With Laura Brown-Lavoie
This workshop invites participants to connect directly with the physical and spirit medicine of dandelion root through a guided meditation practice of drinking tea together. Drawing on understandings of herbicidal culture and the everyday extermination of the common “weed” dandelion, the session explores how the killing of dandelions functions as an enactment of repressed self-hate, colonial amnesia, and an ecocidal attitude toward wild plants. Recognized for millennia as a powerful medicine, particularly in supporting the organs that process toxins, dandelion is approached as both a reminder of the violence of invasion and a potential medicine for its harms. Through shared, embodied experience, participants are invited to connect directly with dandelion as a powerful plant medicine under conditions of ongoing coloniality and environmental toxicity.
Laura Brown-Lavoie is a poet, farmer, and seminarian, completing a Master's of Divinity at Union Theological Seminary, where she is co-chair of the Pagan Caucus. When Laura is not cramming theology, she colludes with visionary land-workers to replant the global forest, and repair the wounds of our collective histories. After eight years running a vegetable farm in Narragansett homelands, Laura turned to work with medicine plants with her herb teacher Deb Soule; their book, Notes from the Hummingbird Corridor, was published earlier this year, and is lyrical and practical guide to supporting the journeys of pollinators through human-impacted landscapes. Laura is a certified practitioner in the Ancestral Medicine Network, and supports pregnant people in the journey of pregnancy release as a full-circle doula (elasticportal.space) Her most recent poetry can be found at Bad Buddhists.
With Teresa Mateus
This session engages the theme of rooting by deepening the practice of engaging with the roots of our ancestral pasts in order to ground into our present and build a stronger root system for a liberative and imaginative future vision of the world beyond what we think is possible. Participants are invited into the practice of rooting in their own ancestral lineages by calling in the places and peoples that are part of their root system, while collaboratively building the ceremonial elements for a mesa, or ceremonial table, in the Andean tradition using elements from the Andean territory. Through invocation of the four directions and three worlds of the Andean territories, story and prophecy sharing from the Andean lineage, and a guided meditation connecting past, present, and future peoples, the session invites reflection on our accountability as ancestors for future peoples, lands, and more-than-human relations.
Teresa Mateus, MSW, was born in the Colombian Andes in the Muisca territory of Bacatá, next to her Apu (mountain spirit) godmother quijicha caca (grandmother's foot). She is an initiated Q’ero Paqo (medicine person) from the Peruvian Andes. She is a 2nd year Philosophy Ph.D. student at California Institute of Integral Studies, focusing on Andean Indigenous cosmology, ecology, and futurism. She is currently working on her first novel, a magical adventure where the lines between Andean mythology and contemporary reality blur in the borderlands between worlds. She lives in Orange, New Jersey, with her chi-mix pup.
With Jessica Stilwell
This workshop guides participants through a practice of moral apprenticeship to soil ecosystems. Moral apprenticeship is a practice of habituation that invites participants to become accustomed to an observant or listening posture from which to explore how the more-than-human can offer moral exemplarity. Participants will engage with the components of a soil ecosystem, taking them as moral exemplars and imaginatively adapting that exemplarity to human action. The session explores how a return to the roots of soil ecosystems, including rocks, bacteria, arthropods, insects, and decomposing matter, can inform living well together in the wider living community of which humans are always already a part. The workshop offers an interactive model for moving from naming to enacting moral behavior and encourages dialogue across multiple approaches to ethics, religious and spiritual backgrounds, ideological commitments, and embodied realities.
Jessica Stilwell is a Practical Theology doctoral student at the Université de Montréal, working on practicable, context-appropriate ecotheological ethics in Québec, Canada. Jessica’s academic work emerges from a background in the community sector, specifically in food justice, urban agriculture, and environmental literacy, and includes current collaborations with community-sector actors to develop hopeful, practical approaches to integrating environmental ethics in decision-making.
With Kristin Brenneman Eno
This interactive video installation and zine-making workshop integrates roots, tree branches, and archival maps and topography of the area surrounding Yale Divinity School; images that echo one another in form and evoke the interconnection of thought and action. Repurposeable archival fragments, presented as facsimiles, will be moved and reconfigured by participants, alongside archival photos of local families with histories adjacent to YDS and the New Haven community. Designed as a walk-through, tactile space where viewers can see, listen, and touch, the installation becomes a living and breathing entity, an ever-changing landscape of roots, branches, rivers and paths, mountains and valleys, words and phrases, encouraging reflection on the conference’s guiding question: How do we move forward?
Kristin Brenneman Eno is a visual artist, educator and video storyteller. Her Ed.M. in Art Education led to ten years working across NYC with young children in various school and community settings, where she honed her focus on documentation of children's play and poetic voice, and became founding director of Little Creatures Films and Find & Seek. She has maintained a solid practice of teaching in the early childhood studio, inspired by the Reggio Emilia approach. A Beinecke Fellowship in 2023 shifted her work toward archives, and led to enrolling in the MAR program at YDS, with the goal of connecting faith and liberation to childhood.
With Sam King
The Cosmic Walk is an embodied ritual experience of the 13.8 billion-year story of the Universe. Guided by music and meditation, participants walk a 138-foot spiral rope marked with pivotal moments in the unfolding of cosmic evolution--from the Great Flaring Forth to the birth of stars; and from the emergence of cells to the dawn of humanity. The Cosmic Walk opens a space to listen to the wisdom of the Universe coursing through us--born of 13.8 billion years of creativity and resilience--and to contemplate how that wisdom can guide us in bringing forth a more mutually enhancing Earth community.
Sam King is the Project Director at Journey of the Universe and Director of Integral Ecology at Marist School Network. Previously, he received his Master of Arts in Religion and Ecology with a certificate in Educational Leadership and Ministry from Yale Divinity School.
