Molly Burhans: Rejoicing in the God of Surprises

Episode 71 of Messy Jesus Business podcast, with Sister Julia Walsh. Podcast: Play in new window | Download Subscribe:  Email | RSS | More “There's always a freedom, though, that I feel... even if I was totally wrong about everything, I have full faith that Christ and God still love me and are still there.” -Molly Burhans IN THIS EPISODE This episode of Messy Jesus Business podcast is the first of two featuring Sister Julia Walsh’s conversation with Molly Burhans. In this episode Burhans, a cartographer, shares the intertwined stories of how she came to find her Catholic faith in her twenties while developing a love for maps and the power they hold for social and environmental change. Together Burhans and Sister Julia explore how Burhans' appreciation for life and living brought her to environmentalism through a passion for regenerative land usage. Her love for the planet and devotion to the Catholic Church led her to look for something that wasn’t yet there — institutions devoted to conservation within the global Catholic Church. She then tells the incredible story of how all these interests — her faith, cartography and environmentalism — brought her into what was almost a cold-call to the Vatican in an attempt to inspire the usage of the Church’s landholdings for good. ABOUT THE GUEST Molly Burhans is an award-winning Catholic environmentalist, cartographer and social entrepreneur. She is the founder of GoodLands, an organization whose mission is to mobilize the Catholic Church to use its landholdings for environmental and humanitarian good. Burhans was the chief cartographer for the first unified global map of the Church, which premiered at the Vatican in 2016. She was named one of Encyclopedia Britannica's 2022 “20 Under 40,” is a winner of the Sierra Club’s EarthCare Award, a U.N. Young Champion of the Earth, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer and an Ashoka Fellow. Molly is a visiting professor at Canisius College and adjunct professor of urban design at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. In 2021 The New Yorker published a profile of her entitled How a Young Activist Is Helping Pope Francis Battle Climate Change. (Molly wanted to give a special shout out to David Cheney, who runs the website catholic-hierarchy.com. David's volunteer work keeping track of diocese and bishop information is crucial to the land work that Molly is doing with the church.) MESSY JESUS BUSINESS is hosted by Sister Julia Walsh.  Produced and edited by Colin Wambsgans. Email us at [email protected] BE SOCIAL: