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Your Invitation to Join the Conversation

Anyone is welcome to join the online discussion. You can respond in the comment section, based on the readings, or in response to my personal reflections and quotes. Please keep your comments to 500 words or fewer. Please be respectful and kind to those who share.

Don’t feel limited to the reflection questions posted below. They are simply prompts to help you get started. You can share in whatever order or format you like.

I will pull insights and questions from everyone’s reflections and use them to draft our discussion guide for our group gatherings.

My Personal Reflections

Chapter 6: In the Beginning Was the Logos

Below are the quotes that stood out to me from this chapter:

The idea of a divine indwelling at the center of the whole universe, with every unique part in conversation with the others, has many names. What Thich Nhat Hanh names the web of interbeing is aligned with what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls sacred reciprocity. David Whyte calls it the conversational nature of reality, and quantum scientist David Bohm uses the term implicate order. Martin Luther King Jr. called it an inescapable network of mutuality, which he said was “tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” The ancient ancestors of Christianity called it logos.

Logos is about the divine relationship between all things. The system of their connection: conversation.

Christ as radical solidarity, as primal and ongoing relationship, as how life works. Christ as the Conversation between everyone and everything.

Christ as that sacred Conversation that brings all things into being and links all things together.

And I offer another relevant metaphor for our time, yet rooted in a forgotten tradition: Christ as Conversation. Christ as Conversation says to me that the oak tree and that deer in the meadow are not God. And I’m not God. But we both carry the Christ, the Logos, the Tao, the spark of divine love within us. And the conversation between us: that is the manifestation of the sacred, moving forward the evolving kin-dom of grace. The wild Christ.

This chapter felt more theological. The general concept of all things containing a spark of the divine has been a continual refrain. This chapter places Christ as the conversation that connects it all.

Subscribe now

Your Invitation to Join the Conversation

Anyone is welcome to join the online discussion. You can respond in the comment section, based on the readings, or in response to my personal reflections and quotes. Please keep your comments to 500 words or fewer. Please be respectful and kind to those who share.

Don’t feel limited to the reflection questions posted below. They are simply prompts to help you get started. You can share in whatever order or format you like.

I will pull insights and questions from everyone’s reflections and use them to draft our discussion guide for our group gatherings.

My Personal Reflections

Chapter 1: A Communion of Subjects May 10th

What Stood Out to Me:

The Broken Conversation

What stood out to me from this chapter can be summed up in this quote:

“Spirituality and nature are not separate. Attempts to keep them apart break the world.”

This premise is supported by the lead quote from Thomas Berry, which I love,

“The divine communicates to us primarily through the language of the natural world. Not to hear the natural world is not to hear the divine.”

I also appreciate the reference to nature as the “First book of God.”

Defining Those on the Sacred Journey

I have struggled with the label Christian with the current political hijacking of that label, which ascribes a definition that is far from my own beliefs. I feel more comfortable with the label of edge-walking nature mystic as defined by Loorz. She defines a mystic as

“someone who has an experience of union with The One—and The One may be God, it may be Mother Earth, it may be the cosmos.”

Nature mystics are defined as

“those who experience the presence of the sacred through nature.”

Her definition of an edge-walker as those

“wandering along the hemlines of the Christ tradition.”

These edges are a narrow space between religious tradition and “very personal experiences in nature that have revealed a truth of their own.”

I have felt drawn to the writings of mystics throughout my faith journey and believe this Meister Eckhart quote to be true,

“Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language.”

All of them describe moments where they experienced a oneness and interconnectedness with all that is. Loorz states,

“Mystical experiences in nature—those moments when you sense your interconnection with all things—are more than just interesting encounters. They are invitations into relationship.”

The Challenge of Our Time

I agree with Loorz’s statement,

“We are staring at the slow-motion collapse of empire. Standing at the threshold of profound change.”

As well as her naming of the root problem,

“The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation.”

My Challenges and Lingering Questions

“There have always been edge walkers: those who didn’t follow along with the status quo, who didn’t swallow the version of religion offered by those on top of the hierarchy as The Only Way.”

Redefining Church

Like Loorz,

“I longed for church to be a place where Mystery is experienced, not explained.”

I also appreciated her spacious definition of the church simply

“as a place of intentional connection with the sacred.”

I am struggling with using the word church to define this type of nature-rooted spirituality, not because I don’t believe it is deeply spiritual, but because of the baggage the word “church” carries both for those inside and those outside the institutional versions of that word.

