Grounding: A Chorus of Voices from Season Four

As in every episode of Climate Changed, this reflection begins with a grounding. This time, the grounding is a chorus of voices from across Season Four.

Listeners hear from Katie Mears, Norma Wong, Tory Stephens, Autumn Brown, Rabbi Ora Nitkin-Kaner, and Francis Weller. Their voices return us to the central concerns of the season: adaptation, imagination, grief, ancestors, spiritual leadership, speculative futures, ritual, and the more-than-human world.

Katie Mears names the need for faith communities to talk not only about climate mitigation, but also about adaptation. Norma Wong calls for consciousness to precede doingness. Tory Stephens invites us to dream about the futures we want. Rabbi Ora Nitkin-Kaner names people’s hunger for spirituality, culture, ancestors, and connection with the more-than-human world. Autumn Brown lifts up the responsibility of spiritual leaders to cultivate the ground people need in order to face this time. Francis Weller reminds us that those same leaders often need more support than they receive.

After the montage, Nicole invites listeners to breathe. The voices hold imagination, adaptation, ancestors, grief, spiritual leadership, and the honest need for support.

Peterson names that the season asked not only how we imagine different futures, but how we become different kinds of people in the present. Ophelia adds that this work is already happening in congregations, disaster response, the arts, ritual, grief work, organizing, storytelling, and everyday relationships with the more-than-human world.

Listener Voices

This reflection episode includes listener voicemails, a special feature of these season-ending conversations.

Fritz from Portland, Maine reflects on the clear-eyed hopefulness of the podcast: not despair, not denial, not magical thinking, but honesty as a form of hope. Nicole and Ophelia connect Fritz’s reflection to the structure of the show itself: grounding, listening, reflection, and next steps.

Grace Pugh Hubbard responds to Tory Stephens’ conversation about “throughtopia,” naming the invitation to walk courageously through fear. The hosts hear this as one of the core invitations of the whole season: not pretending fear is absent, but acknowledging it and taking a faithful next step.

Main Conversation:

Ophelia Hu Kinney: Sinking Down into the Questions
Ophelia reflects on what it was like to listen to each episode before it aired and to help decide how to introduce the conversations to the wider BTS Center community. With each new episode, she found herself wanting to say, “I know I just said the last episode was the best, but hear me out, this one is also the best.”

What rose to the surface for her was an invitation to sink down into the soul of the questions: questions of place, love, longing, healing, and the human need to be with one another through suffering.

Rabbi Ora Nitkin-Kaner’s episode was especially impactful for Ophelia. She reflects on Rabbi Ora’s insistence that when people cannot name their experience, they cannot fully claim it. We need to be witnessed. We need someone to say, “Tell me.” We need someone to remind us, “You’re not alone with this.”

Peterson connects Ophelia’s language of “sinking down” to the early Quaker Isaac Penington’s invitation to “sink down into the seed.” For Peterson, the whole season became a kind of sinking down: not away from the world, but deeper into what is most real.

Ophelia also reflects on hearing Rabbi Ora speak as a new parent. As the parent of a young child herself, Ophelia was struck by the presence of new life alongside Rabbi Ora’s wisdom about our longing to offer comfort and our need to challenge the misconception of separateness.

Peterson Toscano: Better Stories, Better Ancestors
Peterson reflects on his unusual seat inside the season. As producer, he was present for Autumn Brown’s conversations with each guest, edited those conversations for Nicole and Autumn’s responses, joined their recording sessions, and then shaped the audio podcast, full-length YouTube videos, short clips, show notes, transcripts, and discussion guides.

Because of that, he says, he may have been the person most steeped in the season. He lived with the conversations, listened to them again and again, and allowed them to work on him.

The first thing Season Four did for Peterson was deepen his commitment to storytelling. Tory Stephens’ conversation about climate fiction challenged him to imagine stories that are not flat, uniform, or stripped of culture. Tory critiques futuristic storytelling that loses food, religion, ethnicity, clothing, music, and the layered identities that make human beings textured and real. Peterson connects that to the need for climate stories that are worth longing for: stories that help people imagine a world they actually want to live in.

The second thing Season Four did for Peterson was change how he thinks about ancestry. Norma Wong’s teaching about Indigeneity, source ways, and becoming a good ancestor made him curious about his own people, including his Italian grandparents, and about what was lost through war, assimilation, modernity, and disconnection from land and place. Peterson is careful not to claim an Indigenous identity, but he names a growing desire to listen, learn, and belong more deeply to the places where he lives.

As he prepares to move to South Africa, and as he reflects on Sunbury, Pennsylvania, where he currently lives, Peterson asks what it means to pay closer attention to rivers, trees, histories, wounds, and community. The season reminded him that the work ahead is not only technical or political. It is relational, imaginative, and spiritual.

Spiritual Leadership, Friendship, and Support
Peterson also reflects on Francis Weller’s teaching that spiritual leaders often carry immense grief for others while not receiving the support they need. Francis names how clergy, chaplains, organizers, and caregivers can become “chronic holders” of congregational grief, family grief, cultural grief, and the grief of the times.

For Peterson, this teaching landed personally. Even though he does not describe himself as a spiritual leader or minister, he recognizes the experience of carrying concern for a community, especially through his Quaker meeting and his life in Sunbury.

Francis’s teaching on friendship also becomes a key thread. Friends can notice when we are caught in survival mode before we can notice it ourselves. They can ask what is happening, reflect back what has changed, and help us return to ourselves.

