The Holden Village Podcast

"My work is in liberation theology and environmental ethics, taking into consideration the relationship between the cries of the earth and poor and what it means to be Christian and living in response to those cries." Daniel Castillo is an Assistant Professor of Theology at Loyola University Maryland, where he also contributes to the Environmental Studies and Peace & Justice programs...

Cellist Hallie Parkins is an avid performer, collaborator, and advocate for social justice. She is also a recently ordained pastor at St. Mark's Lutheran Church in Tacoma, WA. In 2014, she completed her undergraduate studies at Oberlin Conservatory, where she studied with Darrett Adkins. She also completed a Bachelors of Arts at Oberlin College, studying feminist and womanist religion. To lea...

"We know globally, the U.S. has five percent of the world's population but twenty percent of the world's incarcerated population. The U.S. puts more people in prison and for longer, compared with any other country." Sharon received her BA from William and Mary, her MA from North Carolina and her PhD from Ohio State. She teaches in the Department of Communication Studies at Augu...

"Choir is so antithetical to the prison system at large. For so many of these woman, they are entering prison with immense trauma.. What we're seeing is great healing and a lot of skills that are being built around leadership and being in community with people that are different. There is a change in mindset, because as a choir member, you are listening to other people and understanding...

John Thompson has a fine arts degree from the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks. He started carving in 1990, making a carousel in Missoula Montana. He is now a printmaker that spends most of his time carving wood and some stone carving. He has been teaching printmaking workshops since 1980, and carving workshops since the early 2000s. You can see some of his work at www.hobbyhorsearts.com. T...

"My goal is to present questions and ideas to get people to talk to each other. What we have in common is greater than what makes us different." Octavio Pascal Carrasco is a historian of American culture and music with special interest in the processes of social change, cultural resistance, and the religious imagination. As an undergraduate student at Princeton University, he was blessed...

"It's wonderful being able to routinely record here without any sort of noise pollution. In order to have one square inch of natural silence, you need a thousand square miles around you, roughly fifteen miles of silence in any direction. It's really rare to find places that have natural silence." Thomas Rex Beverly is a field recordist and composer exploring our evolving planet...

Students learned about the radio drama format, sound recording and creating effects. The fable, "More Than a Match" is posted by permission from the author Aaron Sheppard. The moral says "offer the world what you expect to receive from it." The Holden Village School is a public school operated by the Chelan School District under state provisions for schools that are remote but...

"We get used to the stuffiness of concert halls, but music doesn't have to be that way. Guests attending Holden are hearing chamber music throughout the village at various times of day."  Janice Gockel has enjoyed a lifelong love affair with music. She holds degrees in viola performance and has been inspiring violin and viola students of all ages for more than 40 years. Remembering...

"Rhetoric provides tools for understanding a world where we can't always know what is true, but must still move forward. We must be critical viewers of images and know the stories and histories behind them, but also know that there's good reason to allow pictures to make us act. It's not naive to be moved." Christa Olson teaches about writing, rhetoric, and visual culture...

"Good literature creates a kind of understanding and empathy, that when it touches your heart, it changes you. It raises consciousness. You are eager to look at all people with different eyes and understand people's stories. Our heart becomes larger. The beauty of simple things that are beyond the practical and institutionalized, provide awesome statements of love and sharing and connect...

"If we stop at reading books, watching documentaries, and having safe conversations with the people we most know, then we will not be able to help much in the cause for racial justice. We all need to be part of this work for the sake of our world, our relationships, and our own moral formation." Aana Marie Vigen is an Associate Professor of Christian Social Ethics at Loyola University Ch...

"I'm realizing that a song is a kind of story. Stories are expressions of togetherness. They're all we have to bridge the phenomenal gulf of our experiences. Through story telling, we come close to perceiving together." Born in Portland, Oregon with Montana roots, Sam Olson, like his poetic aspirations, can't decide if he should wear a Stetson with his raincoat. He gets in...

"We have so many humans on this planet... As we have a stronger and bigger desire to connect with natural places, we need to be careful that we are doing so in a way that is respectful of the other animals that live here." Stephanie Williams, professional mountain guide and independent field biologist, is the project’s co-founder and manager. Steph earned an undergraduate degree in Biolo...

"Bach is certainly one of the greatest Lutheran composers ever. However, there are many who think he was not just musician and composer, but equal parts theologian. The main ways he embedded theology into music were through word painting and cross and number symbolism. Bach always signed his manuscripts, SDG "Soli Deo Gloria" to God alone be the glory. The embedded symbolism was int...

"Calligraphic words are something to gaze upon. They reach different parts of the heart and mind then when reading words in a traditional font. Adding the visual element gets people to slow down, dwell upon, pay attention to, and perhaps get insights from the words, that they wouldn't have otherwise."Laura Norton is an artist whose spiritual practice includes weekly creating calligr...

"I have been doing avalanche awareness education since the seventies and during that time, I've had people come back and tell me what I said in my presentation helped save their life. That is huge payment. I do this work as a volunteer. The community has been good to me and I want to give back. It's like paying rent."Roland Emetaz "Mr. Em" has been coming to Holden Vi...

"The Quaker practice called clearness committee is about silence, deeply listening to someone else's story, and cultivating space for the inner teacher to emerge. It's not about telling someone what to do or even helping a person figure a problem out, it's about opening space so they can do the work themselves."Music excerpt from Fireside Concert by Annemarie Russell (guit...

"What fuels and enables great improv are the very same things we need to build relational infrastructure of our organizations. Things like cultivating presence, empathy, supporting each other, and being agile in the moment... Improv is about loosening our grip on control, which can be a difficult thing, but when we experience that in the context of play... it builds that visceral experience o...

"The more people meditate or have a prayer life, the more unified we become. It is hard to pray or meditate with holding on to anger or hate." Harp music helps us be contemplative, cleansing our soul through immersion in a sound bath. In this podcast, listen to how Laurence Furr became a certified Harp Therapist, followed by the track, "Jasmine" from his album, "Ylang Ylan...

Our world is dominated by power structures, and the nature of these structures dictate our personal lives, our conflicts, our values, and not surprisingly, our impact on the environment. The Fable of the Happiness Machine is a parable that lays bare the collateral damage of power. Listen to the story and discover it's several different interpretations. Peter Hernes is a professor at the Unive...

"It's almost like there's this fight or flight instinct associated with new information. Either you can dismiss it, if it challenges your previously held ideologies, that's the flight, or you fight it, where you come up with all the reasons that it can be incorrect... This is called the backfire effect and its terrifying, because if you confront someone with a fact, there'...

"There's a deep sadness, but also this incredible life in them. They love living in that area and the subsistence that is necessary to live there."John has been an ordained pastor for over 35 years in the ELCA. He was raised in a small town in Eastern WA surrounded by bountiful farmland nurtured by the immigrants who came there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, made up of e...

"There isn't better training for leaders than the arts because it enables people to reimagine situations, possibilities, when life seems to constrain and stifle, that creativity can bursts through those walls."Peg is a painter, lettering artist, and designer. She is a graduate of Augustana College and served as an artist and Creative Director for Hallmark Cards for over 21 years. Al...

"Music is one thing that everybody has... Before kids learn the alphabet in preschool, they sing... It's something we certainly have in common. Music gives us a model for a shared love that we can experience together in other things as well."Thomas Schmidt was cantor at St Peter's Lutheran Church in New York City for 25 years until his retirement two years ago. The musical repe...