The New Story

I think this collapse and these root problems are evidence of Thomas Berry’s recognition that we need a new story.

“We are in trouble because we do not have a good story. We are between stories. The old story is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned “the new story”. We are talking only to ourselves. We are not talking to the rivers; we are not listening to the wind and stars. We have broken the great conversation. By breaking that conversation, we have shattered the universe.”

Chapter 2: When You Realize Something is Missing May 17th

What Stood Out to Me:

The Need to Examine the Pieces

“Sometimes it takes years of collecting moments of insight before you are ready to dump it all out onto the table to see what you’ve got, find the patterns, make connections, and allow yourself to see what you never noticed before.”

My post Reconnecting Land, Spirit and Community was my attempt to make connections of a multitude of conversations over decades, with Loorz’s book being one of the best weavings of these threads that I have found so far.

“The root prefix trans means “through” or “across,” meaning we are formed as we move through the ways life changes us: from life through death to new life. Transformed, metamorphosed to be more like who we truly are meant to be. Which is another way to say more wild.”

This quote has been true for me. The times of greatest growth for me have come after seasons of tremendous darkness when I have withdrawn into wild places. I wrote about the lessons I learned from the most recent dark season. This journey together is a part of my own search for the new life that I hope will come from the pain.

My Challenges and Lingering Questions:

Wholehearted Living inside Heartless Systems

“Brother David was able to clarify the problem. He said, “You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest? . . . The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.””

This rings so true for me personally, but it feels like we live in a world where this idea of wholeheartedness is absent.

I have a number of friends who are struggling to live wholeheartedly and who appear to be losing faith that it will ever be possible. They are constrained by financial demands and systems that break the spirit of those who strive to live wholeheartedly in the name of efficiency and conformity. Perhaps on the other side of their own dark night, they will emerge transformed in a way that will allow them to resist the broken systems or change them from within.

Continuing to Struggle with this Discussion as an Alternative Church Structure

“The growing number of “nones” (those without church affiliation) find nature a better church than a building and an institution. Nature, according to the researchers, provides for this group a “personal, subjective, non-institutionalized, and unmediated experience with the sacred. . . . When a person hikes in a forest to connect with the sacred, she or he may not feel the need to affiliate with a religious organization because her or his spiritual demands are met.”

I have read dozens of books about the value of spending time in natural spaces and have personally experienced the transforming power of such experiences. I can fully understand this trend and would count myself among those who prefer a wild form of communion. I prefer the word communion over the word church or even worship. All three words are likely too churchy for most “nones.” I am still searching for better language.

What I am sitting with is that I have also had transformative experiences inside church buildings and through scripture, sermons, and in conversations with members of faith communities. I think the two forms can enrich one another. As Loorz states, “There comes a point when you need to withdraw from what has become too familiar in order to see again.”

I think the sacred speaks in multiple languages, or as the Saint John of the Cross quote states, “all things are God.” What I don’t want to do is create a dualistic way of thinking and swap one boxed-up version of the sacred for another. I see this whole conversation as an expansion - a willingness to see “the way” the sacred moves in our lives as being beyond human ability to fully comprehend.

Chapter 3: Into the Mountains to Pray May 24th

What Stood Out to Me:

In this chapter, Loorz illustrates that the wilderness way is embedded throughout Christian scriptures.

A Christian Case for the Wilderness Way

“Jesus didn’t go to the buildings to pray. Jesus went to a mountain—or along the lakeshore, or to the wilderness.”

“The word wilderness is used more than three hundred times in the Bible.”

She provides a multitude of examples of this connection between heroes of the faith and wild places.

Liminal Spaces and Times

“it’s not just that the wilderness invites us into the presence of the sacred; there’s the mysterious reality that the sacred also calls us into the wilderness.”

“The wilderness is the place to go when you are standing at the threshold, like Jesus was, of a calling that asks you to risk everything and embody all you are created to be. In the wilderness—the place that speaks—you find that you are not alone.”

My most profound experiences in the wild have come during some of the most difficult times of my life, when I felt called to separate myself from the human world in order to reorient myself to the sacred and find spiritual clarity.

Responding to an Invitation From the Other

“There is a mysterious union that happens when we enter into a relationship with the wild and practice sacred conversation.”

“The living world is where we can be opened up in receptivity to a divine encounter. There is an invitation here, offered to all of us: in order to listen for the holy, to engage in intimate conversation with the sacred, one goes into the wilderness.”

