the Empathy List #122: For Lore Ferguson Wilbert, Repentance Looks Like Changing Your Mind

Lore Ferguson Wilbert on Ecology, What the American Church Gets Wrong, and Generous Disagreement

Hello friend, Liz here.

I first crossed paths with

Lore Wilbert

at an Acts 29 church we both attended in Denver. As you might guess, we both had our own healing journeys to walk after that church encounter (you can hear about my walk in the dark), and Lore has contained her narrative of healing within this small, poetic work she’s just released into the world, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness Resilience From the Forest Floor.

Frankly, it’s a beautiful book, the type of book I love to read—part memoir, part nature/science/travel writing. And it filled me up the way literary green spaces usually do. She shares some shocking family stories, describes changing her mind and her followers and friends turning on her for it, and details the way that so many different griefs have continued to form her as a person.

While I realize that some of my readers may be temped to write Lore off as a conservative evangelical (because she has been represented that way in the past), actually, what I’ve found…