In this article, we adopt assemblage as methodology and as a way to foreground the vitality and relational agency of other species as they encounter humans. Research as assemblage is a process of becoming with others, and we experienced that ontological process during three environmental excursions as we became entangled in multispecies assemblages with children, the Crow, the Sea Eagle and the Bee. The production of the three assemblages and the rhizomic networks that formed materially and discursively across time occurred within an affective milieu characterised by sensory attentiveness and attunement to the affective power of coincidence. Analysing the formation and reformation of the assemblages enabled us to identify the phenomenon of “ontological flickering” where the ontological foundation of experience shifted moment by moment and remained playfully unresolved. We also consider how multispecies encounters relate to wildness, understood in Thoreau’s terms as unsettling encounters with otherness. In concluding, we recognise our incomplete becoming with others as co-authors and acknowledge the Crow the Sea Eagle and the Bee as powerful teachers.

This article argues that Henry David Thoreau believed in the essential unity of the five senses and privileged each as a source of wild and divine knowledge, which, when combined, created a full picture that might result in a true approximation of God in and beyond nature—the hallmark of Thoreau’s fundamentally incarnational theology. Thoreau treated each sense not only as a source of divine knowledge but as a site of theological discourse: for touch, the relationship between sin and grace; for smell, the conundrum of an eternal divinity acting in historical time; for taste, the efficacy of sacraments; for hearing, the possibility of continuing revelation; and for sight, the ability for human beings to actually see God. The senses were the practical entry point to Thoreau’s theological system, which was concerned with the discovery and redemption of internal “wildness” and reconnection to the mysterious, divine source of that wildness, to the unaccountable in nature.

This article is a small piece of a much larger and still evolving project. Herein we focus on six touchstones for wild pedagogies. The article begins with a short orientation to the larger ideas behind the project and then focuses on exploring six current touchstones with a view towards early childhood environmental educators. The six explored here are: (1) agency and the role of nature as co-teacher; (2) wildness and challenging ideas of control; (3) complexity, the unknown, and spontaneity; (4) locating the wild; (5) time and practice; and (6) cultural change.

Western culture romanticizes wildness even as it fears the destruction of our humanity by all that is bestial, savage and unconstrained. Identity is constructed as a supposedly pure, bounded and sovereign force, constantly fascinated and repelled by its animal others.

The consequences of the church’s investment in this modern humanism are disparate, but united by a strange colonial logic, according to which the savage and the unnatural must be domesticated and incorporated into an empire of light. In the labelling of non-heterosexuals as ‘inhuman’ or ‘bestial’, complex links between the rhetoric of empire and resistance to that rhetoric are exposed. Appeals to African authenticity and liberal universalism are contextualized in postcolonial debates about securing human identity, debates in which the human/animal boundary becomes a key site of struggle.

This paper asks what the church looks like if our obsession with a pure identity of the (Western or African) human is challenged in the context of debates about sexuality within the Anglican Communion. It is argued that the dynamic of Christian revelation works to throw such categories into confusion, to release liberating encounters with the ‘inhuman’ others within and beyond our invented boundaries. An inherently plural, multilingual and differentiated process of Christian community is proposed.