For me, the conversations that are most profound start with a kind of call to pay attention. Something stands out and feels like it is an invitation more than me forcing or even initiating a conversation.

My Challenges and Lingering Questions:

A Fringe Practice or Common Experience

When I shared my story of George the Cow, I was a bit afraid I would be seen as a tad too far out there for most folks. Instead of hitting the unsubscribe button, several individuals sent me images of cows they encountered, or confessed privately that they have had similar conversations with rebels like George.

When I started hanging out with Mamma Winfree, my charismatic spiritual mother, she was convinced everyone could speak in tongues. She staged multiple interventions trying to prove that even I was capable of doing it. She and the other matriarchs in our community laid hands on me, prayed over me, and honestly, I have never felt more uncomfortable. After several attempts, she gave up on me.

The Methodists among us have the quadrilateral of scripture, tradition, reason, and Christian experience. This helps shape how they think about pathways to the sacred.

Along the same lines, Father David Perkins introduced me to Holmes’ 4 Spiritualities. David said most people gravitate toward one or two of these spiritual pathways.

Chapter 4: Allured into the Wilderness May 31st

What Stood Out to Me:

The Power of a Wild Wander Experience

Loorz’s description of the wander resonated with me. This week I shared a post that grew out of one of my earliest wanders back in 2019, titled Cultivating Courage with the Help of Lumpy Old Chestnut Oak.

My Challenges and Lingering Questions:

Seeing Gifts Through an Ecological Lens

In this chapter, Loorz shares insights from Bill Plotkin’s Nature and the Human Soul.

He says that all of us are “born to occupy a particular place in nature—a place in the Earth community . . . a unique ecological role, a singular way you can serve and nurture the web of life . . . as unique as that of any birch, bear, or beaver pond.”

Making the invisible gifts we all have visible is a huge part of my life’s work. This reframing of giftedness through an ecological lens grabbed my attention. I currently ask those I work with how their gift can help bring about their shared dreams for their community. I am pondering, How would this broader frame change the question and the resulting answer? What if we asked ourselves and others, “How might I share my gift to nurture the web of life?” or “What is your unique ecological role?”

I wonder if the gifts that emerge would be different than those made visible through my current focus on strengthening human communities?

The Larger Ecospiritual Narrative

Loorz goes on to say:

“the inner beloved is an archetype, the part of you who is your guide to soul. I think it is not much different from Thomas Merton’s mystical language of true self, or what Carl Jung named the anima or animus. It is the wild twin that Martin Shaw talks about in his lyrical retelling of the ancient European myth, “The Lindworm” “The part of ourselves that we generally shun or ignore to conform to societal norms.””

To the metaphors shared by Loorz I would add Howard Thurman’s Sound of the Genuine (included below in resources) and Henri Nouwen’s Inner Voice of Love. All these mystics use different words, but they all sing the same song – loving our unique selves while recognizing our universal belonging and responsibility to the whole.

I keep coming back to Thomas Berry’s challenge to embrace a new theological story that has the power to change the trajectory of existence from one pointing toward the destruction of the earth to one of thriving wholeness for all earth’s inhabitants.

Chapter 5: Restoring the Great Conversation June 7th

What Stood Out to Me:

This is one of my favorite chapters and includes quotes from many of my favorite wise guides - Thomas Berry, Robert Macfarlane, Francis Weller, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Howard Thurman.

Loves Twin Sister

“Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close.” Francis Weller

This quote reminds me of my Lumpy post from earlier this week.

Loving Thurman More

“When I was young, I found more companionship in nature than I did among people. The woods befriended me…I could talk aloud to the oak tree and know that I was understood…There were times when it seemed as if the earth and the river and the sky and I were one beat of the same pulse. It was a time of watching and waiting for what I did not know—yet I always knew there would come a moment when beyond the single pulse beat there was a sense of Presence which seemed always to speak to me. My response to the sense of Presence always had the quality of personal communion. There was no voice. There was no image. There was no vision. There was God.” Howard Thurman

I did not think I could love Howard Thurman any more than I already do. Then I read this. I had always heard he was a mystic, but now I know we both talk to Oak trees; perhaps that shared language is why he speaks so deeply to me.

