The Divine Nature of Storytelling with Lo Ziv

Welcome to Provocative Conversations from Twice Five Miles Radio. I’m your host, James Navé. Unlike many podcast hosts who book their guests weeks in advance, I choose mine from the people I meet as I travel through my days. The only requirement for a provocative conversation is— you guessed it— they enjoy talking about what they love: gardening, writing poetry, tracking down underground criminals in the Philippines, circling 14,000-foot Colorado peaks in a glider, singing in New York jazz clubs, self-compassion, playing the blues, and consciousness—living and dying. So when I met my guest today, storyteller Lo Ziv, at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, and she told me she was a religious scholar, a progressive storyteller, and a software engineer, I unpacked my microphones and invited her to sit down and tell me about God, HTML coding, and why Artificial Intelligence will never replace our species-imperative superpower—Imaginative Intelligence. Lo Ziv’s story is one of transformation—from ancient languages and sacred texts to the wild dance of storytelling and code. She grew up in a white evangelical military family and somehow found her way through centuries of scripture, dead languages, and a few living contradictions. Along the way, she taught in prisons in the United States and Romania, worked with children in villages, and stood in pulpits she could not yet claim. What fascinates me most is how she carries the sacred into the everyday—how a theologian, dancer, and software engineer can look at a line of HTML or a verse of scripture and see the same divine syntax. For Lo, the imagination itself is a spiritual act, a way of remembering that the wind—like the Spirit—blows wherever it pleases.