HOT SPRINGS For four days recently, the Wild Goose Festival turned this rustic town on the French Broad River near Asheville into a vital center of religious and cultural exchange.

Several thousand people from around the U.S. flocked to discuss issues of faith, spirituality, art and social justice. The festival is affectionately known by many as simply “the Goose,” a name that derives from earlier centuries when the wild goose was the Christian symbol for the Holy Spirit. Like the Spirit, the wild goose was seen as wild, unpredictable and utterly free.

Those few who are well-known to an international audience are surprisingly accessible. Jim Wallis is the founder of Sojourners Magazine, New York Times best-selling author, public theologian and television commentator. Walking alongside, he told me that meaningful immigration reform is today much closer to becoming a reality than it has been in many years. The reason is because “the evangelicals are behind it and they are pressing the Republicans, who are coming around to it,” he said. For evangelicals “this is a moral and spiritual issue, not merely a social or economic one.”