Belief Verses Attention

“I began to realize that my identity depended not upon any beliefs I had . . . [but] actually depended on how much attention I was paying to things that were other than myself—and that as you deepen this intentionality and this attention, you started to broaden and deepen your own sense of presence.” David Whyte, Galapagos Islands marine scientist

This contrast between “believing the right things” and “paying attention” to what is all around us caught my attention. I believe the universe will show you what you need to know when we pay attention at a soulful level. I am not sure if that is what Whyte is saying, but that is my own experience.

Much of this chapter (Whyte’s quote above, Macfarlane below) reminds me of Mary Oliver’s poem:

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

My Challenges and Lingering Questions:

Learning to Tell About It

Loorz writes,

“Mystical conversations defy language. But not naming them leaves them without context, unable to grow into their meaning…Language is fundamental to the possibility of re-wonderment,” Macfarlane reminds us, “for language does not just register experience, it produces it.” [Emphasis mine]

I have been journaling daily for several decades. It allows me to “tell about it” if only to the pages of my journal. The practice allows me to register the experience and produce meaning from it. I began this practice while in seminary and was able to share my thoughts with my professor and my classmates, which was both terrifying and edifying. Since I began writing on Substack, I feel like I have released a log jam; I now have a way of sharing beyond my journal. What I lack is any real interaction, like what I received during my seminary years. I am not sure if that kind of conversation is even possible outside that container, but I would like to explore the possibility.

I am not sure that a 30-minute wander with a 10-minute debrief is enough time to fully glean the meaning of an encounter. I am a part of a writers’ group. Every month, we write to a prompt provided by the teacher and then share what we wrote when we reconvene. It is a bit monotonous as she provides no length limit, but the requirement to write outside of class has produced the desired objective – to encourage us write.

I wonder if starting with that kind of voluntary “check-in” with the “prompt” being whatever grabbed your attention, might deepen the sharing and allow for more meaning-making both individually and collectively. Instead of going around the full circle, we could share in triads.

I know my encounter with George worked on me for weeks and continues to unfold layer after layer of meaning. I don’t think it should be required, but perhaps an option, perhaps a check in question like this one, “What did your wander experience tell you since we last met?”

Not everyone likes to write, so perhaps inviting all forms of creative expression to be how we share meaning with one another.

Animating Community

Robin Wall Kimmerer proposes a new “grammar of animacy,” one that takes cues from her Anishinaabe language, where other species are “recognized not only as persons, but also as teachers who can inspire how we might live.”

“In Landmarks, Macfarlane tells a story of how citizens of an island township called Lewis, on the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, saved their homeland by restoring intimate conversation with their landscape.

They launched a two-year campaign to inspire residents to restore intimacy with their land through specific storytelling. Restoration through re-storying. They called for the sharing of detailed and loving experiences that people had with particular places, encouraging them to tell stories, recall poems, create paintings and photographs, remember songs, recall lost words, map favorite hidden spots, and recount histories about particular places in their township. The activists hoped to restore intimacy with the moor by encouraging particular conversations that reconnected the people and their place.”

The campaign revived the citizens’ sense of kindred belonging to their place.”

I loved this question, “Tell me about the land who raised you.”

When Chris and I first started camping, I found myself strangely drawn to the many amphitheaters I ran across in state parks. They grab my attention and have been speaking to me for years.

This summer, Ruth and I are working with the Theater Kids in Appomattox. Yesterday, Chance said, “Maybe the kids would do short skits around my Friday night campfire circle.” With my conversations with George, Lumpy, and my prior experiences doing oral storytelling projects in my head, I had a vision.

What kinds of conversations might Harold the turtle, Lumpy the Chestnut Oak, Hisstopher the snake, George the cow, Bob the “oldtimer”, Abby the young nature lover, and the rest of the drama kids, other members of the community, past and present, have together?

All Community is Sacred Community

“We are talking only to ourselves. We are not talking to the rivers, we are not listening to the wind and stars. We have broken the great conversation… we will recover our sense of wonder and our sense of the sacred only if we appreciate the universe beyond ourselves as a revelatory experience of that numinous presence whence all things came into being. Indeed, the universe is the primary sacred reality. We become sacred by our participation in this more sublime dimension of the world about us. Then, you’ll find you are fully present with yourself. And you’ll begin to tap into a conversation going on all around you that is bigger than you. It’s as big as God.” Thomas Berry

Loorz makes an interesting point.

“When we invest time and attention in connecting with others as sacred, as Thomas Berry said,“we become sacred.” It’s almost as if the connection between, the conversation itself, is how the sacred is manifested.”

