Time for a poetry interlude. Rebecca Baggett has written this elegant poem, Testimony, which she dedicates “to my daughters”. It appears in her book, The Woman Who Lives Without Money (Regal House Publishing, 2022).  I want to tell youthat the world is still...

Connie Barlow and her ex-evangelical-minister husband Michael Dowd, another RN Voice, spent years traveling the U.S. in their van and bringing the “Good RN News” to countless venues. Their website is full of RN-oriented materials. Two links that Connie feels are...

Thomas Berry (1914-2009) was a cultural historian who preferred to be called a geologian. When Loyal Rue wrote Amythia in 1989, lifting up the salience of Everybody’s Story, he was unaware of Thomas’s 1978 book that called for the adoption of what he called The New...

Wendell Berry, a poet, novelist, and environmental activist, lives his religious naturalist orientation to the fullest, farming his land in Kentucky and speaking to our deepest and most important understandings. I’ll start with my two favorite poems and then lift up...

It being Earth Day, a paean must go out to Rachel Carson, its inspiration and its embodiment. I’ll post below some of her mellifluous quotes that lift up her deep religious naturalist sensibilities, sensibilities that fueled her pivotal environmental activism. Those...

Billy Collins is a celebrated poet whose work is often whimsical. I encountered this one a few years ago and it never fails to elicit a smile and warm my heart.   I pick an orange from a wicker basket and place it on the table to represent the sun. Then down at...

Don Crosby is a retired professor of philosophy at Colorado State whose 2002 book, A Religion of Nature, was the first of a series of books offering philosophical perspectives on the religious naturalist orientation/a religion of nature; a full list is here. With...

Tammerie Day is one of 10 persons that the Religious Naturalist Association is honored to have officially endorsed as a chaplain. She wrote this beautiful poem in 2020.   Oh, Trees. You have searched us and known us. In our rising up and our lying down, in our...

Annie Dillard’s book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) played a major role in situating me within the natural world, as it has doubtless done for countless others, and she has written many wonderful books since then. Annie is pithy, often wry, real, insisting that we...

Michael Dowd is married to Connie Barlow, another key RN Voice, and they spent many years touring the U.S. in a van, promoting the RN orientation in hundreds of churches and other venues. He also published an important book, Thank God for Evolution, that encouraged...

Loren Eiseley (1907-1977) was a Professor of Anthropology at U Penn, in the same department as my brother Ward Goodenough. In a tribute to Eiseley, Ward wrote: “In his writings, Loren Eiseley revealed the feelings and the wonder that inspire many scientists in their...

Owen Flanagan is a professor of philosophy at Duke University. He’s also a professor of neurobiology, and his thinking and writing span the two genres with wonderful fluidity and insight. His book, The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized, is a wonderful...