The Feed Store

Rebekah Curtis reviews Rory Groves' book Durable Trades through the lens of the novel Growth of the Soil. While sometimes difficult to apply to modern-day life, the trades are not only occupations, but reasons and ways to come back home.

Ed Hagenstein reflects on Makoto Fujimura's metaphor for cultural engagement and suggests that cultural renewal starts with the essential resources all around us.

Our disagreements are about real things, but people are real too.

Corrymeela is a dreamscape, a landscape that I marvel at every time I go out there. If conservation consists of loving something—a tract of land, a garden, a wood—then my hope is to love this land even more intensely into its full God-created glory.

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.

That advocates of year-round DST persist says something about the evolution of American agriculture and how out of touch we collectively have become with the intractable pulse of nature.

Today I make a COVID resolution: I will learn to be more lamby-like, as Carl would say: to think like a lamb.

Minari is haunted by O’Connor, as Chung explores the theme of misfits and “hard to find” good men (and women) that jolt our senses toward who we truly are, including our limitations.

The best stories in the volume offer Cather-esque explorations of the links between place and people. The stories are remarkable for their dense layers, for their social, psychological, and emotional intricacies.

Supportive efforts can steer this ingenious workforce toward better stewardship and environmental integrity by reclaiming that awe that life on the land should inspire.