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.
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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