Earthkeepers: A Circlewood Podcast on Creation Care and Spirituality · Forrest Inslee

Community with the Whole of Creation, with Wes and Stephanie Vander Lugt of Kinship Plot | Ep. 137

·47 min·3 clips

Kinship Plot is an intentional community that cultivates resonant relationships of every kind.

Earthkeepers centers the conversation on kinship plots, a project shaped by intentional fellowship in place. Stephanie and Wes Vanderluck talk about why community matters for creation care. The episode starts from a plain conviction that people are made to belong to one another. It widens that idea to include the more-than-human beings that make up the whole community of creation. That frame gives the discussion its moral and spiritual center. The hosts describe the work as local, relational, and slow. They do not treat slowness as indecision. They treat it as part of trust. The conversation then turns to the search for land. That search is not romantic or easy. They describe asking basic practical questions about zoning and what a site can actually support. A former pond had been filled with construction debris decades earlier. The result is contaminated ground and the inability to drill a well. The land is beautiful. It is also wounded. That tension becomes a major thread in the episode. The guests describe the need to work with real conditions rather than imagined ones. They also talk about the patience required to bring a place slowly toward fuller life. The conversation then shifts toward their motif of contemplative action. They reject the idea that contemplation and action are opposite poles. Instead, they argue that people are whole beings whose thinking, feeling, and doing are always connected. Effective action, they suggest, grows from grounded identity and stable relationship. That includes relationship with God. It includes relationship with one another. The episode keeps returning to repair, mutuality, and an embodied spirituality of place.

As heard by us

Creation care here is communal, patient, and shaped by the limits of place.

Earthkeepers asks a plain but stubborn question: what changes when creation care happens in community instead of as a private ethic? Stephanie and Wes keep the focus on kinship plots and a more intentional fellowship with one another and with the more-than-human community of…

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Why you'd press play

You want a faith conversation where creation care, community, and prayer belong together.

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