The keyword first appeared in her self-published 2018 manifesto, The Green Testament , where she famously wrote: "We have spent millennia trying to climb a ladder to a distant heaven. Holy Nature reveals that heaven was under our fingernails and between our toes all along." Deconstructing the Term: What is "Holy Nature"? To the uninitiated, "Holy Nature" might sound like a simple synonym for "beautiful landscape." However, within the Paula New lexicon, the term carries specific, almost legalistic weight.
Paula New does not claim to have invented a new religion. She claims to have remembered a very old one. In her words: "Before the book, there was the bark. Before the sermon, there was the wolf’s howl. Before the temple, there was the cave. I am not a prophet. I am just a woman who stopped scanning the horizon for God, and looked down at the ant on her shoe." holy nature paula new
This article explores the depths of the framework—a radical reimagining of the natural world as not merely God’s creation, but as God’s continuing, breathing, speaking presence . Who is Paula New? The Architect of Sacred Ecology Before dissecting the philosophy, we must understand the visionary. Paula New is not a traditional theologian seated in an ivory tower. Rather, she is an artist, a naturalist, and a mystic who spent two decades living in relative solitude among the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. The keyword first appeared in her self-published 2018
This aesthetic has spawned a movement. Instagram and Pinterest boards dedicated to aesthetics are filled with high-contrast images of dew on spider webs, lichen on gravestones, and roots cracking through concrete. It is a gothic, moist, vibrant holiness—far removed from the sterile, bright light of conventional religious art. Critiques and Controversies No new theological movement arrives without friction. Traditional environmentalists have accused New of anthropomorphism, arguing that calling a virus "holy" (which she does in her chapter on disease) is dangerous magical thinking. Evangelical Christians have labeled her a pantheist (a label she rejects, preferring "panentheist"—God in all things, not equivalent to all things). Paula New does not claim to have invented a new religion