Holy Heretics: Losing Religion and Finding Jesus · The Sophia Society

Ecospirituality and ReWilding w/Dr. Rachel Wheeler

·50 min·3 clips

Rewilding means “being human in a new way” that is reciprocal with the natural world.

1. Holy Heretics: Losing Religion and Finding Jesus uses Rachel Wheeler’s “Ecospirituality and ReWilding” episode to connect Christian faith with the natural world. 2. Host Gary Allen Taylor interviews Dr. Rachel Wheeler, a University of Portland professor who teaches Bible, Christian spirituality, eco-spirituality, and spiritual practices. 3. The episode asks what rewilding means for life, faith, and Christian practice in a post-evangelical setting. 4. Taylor says Holy Heretics covers God, politics, sexuality, spiritual formation, and how to move forward post-evangelicalism. 5. Wheeler says she loves school and feels grateful to “get paid to learn,” especially through teaching and sabbatical reading. 6. She says her students are often “disaffected” or “really disinterested in religion writ large,” but they still ask good questions. 7. Wheeler notes that the Christian and Catholic population at the University of Portland dropped from the 40s to the high 20s over eight or nine years. 8. She says that demographic shift has brought “multicultural and multi-religious perspectives” into her classroom. 9. Taylor asks why Christians have done “a pretty poor job” with environmental care, and Wheeler answers with materiality-versus-spirituality dualism. 10. She says some evangelical teaching treats creation as degraded, not sacred, and needing redemption by human labor. 11. Wheeler argues that Genesis repeatedly says creation is good and that Christians have too often preferred a world that is “bad.” 12. She places the desert mothers and fathers in the third and fourth centuries in Egyptian, Syrian, and Palestinian deserts. 13. Wheeler says they distanced themselves from the Roman Empire and from a church becoming “complicit with empire.” 14. She says the desert tradition includes troubling Gnostic elements but also stories of love for land, handmade ropes, mats, crocodiles, and hyenas. 15. Wheeler defines “radical kinship” as naming creation as sister and brother rather than managing it from above. 16. She says kinship suggests reciprocity, while stewardship still sounds like “management” or parental control. 17. Wheeler links rewilding to letting nature “take back its own power,” including plants and animals returning to human-made spaces. 18. She cites Freya Matthews and says rewilding may require accepting a different aesthetic, even looking “shabby” in professional life. 19. The interview stays reflective and exploratory, with Taylor pressing examples from evangelical background, wilderness hikes, and everyday city life. 20. Listeners interested in Christian ecology, contemplative spirituality, or post-evangelical rethinking will get the most from it; listeners wanting a fast doctrinal debate may skip it.

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