Walking as a Spiritual Practice with Mark Buchanan

Sep 23, 2025

Mark Buchanan, a pastor and author known for his work on spiritual formation, delves into the profound connection between walking and spirituality. He highlights how a slower pace fosters attentiveness and nurtures our relationship with God. Buchanan discusses the humbling aspects of pilgrimage, emphasizing that walking deepens our sense of place and cultivates virtues that thrive in stillness. He also touches on barriers in modern cities, offering practical advice for making walks meaningful, even providing alternative options for those unable to walk.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Walking As Embodied Theology

Mark Buchanan found walking to be a neglected embodied practice in Christianity and set out to rediscover it.
He argues walking embodies faith and counters Christian dualism by joining theology with bodily practice.

ADVICE

Adopt A Godspeed Pace

Try moving at a deliberate, unhurried pace—Buchanan calls it Godspeed, roughly three miles per hour.
Use slow walking to notice more, cultivate patience, and align with a non-hurried rhythm of God.

INSIGHT

Place Deepens Through Repeated Walks

Walking deepens connection to place because the earth underfoot reveals layers you miss at speed.
Repeated walks make a place more knowable and foster rootedness and wonder.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

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.

If that resonates with you, please join the Trinity Forum as a member, at ttf.org.

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:

Get tickets for The Rabbit Room's Housemoot.

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.