Spirituality

Hedgerow Institute

Hedgerow is a learning community for theological education, spiritual integration, ecological awareness, and leadership for a just and holy world.

Hedgerow classes and events especially highlight the scholarship of women who have worked to reclaim women’s presence and significance in scripture and church history by constructing inclusive and liberating theologies, which cultivate the ideas, values, and actions vital to our future.

In Ireland, rows of hedges that grow between fields provide a place for wildlife and plants. A hedgerow is a biosphere that nourishes a community of life, even in challenging times. Hedgerow Institute takes its name from the hedgerow schools in Ireland that kept alive the culture, language, faith, and community of the people during the 17th and 18th-century penal laws.

Fall 2026 Classes

For 20 years Hedgehogs (attendees) have gathered Monday evenings to reflect on our spiritual lives together through group readings and discussion — resistant to patriarchy, resilient in spirit with feminist, womanist, Hispanic theologians expanding our views, challenging us to live the common good and pursue justice that includes all.

This fall prolific writer Ilia Delio brings theology alive in our world that knows the vastness of space, the tininess of particles, the diversity of nature and culture. She explores inner and outer human life in our unfinished world, still evolving. The course includes voices that sounded the dangers now so evident to our home planet Earth and draws on Elizabeth Johnson’s mediations, Come, Have Breakfast, on the two great books for Christians, the bible and nature. Plus, we will pray with women mystics using historian Mary T. Malone’s contemporary translations of their reflections.