In this way, friendship becomes more than affection. It becomes one of the forms of medicine required for the long work of repair.

Trust, Repair, and Relationship
Peterson closes his reflection by naming how much he enjoyed listening to Nicole and Autumn Brown build trust across the season. They did not know each other before recording together, and listeners got to hear their relationship form in real time.

One moment that stayed with Peterson came after the conversation with Norma Wong, when Nicole shared about making a public apology to John Bear Mitchell. Nicole’s vulnerability opened a deeper conversation with Autumn about accountability, apology, repair, and relationship.

Autumn named that accountability cannot happen outside of relationship. Apology is not merely a statement; it is part of the work that makes accompaniment possible. Peterson identifies this kind of unscripted, sacred exchange as one of the gifts of the season: a moment when trust deepened, repair was named, and the conversation moved beyond concept into lived spiritual practice.

Themes in This Episode

Spiritual imagination as practice
Season Four explores spiritual imagination not as escape, but as a faithful way of meeting reality. It asks how we imagine the worlds we will co-create and how those imaginings shape the way we live now.

Storytelling as climate practice
The episode returns to Tory Stephens’ insistence that climate stories need culture, emotion, character, and longing. We need stories that make people want to live differently.

Honesty as hopefulness
Through Fritz’s voicemail, the hosts reflect on a kind of hope that is neither denial nor despair, but clear-eyed presence.

Witnessing and moral agency
Ophelia reflects on Rabbi Ora Nitkin-Kaner’s teaching that people need to name their experience, be witnessed, and offer comfort in a world where suffering often reaches us at a distance.

Ancestry and becoming a good ancestor
Peterson reflects on Norma Wong’s invitation to think about ancestry, source ways, and the responsibility to those who come after us.

Spiritual leadership and support
Francis Weller’s voice reminds listeners that those who hold grief for others also need to be held.

Trust and repair
Nicole’s story of public apology and Autumn’s response become a concrete example of accountability rooted in relationship.

Next Steps

These next steps are shared across the final season reflection episodes.

Share this season with someone.
If an episode made you think of a friend, colleague, family member, clergy person, teacher, artist, organizer, or community leader, send it to them with a personal note. Tell them why you thought of them.

Host a listening party.
Choose one episode from Season Four and gather a few people from your congregation, family, neighborhood, or community group. Listen together in person or online.

Use the discussion guides.
Each episode comes with a discussion guide, so you do not need to create your own curriculum. Use the questions, activities, and suggested next steps to help your group reflect and respond.

Share an episode in your community.
Include a link in a church bulletin, newsletter, community email, Google group, Reddit thread, Slack community, Discord server, Facebook group, or wherever people are talking about climate, faith, grief, imagination, or community.

Use the videos.
The BTS Center offers full-length video episodes, short clips, and bonus material on YouTube. Consider playing a short video in a class, worship service, meeting, retreat, or community gathering.

Tell people why you are sharing.
Do not just send a link. Add a sentence about what the episode helped you see: adaptation, imagination, climate grief, friendship, spiritual leadership, ancestors, or what it takes to be a neighbor.

People and resources mentioned:

Climate Changed Podcast
https://climatechangedpodcast.org/

The BTS Center
https://thebtscenter.org/

The BTS Center YouTube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/@TheBTSCenter

Tory Stephens and Grist’s climate fiction work
https://grist.org/author/tory-stephens/

Rabbi Ora Nitkin-Kaner
https://www.exploringapocalypse.com/

Francis Weller
https://www.francisweller.net/

Norma Wong
https://normawong.com/

Connect with us

• Climate Changed Podcast:
  https://climatechangedpodcast.org/
• The BTS Center:
  https://thebtscenter.org/
• Email: podcast@thebtscenter.org
• Find transcripts, discussion guides, full-length video episodes, and bonus materials on The BTS Center’s YouTube channel.

Meet Our Hosts

Rev. Nicole Diroff (she/her) is ordained in the United Church of Christ. She holds expertise in facilitation, data management, and strategic planning. Nicole is a certified Maine Master Naturalist, serves as Chair of the Spiritual Formation Committee at Williston-Immanuel United Church and is Co-Chair of the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion Committee for the Scarborough Public School District.

After spending 17 years and over $30,000 on three continents attempting to “de-gay” himself through conversion therapy, Peterson Toscano came out a quirky queer Quaker concerned with human rights. He also produces other podcasts including Citizens Climate Radio, Bubble & Squeak, and the Bible Bash Podcast. Peterson has been featured in People Magazine, The Times of London, the Trya Banks Show, and NPR Morning Edition. He lives in Pretoria, South Africa with his husband, Glen Retief.

Ophelia Hu Kinney is The BTS Center’s Strategic Communications Director. She is the child of immigrants and lives in Scarborough, Maine, with her wife and daughter. Her family of origin strictly adheres to disorganized religion, but she took a more scandalous route of Christian curiosity. Prior to joining The BTS Center’s staff, Ophelia served on The BTS Center’s Board of Trustees and was a grateful participant in its community and programs. She previously served as Director of Communications for Reconciling Ministries Network, an organization working for the full participation of LGBTQ+ people in the life and leadership of The United Methodist Church. One throughline of Ophelia’s work and writing is the provocation of spiritual imagination. She is part of HopeGateWay in Portland, Maine.