My favorite definition of community is a group of people wrapped in mystery. Mystery is the connection, conversation is the vehicle for cultivating connection. No AI program can forecast how people will connect, or force a connection. Perhaps a better definition of community might be, “a group of individuals (human and more than human) stitched together by the sacred, one meaningful conversation at a time, forming a sacred bond of oneness.”

Other Resources:

During our first gathering, I shared a modified version of Soul Collage that I found helpful in my conversations with our non-verbal kin. I wrote about one such conversation in this week’s article titled, Meet George, A Rule-Breaking Non-Conformist with a Message.

One of our book group participants, , wrote a lovely piece along these lines on her Substack this week titled “Delight as Worship.” I encourage you to check it out.

I think Howard Thurman is one of the most skilled at using language that expands. I love his use of the metaphor “The Sound of the Genuine.” Here is an excerpt:

There is in every person something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in herself (or himself.)… If you cannot hear the sound of the genuine within you, you will never find whatever it is for which you are searching, and if you hear it and then do not follow it, it was better that you had never been born...

If you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls…So the burden of what I have to say to you is, “What is your name—who are you—and can you find a way to hear the sound of the genuine in yourself?”

[The sound of the genuine] is the only true guide you will ever have and if you don’t have that you don’t have a thing. Cultivate the discipline of listening to the sound of the genuine in yourself.

Now if I hear the sound of the genuine in me, and if you hear the sound of the genuine in you, it is possible for me to go down in me and come up in you. So that when I look at myself through your eyes having made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me and the wall that separates and divides will disappear and we will become one because the sound of the genuine makes the same music.

—Howard Thurman, Spelman College Commencement Address 1980

Valerie Loorz hosted a follow-up conversation this past week. She shared this poem that I thought others might enjoy:

When I was the stream, when I was the
forest, when I was still the field
when I was every hoof, foot,
fin and wing, when I
was the sky itself,

no one ever asked me did I have a purpose, no one ever
wondered was there anything I might need,
for there was nothing
I could not love.

It was when I left all we once were that
the agony began, the fear and questions came,
and I wept, I wept. And tears
I had never known before.

So I returned to the river, I returned to
the mountains. I asked for their hand in marriage again,
I begged — I begged to wed every object and creature,

and when they accepted,
God was ever present in my arms.
And He did not say,
“Where have you
been?”

For then I knew my soul — every soul—
has always held
Him.

(Often credited to Meister Eckhart, but likely Daniel Ladinsky in Love Poems from God)

I have been reading Jim Palmer’s publication . This week’s article is Jesus After Religion. This collection of articles might be of interest to some of you. Bruce and I had a fun exchange along these lines on a note I shared here on Substack earlier this week.

I am thankful others are interested in reading Victoria Loorz’s book Church of the Wild together which I mentioned in my previous post, Reconnecting Land, Spirit and Community. Here are a few details to help us get started.

Facilitated Group Discussions:

I am planning on hosting two groups - In Person and Virtual

In Person:

DATES:

• May 3rd 3:00-5:00 pm

• June 7th 3:00-5:00 pm

• July 12th 3:00-5:00 pm

LOCATION: My House, Appomattox VA

Virtual:

DATES:

• May 3rd 6:30 - 8:00 pm

• June 7th 6:30-8:00 pm

• July 12th 6:30-8:00 pm

LOCATION: Zoom

Reading Schedule:

May 10th - Chapter 1

May 17th - Chapter 2

May 24th - Chapter 3

May 31st - Chapter 4

June 7th - Chapter 5 and Group Discussion of Chapters 1-5

June 14th - Chapter 6

June 21st - Chapter 7

June 28th - Chapter 8

July 5th - Chapter 9

July 12th - Group Discussion Chapters 6-9 and Celebration

Format:

On Mondays, I will post a few quotes from the chapter and discussion questions along with a link to a discussion guide on Facebook and on Substack.

I will invite you to share your reflections on the Discussion Guide Thread, which will be hosted on Substack.

When we gather, I will pull insights, questions, and other shared information from the discussion guide responses as a guide for our group discussion.

This process of reading, reflecting, and then digging deeper into what stands out or challenges us makes for a much richer group discussion, so I hope you all will take the time to share your reflections on the discussion guide weekly.

NOTE: In order to comment on Substack, you have to create an account. It is super easy and totally free to do so.

