Walking as a Spiritual Practice with Mark Buchanan

What does it mean to walk with God? The spiritual life is so often described as a walk, journey, or pilgrimage that it can be easy to dismiss the practice of walking as a mere metaphor.

But in God Walk, author, pastor, and professor Mark Buchanan explores the way that the act of walking has profound implications for followers of the Way:

“Hurry is the enemy of attentiveness. And so love as attentiveness is listening and caring and noticing, cherishing, savoring, being awestruck, these things that we feel in a relationship. I am deeply loved by this person because they notice me. I think that that’s how God’s built it. And we can’t get that if we’re moving too fast, if we’re in a hurry.”

This episode is drawn from an online conversation held in 2023. It’ll give you a sense of what the Trinity Forum is about: a community of people renewing our culture by applying wisdom from the Christian tradition, and nurturing new growth in it, in our time. 

As we ponder the spirituality of walking, our fall Trinity Forum Reading features naturalist Henry David Thoreau’s ruminations on the art of walking, with an introduction by Trinity Forum President Cherie Harder. Stay tuned for pre-ordering later this week, and join our membership to receive a copy mailed directly to you.

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:

• Aristotle
• Søren Kierkegaard
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• God Walk, by Mark Buchanan
• Simone Weil
• The Three Mile an Hour God, by Kosaku Koyama
• Wanderlust: A History of Walking, by Rebecca Solnit
• Knowing God, J.I. Packer
• Kai Miller

Related Trinity Forum Readings:

• Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard
• God’s Grandeur, by Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Long Walk to Freedom, by Nelson Mandela
• Brave New World, by Alduous Huxley

Related Conversations:

• A New Year With The Word with Malcolm Guite
• Music, Creativity & Justice with Ruth Naomi Floyd
• Pursuing Humility with Richard Foster and Brenda Quinn
• Reading as a Spiritual Practice with Jessica Hooten Wilson

To listen to this or any of our episodes in full, visit ttf.org/podcasts/ and to join the Trinity Forum Society and help make content like this possible, join the Trinity Forum Society.