The Holy Wild with Victoria Loorz

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 disruptions in our own lives might be exactly where new life is gathering.Together, they explore what it means to play jazz with inherited religious traditions and to return in fidelity to the same place, season after season, until a real relationship with the living world becomes possible.

Connect with Father Pete:
Website: petenunnally.com
Book: Catching Hope: The Hidden Spiritual Wisdom of Fishing
Church: Water and Wilderness Church
Substack: fatherpetethewildernesspriest.substack.com
Instagram: @fr_pete_the_wilderness_priest
Mentioned in the episode:
Book: The Body of God by Sallie McFague
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
03:47 Interview Begins
08:26 Moving Outdoors
12:39 Surprise as Indicator of Sacred
14:45 The Potomac
16:34 Not Alone
18:02 Vulnerable to the Seasons and Elements
21:01 Intellecting and Theologizing
22:22 Fidelity to Place
23:54 A Lesson In Co-Regulation
25:46 Francis' Vision of The Body of Christ
27:40 The St. Francis Service
31:06 Fishing, Death, Destruction
37:28 Reading
42:32 Wild Invitation
43:59 Credits

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. As old sources of spiritual authority lose their hold, Victoria and Tony wonder what might emerge in their place, and how we might find new language, community, and practices for encountering the sacred in relationship with one another and the more-than-human world.

Connect with [guest:
Website: reverendhunter.com
Substack: jonestony.substack.com
Book: The God of Wild Places
Novel TrilogyOut now: Son of Helena: Constantine the Great, Book I
Out now: In This Sign: Constantine the Great, Book II
Pre-order: The Thirteenth Apostle: Constantine the Great, Book III

Mentioned in the episode:
Article: Opinion | Don’t forget ― the Boundary Waters are still under threat by Tony Jones
Book: The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why by Phyllis Tickle 
Website: thenonesproject.com
Article: Pascal Was Wrong: There (Probably) Is No God-Shaped Hole by Tony Jones
Book: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel 
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
05:07 Interview Begins
08:34 Hunting and Predation
16:44 Necessary Collapse
21:22 The Spiritual Climate of Today
25:01 The Crisis of Authority
28:35 Spiritual Containers
36:18 Tony's Wild Edge
43:13 Wild Invitation
44:13 Credits

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 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

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