Subscribe now

If you would like to join the book study, please do the following:

1. Let me know if you will be joining virtually, in person, or some combination.

2. Send me a private message with your email address if I do not have it already. I will be emailing further details about the group discussions.

3. Set up an account on Substack if you do not have one.

4. Subscribe to my publication if you are not already a subscriber. I will notify you when the discussion guide has been updated.

5. Feel free to invite others you think might resonate with this discussion.

6. I know some of you have read the book previously. Let me know if you are willing to be a co-facilitator and, if so, which group you would be willing to co-facilitate.

7. Order or download the ebook version and get a jump on the reading!

Additional Resources:

As I shared in my previous post, this is one of many books I have read on this topic. I also know many of you have been on this journey awhile and have other resources that may be helpful. I will also be using a Google Doc to capture our favorite supplemental resources for those who want to deepen their learning, and will email that document to the group before our first conversation.

Quotes from the Endorsements and Prologue:

“This book is a luminous love song to the body of the earth, a sober celebration of interconnection, an elegant entreaty and a bold proposal for a new way, the renewal of the ancient way, a way of healing and holiness and prophetic enkindling. This book is a prayer. Intelligently shaped and beautifully written.”

“This book is dedicated to the wild ones who have heard the whispering call from Earth and Spirit to restore the great conversation.”

“Once upon a time, all humans knew their lives, their food, their survival, their sense of meaning and kinship with God or the gods was connected with all their relations: the hawks and soil and ferns and mosquitoes…The time has come to lift that veil of fog and return to intimate relationship with the living world. More and more of us are taking our place, once again, as full participants in the web of life, which we remember is held together by love. There are no magic words to incant, no spiritual laws to memorize, no ruby-slippered heels to click three times. You don’t need to read a hundred new ecotheology books or leave the church or become an animist or pantheist. (But you can if you want to.) You simply need to learn how to listen.”

In the comment section, you will find responses from those engaging through both my personal Facebook page and those joining the conversation directly through Substack. You can use whichever platform you prefer. All comments will eventually find their way to this page so that we have a record of our full conversation. I will draw our discussion questions from those threads in the comments that seemed to resonate most deeply for those engaged in this conversation.

Why is it that Christianity seems impotent to deal radically and therefore effectively with the issues of discrimination and injustice based on race, religion, and national origin? Is this impotency due to a betrayal of the genius of the religion, or is it due to a basic weakness in the religion itself?

To those who need profound succor and strength to enable them to live in the present with dignity and creativity, Christianity often has been sterile and of little avail.

The conventional Christian word is muffled, confused, and vague. Too often, the price exacted by society for security and respectability is that the Christian movement in its formal expression must be on the side of the strong against the weak. - Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited

As I shared, Howard Thurman is one of my favorite theologians, and this book has been on my list of books to read for decades. While written between 1935 - 1949, I got chills reading the words above in our current context.

Thurman wrote this book expressly for “those who stand, at a moment in human history, with their backs against the wall,” and it speaks as profoundly today as it did to civil rights leaders of the 1960’s.

Through this article, which I will update weekly, I invite you to add your comments to the ongoing conversation on this timeless book. A similar conversation is happening on my Facebook page. I hope to bring the readers from both sites together for a conversation sometime in March, once we have worked our way through the whole book through these virtual discussions.

I know many of my pastorally trained friends and activists are very familiar with this book. I hope you all will dust off your copy and come to the text with fresh eyes, allowing it to speak into the longings and wounds of the present moment, and letting those contemporary questions reshape how the tradition lives.

If you don’t have time to read the full text, I will strive to pull those quotes that will give you a taste of the wisdom we find in Thurman’s pages. Feel free to comment on what is shared, adding your own stories and wisdom to our collective journey.

Insights from the Foreword, Preface, and Chapter 1

“The basic fact is that Christianity, as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker, appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed. That it became, through the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus. “In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” Wherever his spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced the good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited, need have no dominion over them.”

1. What stood out to you from the Forward and Preface?

2. In the Forward, we are reminded to pay attention to the culture gap between the context of the 1930’s and 1940’s when Thurman was writing and our present reality. What shifts in culture should we hold as we move through the text?

3. What stood out to you from Chapter 1?

4. “Jesus, a poor non-Roman Jew, knew intimately what it meant to be “a member of a minority group in the midst of a larger dominant and controlling group...[in a time when] patriotic emotions were aroused to the highest pitch and then still more inflamed by the identification of national politics with a national religion.”

