Stay ConnectedWild Goose Festival is a transformational annual event grounded in faith-inspired social justice. Over the course of four days, there are hundreds of sessions focused on social justice, spirituality, the arts, and more.
This is the Year-Round Wild Goose Festival! Catch some of what you missed and maybe revisit a few personal highlights. Click here to keep up with the latest Goose News: http://wildgoosefestival.org/signup/
Click here to keep up with the latest Goose News: http://wildgoosefestival.org/signup/
Enjoy an interview with Randy Eddy-McCain. Randy serves as founding pastor of Open Door Community Church in Sherwood, Arkansas. He lives with his husband Gary and their son Bobby in North Little Rock, Arkansas. Hear Randy talk about his journey as a gay Pentecostal boy who always loved Jesus as he reconciled his faith with his sexual orientation and became a Pastor in the Bible Belt South. Randy is a true pioneer inspiring people like Tony and Peggy Campolo, Stan Mitchell, Ray Waters, and thousands more. His church affectionately called the 'House of Hugs' is a genuinely transforming community making a difference. Randy has much has to say, and you will fall in love with him.
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When Emily Joy unintentionally launched the #ChurchToo campaign in November of 2017, she had no idea the ripple effect that would follow her sharing her story. Now, a year and a half out, join Emily to discuss what she's learned from advocating for sexual revolution in faith communities and to hear what's next for the movement. Issues of power and purity culture will be explored, and Emily will show how sexually dysfunctional environments form the bedrock of sexual abuse and exploitation. Space for Q&A to follow.
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The decision to live authentically often comes with a hefty price tag. After the loss of a 23-year marriage, Matt Bays came out as a gay man. As a public figure (worship leader of a conservative mega-church of 7,000+ and nationally published author and speaker) the aftermath of this decision threw his life and career into a tailspin. While his book Finding God in the Ruins: How God Redeems Pain, was still lining the bookshelves of local Barnes and Noble booksellers, his publishers put his book out of print. As Laura Parrott Perry, author of She Wrote It Down: How A Secret-Keeper Became a Storyteller, stepped fully into the truths of the demise of her marriage, her childhood sexual abuse, and her struggles with addiction, she found the ground constantly shifting under her feet. Friends fell away and the life she had been living became incompatible with her decision to live out loud. Matt and Laura will discuss how to navigate and survive the grief of massive life change and what it is like to embrace the joy that comes from authentic living.
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In traditional Goose fashion, Micky ScottBey Jones and Marthame Sanders touch on a few elements of Wild Goose that they are thankful for.
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Creative Tensions is an interactive dialogue, a physically active, collective conversation where participants indicate where they stand on a question or issue by the place they stand in the room. Instead of the audience watching a speaker or panel discuss a topic, the Creative Tensions format invites the entire audience into the conversation, through movement. An interactive way to approach group conversation, Creative Tensions is a method for inclusive conversation and a way to show both where our differences and similarities lie but with specificity and nuance. Creative Tensions prompts reflection, invites openness, and celebrates the rare moment when someone changes their mind. Most importantly it stokes curiosity, promotes optimism, and inspires real empathy in participants. The way we practice it, we start in large room with a line down the middle, separating it in two parts.
Everyone is standing while the moderator offers a prompt or question. The tension is created by two possible answers and the spectrum of answers in between. Participants than choose where to stand based on how they interpret the question, how they interpret the answers and where along the spectrum they believe they lie (or stand). At that point, the fun begins. The moderator gets a volunteer to tell why they are standing where they are standing and invites others to move in response to any shared answers (whether it changes their mind or enriches their position or causes them to understand the question or answer in a different light). From then on the moderator may ask others who move in response, why they moved, while allowing others to respond why they didn't, all while inviting others to continue moving in response to what they are hearing and sparking more and new conversations. All of this is facilitated with microphones so all can hear the openly shared responses. We usually organize the prompts or questions around a theme so that some questions or prompts build on previous ones or provide a twist on a previous one. This allows an even greater depth of conversation than if we had questions and prompts on random topics, starting at the surface level with each one.
The physical form activates people viscerally, places them in close proximity to one another, and encourages eye-contact — all of which enhance one's ability to hear and absorb perspectives that may differ from one's own. The volleying nature of the conversation, which evenly engages audience and speakers alike, sparks a desire to hear from as many people as possible. Lastly, the invitation to move if one's perspective shifts during the conversation, opens participants to the possibility of change, a crucial step toward a growth mindset, learning, and adopting an optimistic point of view. Beyond being educational, it's also just fun and focuses and brings the body into connection with the heart and mind while navigating different issues.
