Today we celebrate the recent release of a new book by Lydia Wylie-Kellermann, the co-founder of RadicalDiscipleship.net! You can order This Sweet Earth right here. We were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to ask her a few questions about it. See below for book tour dates!

RD: We are interested in what led you to write this book. Are there specific experiences or situations that you can go back to that told you that this book needed to be written and that you needed to write it?

LWK: I think more than anything I had this ongoing nagging feeling for a few years that there was this book inside of me. I just needed to make space to see what would pour out.

A big part of why I personally needed this book was because I was shocked by the level of immobilizing anxiety I was experiencing. I was reading scientific studies that kept saying how much worse things are than we thought. I was witnessing predictions for human extinction. The doomsday scrolling was making it hard to breathe. There was so much grief and rage stuck in my body all the time. And I don’t think I’m alone in that. I realized that if I held these feelings by myself that they would turn either towards total despair or I would have to pretend it wasn’t happening just to keep going.

Yet I know that this rage and grief and anxiety are holy. They are how we express how much we love this world. And that if we hold these emotions in community, then there is beautiful, transformational power in it all.

When I was overcome with pain around climate crisis, it was my kids that would grab my hand and pull me over to watch the caterpillar devouring the milkweed. Their ability to slow down and intimately rest in this ecosystem changed my posture.

And as I look out into the future and what I want my kids to know and learn, I find myself leaning on the theological imagination and political analysis of my childhood. My parents and the community around me taught me so much about what it means to be human….what we say yes to with our whole bodies and how we also say no by putting our bodies on the line.

This book in many ways is a love letter to the generations before me and the generations after. I am constantly stumbling over gratitude for the lessons they teach me daily.

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RD: Did you have a particular audience in mind while you wrote this book?

LWK: Well I certainly wrote it from the perspective of being a parent and mindful of the impossible task parents have of raising kids in this time of constant climate crisis. But coming from a queer family, I certainly know the gifts of claiming family as wide as possible. All of us have our lives wrapped up with children in one way or another- whether as aunts, uncles, grandparents, teacher, church member, neighbor. I think we are all holding these griefs and longings. And we all need the wisdom of kids right now. I’ll be curious to see how it reads for non-parents…but I hope there are questions and dreamings in here that touch all of us about what it means to be alive…to be human…in this moment in time.

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RD: How do you hope readers of your book respond? 

LWK: My hope for readers is a couple things. First, I hope they hear aloud the anxiety, grief, anger, and fear that so many of us are holding silently in our bodies every day.  So many of us are hungering for collective spaces for grief and ritual to release the pain and to know that we are not alone. My hope is always that reading stories tickles memories of our own stories that end up falling from our lips. Each story told weaves the web of community.

Second, I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to teach my kids in this moment. What skills might they need? What transformations need to happen? And the more I wrote about them, the more I fell in love with this different way of being. What I realized was that the life I want for my kids was actually incredibly beautiful, sacred, and joyful. Without minimizing the crisis, there was a life worth fighting for. Perhaps this crisis is forcing us to make huge changes that actually lead us towards living more humanly.