Earth and Spirit Podcast

Stephen Jenkinson is a Harvard-trained author, activist, farmer, sculptor, and canoe-builder who has worked in his native Canada as a palliative care provider for dying people and their families. In this challenging conversation, Stephen reflects on the deep roots of our troubled times and on how rich and full human belonging – in one’s life, one’s culture, one’s place – means letting go of our dr...

Bethany Gonyea is the founder of Numinous, a nonprofit that facilitates interfaith spiritual practices to reduce human suffering. In this conversation, Bethany shares about her work in creating mass meditation events aimed at reducing crime and violence in specific geographic areas (in statistically verifiable ways), as well as bringing benefits to the meditators themselves. RESOURCES: Earth & Spi...

Justin Magnuson is a Zen Buddhist who works with the elderly and terminally ill. In this episode, Justin reflects on how approaching death and dying with intention can be an invitation to a fuller way of living. RESOURCES: Earth & Spirit Center: https://www.earthandspiritcenter.org/ University of Louisville Trager Institute and Republic Bank Foundation Optimal Aging Clinic: https://www.tragerinsti...

Peter Mayer is a singer and songwriter whose music reflects a profound love of the world, as we’re coming to understand it through the new story science tells us about our place in the 14-billion-year-unfolding of our universe. This conversation reflects on science, spiritual practice, social justice, and environmental care, all animated by a sense of our belonging to deep history, to each other,...

Jeanette Prince-Cherry had careers in the Air Force and as an industrial engineer before dedicating her life to Zen Buddhism. A Zen priest and instructor, she divides her time between the Louisville Zen Center and the Rochester Zen Center in New York. In this episode, Jeanette explains the basics of Zen, how it is similar to and different from secular mindfulness, and how it provides tools and res...

Once a farmer in rural Kentucky, Chris Isgrigg is now a practicing psychotherapist in Louisville, KY. He’s thought deeply about the relationships that weave each of us to each other and to the more-than-human world and has integrated the natural world meaningfully into his therapeutic approach. This conversation explores how a deeper spiritual connection to our places can help heal and mature us a...

Over the past year, the Earth & Spirit Center, with funding from the Kalliopeia Foundation, has collaborated with Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest to create two documentary films featuring environmental activists working on climate change and watershed health. In this episode of the podcast, we’ve taken audio clips from some of the interviews we conducted and have woven them together to pres...

Phyllis SanAngelo is a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother with decades of experience from a long career in spiritual formation and hospice work. She also facilitates a “Conscious Eldering” course at the Earth & Spirit Center. This conversation is a reflection on what it means to age with grace, dignity, and active intentionality, claiming the great spiritual gifts of elderhood. RESOURCES:...

Deryl Sweeney is an entrepreneur, business coach, and the co-founder of Cure CF, a nonprofit that raises funds to support cystic fibrosis research. In this episode, Deryl and host Kyle Kramer reflect on how mindful curiosity and intentional commitment to core values can help all of us show up as leaders, deeply rooted in love and connection.

Sr. Kathleen Deignan is a Sister of the Congregation of Notre-Dame and a professor emerita of religious studies at Iona College. She’s also an accomplished composer and singer. In this episode, which weaves in music that she wrote and performed, Kathleen shares the wisdom of the Shaker community, Thomas Merton, Thomas Berry, and other spiritual exemplars of courageous, contemplative creativity, wh...

Sr. Caroljean Willie, who goes by CJ, is a Sister of Charity of Cincinnati. With a doctorate in multicultural education, she has worked in 48 countries as an environmental educator, teacher-trainer, and cultural diversity consultant. She has also served as an NGO representative at the United Nations, working on social development, education, environmental sustainability, human trafficking, interfa...

Scott Koloms believes that businesses can both make money and do good. He is the President and CEO of Louisville, KY-based Facilities Management Services, the first janitorial service company in the world to be certified as a B-corporation, committed to a “triple bottom line” of financial profit along with social and environmental benefits. He is also the Founder of Canopy, a non-profit working to...