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This session is a conversation with one of the well known "Nuns on the Bus," a politically active group of religious Sisters who lobby at a federal level and speak truth to power as they traverse the country on a bus. Derived from encounters along the bus trips, the goal of the session is to explore how you can capture your unique power to influence policies impacting those who have repeatedly been left at the margins. We will discuss unexpected political success that can be realized when unique faith voices boldly speak the truth that we ARE our brothers' and sisters' keepers. In today's political climate, it is people of faith who must hold our nation to its moral commitment to the common good, enshrined in the Constitution.
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People have questions they aren't comfortable asking in their faith communities. They can be absurd curiosities or the deeply personal points of pain. What happens when a car turns on it's headlights while traveling at light speed? Could God make a rock so heavy that God couldn't lift it? How does cancer happen? What does science tell us about monogamy? How do I tell my family I don't believe in God anymore? Ask Science Mike is a weekly podcast hosting an open, honest, and safe discussion about science, faith, and life. A global audience of hundreds of thousands show up every week to talk about the strange, confusing, and often taboo topics that show up at the intersection of ancient faith and modern science. This week, we're doing it live at Wild Goose. What will we talk about? Whatever you ask. Ask Science Mike is a weekly podcast where no question or topic is off limits, where the genuinely curious find a safe space to voice what they've been afraid to say aloud. It's a program run by its listeners–they choose the topics and focus of every episode.
This Wild Goose episode is a rebroadcast of a LIVE 'Ask Science Mike' recording from the 2019 Wild Goose festival.
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We're pretty solid on Christ's divinity in the church- we've spent a lot of airtime on that. But what about his humanity? If we talk about Jesus' humanity at all it's often apologetically. Based on my work in The Irrational Jesus I make a fully throated pitch for using what we know about cognitive bias, what Dan Ariely calls our "predictable irrationality" to highlight areas of Jesus' full humanity. In this episode, we learn about common cognitive biases, including implicit racial, gender, and sexual identity bias, and learn how understanding more about our bias makes us better able to work well and play with others.
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In this episode, musician Emily Musolino discusses music as a spiritual practice and sexism in the music industry.
Emily Musolino is a Durham, NC native who mixes soulful vocals with shredding blues rock guitar riffs. The depth of emotion in her voice is stunning and her songs have a classic sound and lyrics that tell compelling stories. A Berklee College of Music graduate, Emily has opened for and collaborated with artists like Ani Difranco, Nikki Hill, Vinx, Shana Tucker, Anna Wise (SonnyMoon, Kendrick Lamar) and Eric Hirsh (The Beast, Orquesta GarDel). She is also owner and head engineer at Blue Moose Recording Studio in Durham and Co-founder of the women's music and arts collective Mama May I. Emily released her newest album "The Vault" in April 2018. Emily has been featured several times on NPR's the State of Things with Frank Stasio and written up in the News and Observer. She currently fronts the Emily Musolino Band and plays 200+ shows a year, both bandleader and soloist around the world.
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"Christ on the Psych Ward" is a story-sharing based on my experiences of mental illness, recovery, and faith. In telling my story, I weave together threads of personal experience, spiritual reflection, and ministry praxis. By "going first" with my own story of mental illness and mental health, I open up the opportunity for other participants to share their own stories of mental health struggles in their personal lives, family lives, and/or communities of faith. In this episode, we work together to create a shared storytelling space of courage, lament, vulnerability, and hope.
David Finnegan-Hosey currently serves as the College Chaplain and Director of Campus Ministries at Barton College in Wilson, NC, having previously worked with campus ministries at Georgetown University, American University and the University of Hawaii. He holds an M.Div from Wesley Theological Seminary and a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education from the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. He is certified by Mental Health First Aid USA to provide initial help to people experiencing depression, anxiety, psychosis, and substance use disorders. In 2011, David was diagnosed with bipolar disorder after a series of psychiatric hospitalizations. He now speaks and writes about the intersections among mental illness, mental health, and faith. You can read more of his writing on his blog, Foolish Hosey. David lives in Wilson, NC with his wife Leigh and their dog Penny Lane.
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