“The Place of Man Within the Whole”: A (Brief) Theology of...
We’ve recently started the annual tradition (three years going strong!) of holding a wild game dinner with our friends and church community. Each family brings a dish harvested from the East Texas area, and past menus have included crab, venison, wild pig, crappie, and, of course, squirrel. We tell stories about the harvest of each, and each family explains how the dish was prepared—from start to finish.
To a Hare, From a Louse
But on this day, I am the louse. It’s my “impudence” and “cursed speed” that has made me break what little union I had with my fellow mortals.
Rejoice Evermore, Even for Grocery-Store Chicken
If we imagine that the fate of our times hangs upon our efforts, we’ll deceive ourselves and miss out on the goods and pleasures that are at hand waiting to be enjoyed, even now.
Grace Olmstead’s Uprooted Idaho, and My Own
Uprooted is partly a memoir of her extended family, partly a paean to a way of life that is both dying and which she never really understood while she grew up in the midst of it (and thus feels the loss of all the more deeply now), and partly a study of the causes of that dying, and how what has endured--the habits, the connections, the sense of place--has shaped her extended family nonetheless.
Of Heat, Houses, and Heuristics
Thinking about ecology from a national perspective, my house with standard R-19 walls and R40 roof, standard windows, and so on, is a “problem.” From a local perspective, though, there’s a solution that’s far simpler than the ones proposed by national standards for green building: Get up from my library chair and throw another log in the wood stove.
The Beauty of the Unexpected
This year an unexpected autumn snow blanketed our farm. In the days that followed, single-digit temperatures secured its place in the landscape, and another,...
New Leaf
If only I had the patience of trees; if only I let time inch me, push me, stretch me ever upward, defying gravity’s pull. My demand for instant responses mocks the good work of time. Trees chasten my fleeting desires that dart hither and thither by slowly pressing, intentionally pushing, and inevitably plodding upward.
A Farmer Who Walks the Talk
Human stories, centered around human persons in pursuit of wisdom, are the roots from which communities grow. We can be sure, by the sweat on the brows of each person in the McGinley family, that this connection between the land and community is no mere metaphor.
The Growing Pains of a Small Farm: Kristin Kimball’s Good Husbandry...
In some ways Good Husbandry stands as a kind of bildungsroman for Essex Farm and, by extension, the support-your-local-farmer movement.
John Deere and the Ox-Cart Man
How might we recognize and adopt a vision for the future of agriculture inspired by the beauty and goodness of the ox-cart man?