In addition to a career in nursing and a graduate degree in philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness, Mary Underwood has through-hiked the 2600-mile Pacific Crest Trail and other long-distance wilderness treks. Through all of this, the search for healing – personal and planetary – has been her compass. In this broad, rich conversation about health, spirituality, and deep connection to nature, Mary...

Farmer-philosopher-musician Cameron Howard farms with horses on the 71-acre farm that he and his family call home in southern Indiana. In this episode, recorded on the Howard farm amidst the domestic background noises of their hand-built home, we reflect on how the spiritual and material intertwine in the joys and challenges of a made-by-hand life, crafted with deep intentionality and thoughtfulne...

Dr. Kathleen Dean Moore is a philosopher, nature writer, and environmental activist who makes her home in Oregon and Alaska. In this conversation, Kathleen reflects on her fierce, reverent love of this worthy and wounded world and its secular sacredness, and how we’re called beyond hope and despair to act with moral integrity for its healing. RESOURCES: Earth & Spirit Center website: https://www.e...

Claude Stephens is the Facilitator of Outreach and Regenerative Design for Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest. He’s also the director of Bernheim’s Children at Play Network, an initiative that helps connect children to nature through free play. This conversation explores the importance of free play in nature as an engine of inspiration and imagination, empowerment, equity, and efforts to susta...

Scott Russell Sanders is a Cambridge-educated novelist, essayist, conservationist, and a distinguished professor of English, emeritus, at Indiana University. He has written and taught for decades about nature and place, family and community, and the concerns of social justice and ecology, woven together with a spirituality that is rooted in awe and wonder. This conversation explores the joys and d...

Dr. David Haberman is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. Much of his work focuses on Hindu temple worship traditions of northern India, where he has spent a great deal of time studying how worshippers encounter the sacred in stones, trees, rivers, and all of the more-than-human world. In this conversation I reconnect with my undergraduate mentor from decades ago to d...

Sr. Susan Gatz is a member of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, formerly in community leadership and now serving as the chair of the sisters’ international ecological sustainability committee. Carolyn Cromer is the director of ecological sustainability for the sisters. In this conversation, Sr. Susan and Carolyn reflect on how deep spiritual commitments to caring for Creation play out in the con...

Marianne Welch is an avid gardener, a musician, an artist, a philanthropist, and a conservationist, deeply involved in support of the arts and environmental causes. This deep and broad conversation explores creativity and beauty as paths for the flourishing of people and planet. Resources: Documentary on Netflix about interconnection in forest ecosystems: “Fantastic Fungi” Nature's Best Hope: A Ne...

Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim are a husband and wife team of Senior Lecturers and Research Scholars at Yale University in the School of the Environment, the Divinity School, and the Department of Religious Studies, with specializations in East Asian religions and Indigenous religions. They co-direct the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology and are the creators of the new Coursera series, Religion...

Tina Brouwer is the co-founder of Red Oaks Forest School in Eastern Kentucky. Amid the beauty and ecological diversity of the Red River Gorge area, Red Oaks invites youth to connect deeply with the natural world in creative ways and in all sorts of weather. In this episode, Tina shares how interweaving nature and education helps cultivate wonder, curiosity, trust, vulnerability, courage, and mindf...

Victoria Loorz is the co-founder of the Wild Church Network and Seminary of the Wild, and she’s the author of a new book, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred. In this conversation, we explore what it means to reclaim our place in nature as an essential part of spiritual belonging and how to restore the great, necessary conversation between us, the divine, and the more-than-hu...

Dr. Justin Mog, Assistant to the Provost for Sustainability Initiatives at the University of Louisville, describes himself as a “car-free, TV-free, vegetarian, beekeeping, gardening Quaker with a fully solar-powered home.” This conversation explores Justin’s vision of a restored Earth, informed by both his faith and his environmental commitments, and how his radical lifestyle choices are far more...

Halida Hatic is long-term student of the Enneagram, a tool for personal self-understanding and transformation. She serves as the Community Weaver for the nonprofit Enneagram Prison Project, with a mission to help free people on both sides of the bars from prisons of own making. In this episode, Halida reflects on the Enneagram as a key for personal, social, and environmental healing. Halida’s Octo...