   How does this historical context shape how we read the biblical accounts of that time?

5. Thurman points to Jesus’ focus on the inner life as an alternative to the political options of resistance or non-resistance.

   “He recognized fully that out of the heart are the issues of life and that no external force, however great and overwhelming, can at long last destroy a people if it does not first win the victory of the spirit against them… Again and again he came back to the inner life of the individual…He recognized with authentic realism that anyone who permits another to determine the quality of his inner life gives into the hands of the other the keys to his destiny.”

   How does this focus on the inner life inform our current reality? How does it inform our actions in the face of injustice?

Chapter 2: Fear

“The fear that segregation inspires among the weak in turn breeds fear among the strong and the dominant. This fear insulates the conscience against a sense of wrongdoing in carrying out a policy of segregation. For it counsels that if there were no segregation, there would be no protection against invasion of the home, the church, the school.”

“In this world, the socially disadvantaged man is constantly given a negative answer to the most important personal questions upon which mental health depends: “Who am I? What am I?”

“In the absence of all hope, ambition dies, and the very self is weakened, corroded.”

In Chapter 2, of Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman examines the impact of fear, both on the oppressed and the oppressor.

What stood out to you?

What did you find most challenging?

What did you find most helpful and why?

Chapter 3: Deception

“It is a simple fact of psychology that if a man calls a lie the truth, he tampers dangerously with his value judgments.”

“The penalty of deception is to become a deception, with all sense of moral discrimination vitiated. A man who lies habitually becomes a lie, and it is increasingly impossible for him to know when he is lying and when he is not.”

In Chapter 3, of Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman examines the impact of deception on both the oppressed and the oppressor.

I invite you to share in the comments below.

What stood out to you?

What was most challenging?

What was most helpful and why?

Chapter 4: Hate

“Hatred bears deadly and bitter fruit. It is blind and nondiscriminating.

But once hatred is released, it cannot be confined to the offenders alone.

Hatred destroys finally the core of the life of the hater.

There is a conspiracy of silence about hatred, its function and its meaning…Hatred becomes for you a source of validation for your personality. A strange, new cunning possesses the mind, and every opportunity for taking advantage, for defeating the enemy, is revealed in clear perspective.

Thus hatred becomes a device by which an individual seeks to protect himself against moral disintegration…It is not difficult to see how hatred, operating in this fashion, provides for the weak a basis for moral justification.

Jesus rejected hatred. It was not because he lacked the vitality or the strength. It was not because he lacked the incentive. Jesus rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, death to communion with his Father. He affirmed life; and hatred was the great denial.”

In the fourth chapter of Howard Thurman’s book, “Jesus and the Disinherited,” Thurman examines the impact of hate on both the oppressor and the oppressed.

This chapter hit a bit differently, given the bombing of Iran this week. It is amazing to me how timeless Thurman’s wisdom is.

What stood out to you from Thurman’s reflection on hate?

How are Thurman’s words relevant to us today?

Chapter 5: Love

“In a memorable story Jesus defined the neighbor by telling of the Good Samaritan. With sure artistry and great power he depicted what happens when a man responds directly to human need across the barriers of class, race, and condition. Every man is potentially every other man’s neighbor. Neighborliness is nonspatial; it is qualitative. A man must love his neighbor directly, clearly, permitting no barriers between.”

In Chapter 5, of Jesus and the Disinherited, Howard Thurman provides a path forward that destroys the three hounds of hell: fear, deception, and hate. In this chapter on the power of love, Thurman provides us with a clear path forward for those who take the Gospel message of Jesus seriously.

When we began this journey together, we were dealing with the three hounds of hell here in our own nation, being visited upon our own communities. Our nation is now spreading fear, deception, and hate across the globe.

I had no idea how applicable Thurman’s words, which were written in the context of the Jim Crow era here in the USA and during World War II, would be to us today. His words have both domestic and global implications. While the similarities between his time and ours are profound, in our time, at both the global and domestic levels, our nation is the perpetrator of violence and not the defender of innocence.

In this chapter, Thurman speaks to the “cult of emperor worship,” which was alive in Jesus’ time and, sadly, our own.

Thurman provides us with a difficult but clear path forward drawn from Jesus’ life and message as a citizen under Roman rule and festering hatred. “The first step toward love is a common sharing of a sense of mutual worth and value.”

