.
She said perhaps she hasn't been saved by the beauty of the world so much as by its wholeness, the wholeness of the world.
The things that we wish wouldn't happen as well as the things that we're fighting against.
All of it makes me wonder how accepting the wholeness of the world as holy might help us accept the wholeness, the uncomfortable and disagreeable parts of ourselves as holy too.
And in case you don't know her, she is one of our most beloved spiritual writers, an Episcopal priest, or at least she was before she left church, and a retired professor of religion.
She now describes herself as a farmhand on the land that she loves in the foothills of the Appalachians.
Join me as we share and talk about her new book and all that is involved in it.
Barbara Brown Taylor, thank you so much for taking time to join us today, especially around the topic that has been central to you, at least for the last few years, probably your whole life.
So grateful that you've taken the time to write this next book that's coming out soon.
When I found you, we were introduced through a mutual friend and it was like finding a first cousin.
