The Holden Village Podcast

Elizabeth served as Village Musician in 2011. She graduated from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. Elizabeth spent time working in music ministry for Pacific Lutheran University and congregations in Tacoma, Washington, Grand Forks, North Dakota and in Minneapolis. She studied at Luther Seminary and was called by Holden Village to be associate pastor in 2013.To learn more about Holden Villa...

Dr. Doug Thorpe has been teaching in Christian higher ed for 35 years in literature and creative writing and has four books published. He has done volunteer work with Earth Ministry, a Christian based national environmental nonprofit. He serves as co-chair of the board of Friends of Sabeel North America, also a Christian based nonprofit working on peace and justice in the holy land, and serves on...

Kate Thorpe is a doctoral candidate in English at Princeton University. Her dissertation seeks to reexamine the trope of personification in eighteenth-century poetry from Milton to Wordsworth. She is also currently completing a poetic manuscript, The Marriage of Art and Industry, about the transformation of post-industrial architecture through art in the Ruhrgebiet, Germany based on research condu...

Wes Howard-Brook has been teaching, writing and living at the intersection of church, academy and the world since 1988. After a career as an attorney for the US federal government and Washington state governments, Wes left law practice in 1985 to earn a Master of Divinity degree at Seattle University. He has been teaching Bible and theology at Seattle University since 2003. He has written, co-writ...

Ridgeway Addison is an educator and researcher in the fields of spirituality, theology, and ethics. He is a specialist on the American minister and public theologian Howard Thurman. Thurman's own interest during his life in Christian mysticism and nonviolence, contemplative pedagogy, and interreligious encounter and dialogue inform and inspire Dr. Addison's current work in these areas. C...

Dr. Steve Arnold is a Deacon of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and is a member of the Lutheran Diaconal Association community. Steve is certified as a Director of Christian Education and as a Lutheran Teacher. He has served the Church through parish ministry, teaching at a Lutheran high school, and serving on the faculty of a Lutheran university where he taught parish leadership and li...

Mary Hess has been an environmental engineer for the last 32 years. She has assisted communities with public health issues and industries with environmental policy paradigm shifts. She has mentored children and adults in developing healthy visions for themselves and our world. Although she does not have an education degree, she has enthusiastically taught Sunday school at Christ The Servant Luther...

Joe Davis is a nationally-touring writer, speaker, and performer based in Minneapolis, MN. He is the frontman of emerging soul, funk, and spoken word ensemble, The Poetic Diaspora, and the co-founder and Artistic Director of H-Cubed: Harrison, Healing, and Harmony, a monthly event series centered on healing through the arts. As a student and educator, he has served as teaching artist at dozens of...

"I was frustrated with the quality of our national dialogue and concerned with all of the things that ask us to look at what separates us. I wondered if I could use my photography and storytelling instead to look at what connect us."John is a Minnesota-based photographer. For 25 years he has made images for national magazines, Fortune 500 companies, and non-profit organizations. In 2009...

"Lyrical poetry carries at it's heart the radical belief that the self narrating I can have something to offer the wide world. That the individual might say, I have something to say, and it might not be just for yourself, it might somehow be a place in which many peoples find deep narrative echo of their own lives."Poet, theologian and group worker, Pádraig has worked with groups in...

"The early Anthropocene is where I leave my life behind and you begin yours. You cannot know what I would give so you did not live out your days on this trajectory of climate instability, mass uncertainty, and breath taking extinction across the community of life. I pray that you are able to bring adaptation from distress. What I know, is that Anthropocene citizens who continue Holocene habit...

Rev. Dr. Gary Mason is a Methodist minister and directs a conflict transformation organisation based in Belfast called "Rethinking Conflict." Prior to this he spent 27 years as a Methodist clergy person in parish ministry in Belfast and has played an integral role in the Northern Irish peace process. He played a key role in establishing the Skainos project which is a world class urban ce...

