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.

Continue reading “This Sweet Earth” →

By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann, editor of Geez Magazine, director of Kirkridge Retreat Center and author of The Sandbox Revolution: Raising Kids for a Just World

I was a bit undone by the story of the three wise astrologers this year.

^“He sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.” (Matthew 2:8)

How easy it is to be tricked. How easy it is to believe fully that we are doing good while the powers are using us in horrible ways. How easy it is to become distracted by something else while the rulers make plans for power grabs and murder.

As the world is witnessing the slaughter of children in Gaza, a slaughter of innocence, I fear for the ways I am unknowingly being tricked. I know, without fully understanding, that I am constantly being manipulated by the empire that is sending the bombs and blessing the genocide.

Yet, it is in a dream that these three find the truth and figure out a different way. They awake with knowledge in their bellies and truth on the tips of their tongues quickly disappearing as dreams tend to do. They share their dreams with one another, trust the deeper knowing, and move together.

Continue reading “Three Wise Dreamers as the Year Turns” →