His harsh words about Western Christianity that became entangled with the Roman Empire run throughout the text. “It is in this connection that American Christianity has betrayed the religion of Jesus almost beyond redemption.”

What stands out to you from Chapter 5?

Is Western Christianity, which is now being used as a tool for empire-building, beyond redemption?

How might Thurman’s words guide us in our troubled times?

This is the final chapter of the book. I will be reading and reflecting on all the comments over the next few weeks and hope to gather whoever is interested in discussing the book virtually in late March.

I know not everyone was able to read along, but I think the Substack discussion guide and comments below should be enough to allow anyone who is interested in coming together to contribute to the conversation.

The discussion guide focuses on the central thesis of Thurman’s work: that the religion of Jesus provides a specific manual for survival and resistance for the oppressed and disenfranchised.

Key Themes:

• The Context of Jesus: Thurman emphasizes that Jesus was a poor Jew living under the Roman Empire—a member of a minority group with no legal standing. This shared experience of “disinheritance” makes his message uniquely applicable to the oppressed.

• The Three Hounds of Hell: Three psychological states that Thurman argues plague the disinherited:

  • Fear: The constant, objective danger faced by the oppressed that can paralyze the spirit.

  • Deception: The temptation for the oppressed to use lying as a survival mechanism against the oppressor, which eventually compromises their own integrity.

  • Hate: The natural reaction to injustice that, while providing a sense of power, ultimately destroys the individual from the within.

• The Inward Life: Thurman’s focus on the “inward center” argues that before external social change can happen, an internal transformation must occur where the individual recognizes their inherent worth as a child of God, independent of their social status.

• Love as the Ultimate Solution: The text explores Thurman’s radical interpretation of “loving your enemy,” which is presented not as a passive acceptance of abuse, but as a disciplined spiritual practice that denies the oppressor the power to dictate the victim’s emotional state.

Summary of Comments and Discussion

Reflect a deep engagement with how these mid-century concepts apply to modern social justice and personal spirituality.

Common threads in the comments include:

• Resonance with Current Events: Many noted that Thurman’s analysis of “fear” and “deception” feels incredibly relevant to contemporary political and racial tensions.

• Non-resistance vs. Resistance: There is a significant discussion regarding Thurman’s alternative to the binary of “violent resistance” or “passive non-resistance.” Including how the “inner life” acts as a third way that preserves dignity without resorting to the tactics of the oppressor.

• Psychological Surgery: Several readers reflected on the quote regarding “a profound piece of surgery” that must take place in the psyche. Sharing the difficulty of unlearning the “inferiority complex” imposed by systemic racism.

• Practical Application: Readers asked how to practically implement Thurman’s teachings in modern activism, specifically how to maintain “love” without it being misconstrued as weakness or a lack of accountability for the oppressor.

Key Findings Summary

Historical Context - Positions Jesus as a direct peer to the modern oppressed.

Psychological Barriers - Identify fear, Deception, and Hate as the primary spiritual threats.

The “Third Way” - Proposes an internal spiritual groundedness as the foundation for social resistance.

Community Impact - Comments highlight the book’s role in sustaining the moral courage of activists.

The book has served as both a historical reflection and a contemporary tool for groups looking to navigate the intersection of faith and social justice.

Questions for Deeper Reflection:

1. How can we help Jesus followers (both those with privilege and those who are oppressed) see Jesus as he was, a member of an oppressed group? How does this historical reality change the way we live our faith?

2. How can we, as either activists or pastoral leaders, help overcome the three hounds of hell - Fear, Deception and Hate by cultivating the third way of internal groundedness as a form of social resistance? Is that enough in our current context?

3. What do you wish Thurman had addressed in the book? What are you curious to learn more about? What lingering questions do you have?

Facilitated Conversation Outline

Introductions: Name, location, role in your community

Check In: Why was it important for you to be here today?

Group Reflection:

1. What was one key takeaway for you from the book?

2. What lingering questions would you like to explore as a group?

3. What from the book and today’s discussion do you find most helpful in your own work?

4. Deeper Reflection Questions from Above (if we have time)

Next Faithful Step:

1. What suggestions would you have regarding future book studies? I am thinking of offering one per quarter.

2. Next Book: Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites us into the Sacred

   Offering 3 facilitated conversations along with weekly reflection

   Going to try using only Substack for reflections

   What topics or books would you most like to explore with others?

Check Out: What is one gift you received from this experience as a whole?