Natalie Renee Perkins is a professional performer and proud member of the Actors’ Equity Association. She has traveled internationally with two major cruise lines, toured the country with Hairspray and RENT, been a featured singer with multiple symphony orchestras, and performs regularly with the USO Show Troupe. This past year she has been seen as "Deloris" in Sister Act, "Annie&qu...

Hal Taussig is visiting Professor of New Testament at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he has taught masters and doctoral level studies since 1998. He also is Professor of Early Christianity at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia. He has retired from 30+ years as a United Methodist pastor, and now is specially assigned by his bishop as a consultant to local congre...

Pastor Mindy Roll is the Lutheran Campus Pastor at Texas A&M and Blinn College, a ministry known as Treehouse, where she has served since 2010. She is a 2007 graduate of Yale Divinity School (M.Div), a 2011 graduate of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg (STM, Pastoral Theology), and is currently working on a DMin at Brite Divinity School. Mindy is married to Tom Ham, an architect...

Sharon Varallo teaches in the Department of Communication Studies at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. Her scholarly interests originated in relational communication and include cultural expressions of time. In recent years her interests have taken a sharp turn toward justice, particularly toward racial and criminal justice and intercultural competence as a gateway toward social justice...

Dr. Carl S. Hughes teaches historical and constructive theology at Texas Lutheran University in Seguin, TX. His interests focus on the legacies and challenges of the Lutheran theological tradition and how they relate to struggles for justice in society today. He is currently working on a book on how Luther’s theology of the cross can inform biblical interpretation so that it promotes spiritual gro...

Killing’ot Lembikas grew up a Maasai boy in tropical savanna in Tanzania. Apart from primary education in early years, he went to school in Maasai land, in the first secondary school built in Maasai land in Ngorongoro District in Tanzania and succeeded to university level education in another part of Tanzania. At the time all he knew was about his cultural background in the natural environment in...

Sharriah Armstrong is a language arts instructor-turned-yoga instructor working to bring calm and wellness into the lives of those who sacrifice their own health while caring for others. While on hiatus from the high school classroom, she continues to support classroom teachers as a teacher trainer for the Paideia Program at Augsburg University. She is passionate about the Paideia Program because...

David Canon is a professor in the political science department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He served as chair of the department from 2014-2017. He received his Ph. D. from the University of Minnesota and previously taught at Duke University. He also served as the Distinguished Fulbright Chair in Tübingen, Germany in 2011-2012 and Debrecen, Hungary in 2003-2004. His teaching and resear...

Rev. Dwight Dubois is a parish pastor who has been through a personal re-formation. Returning to seminary several years ago to earn an STM (in missiology), Dubois sought to understand the mission of the church with an eye toward how the church might be renewed. As the director of Grand View University’s Center for Renewal he was led to a re-examination of the priesthood of all believers. His recen...

Anna Mercedes teaches contemporary theology, gender studies, and peace studies at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University in central Minnesota. She has loved doing theology in or near the outdoors since her childhood experiences of outdoor ministry. She is a candidate for ordination in the ELCA. She wrote a book called Power For: Feminism and Christ's Self-Giving (T&amp...

Mario is an Environmental Engineer with the US Forest Service and has oversight responsibility for the mine remediation project at Holden Village. To learn more about Holden Village, visit: www.holdenvillage.org or to listen to more audio recordings visit: http://audio.holdenvillage.org

Anna Czarnik-Neimeyer, MA, is a social justice educator & writer, and founder/CEO of Bridgebuilder Consulting, bridging divisions to build better organizations. Czarnik-Neimeyer cultivates unlikely comrades through trainings, keynotes, courses, scholarly writing, and popular press, towards innovation at corporations, schools, churches, nonprofits, and publications. Former board member at the b...

Glenn is a native of Bray in Co Wicklow in Ireland and has been living in Northern Ireland since 1987. For 15 years he has worked on Skainos Square, a transformative urban regeneration project in the inner city of Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is currently pursuing doctoral studies in Isaiah looking at the issue of imagination and community transformation. To learn more about Holden Village, visit...