nature 45

In Oklahoma, the nature many of us live so close to is a different thing from the concept of “nature” we have internalized.

I’ve heated with wood for a winter, and I am pleased to do so, but it’s backbreaking labor to warm this way for a lifetime

You’re forgiven, your future right here, given for you.

I had to understand life and nature not as something to be mastered, but as gifts afforded to me to steward by a God abundant in goodness.

To find these deeper wells of silence, however, we must seek them out, whether in the woods or the deserts of our own shut doors.

Plant biology seems to be revolutionizing our understanding of what a plant is and can be. This is a gift that may help us grow in wisdom, in reverence, and…

There ought not be unnecessary opposition between Indigenous and Christian perspectives. The creative work of caring for our ecology is hard enough; let us not also misunderstand one another.

Wallie is gone; no visible scar remains. Mourning provides no lesson, no answers, no closure. The poet is not decrying grief for its lack of utility.

In this way, “idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; quite the contrary, it is a truly divine way of life so long as one is…

And this progression from the raw, unabated natural Florida to the ever-more artificial Florida, has grave consequences for both the geographical locale and the people who inhabit it.

And so the shotgun sits in our home like a quiet benediction. It dreams—as I do—of long walks in the valleys of my youth and whispers of future pastures that…

Rational ideas create hell on earth. Just ask a kulak. Or just ask the lettuce plants in my garden.

But there is something more going on. We also face a new “transcendent reality,” as Klass puts it, in which we see the spiritual world with new eyes. This may…

This talk was delivered earlier this year at a conference on wellbeing held at the Sorbonne.

We are the blind, each calling out that which we are so sure we see. No longer aware that the sight we now marvel at is little more than one…

If we can foster a freedom to flourish rather than our modern freedom of choice, and if we can recognize versions of a common good appropriate to different real entities…

Brown stresses the need to pay attention to “what God has said, and nature is his most primordial and exoteric word”; after all, within this word, human nature is situated…

We live in a society where lust, greed, gluttony, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride have been commercialized. When the self and its desires are everywhere celebrated, to contain the self…

I’d always wondered what woodland flowers had to do with morels and fishing. I’d also marveled about how robins knew when to return north or questioned why certain mayfly imitations…

There is a significant difference between staring at a computer screen and seeing the world through a porch screen. Hailey emphasizes the benefits of seeing from the “threshold between stability…

Perhaps this, above all, is the work of nature writing: to bring the wild and the domestic together and to reveal the mystery at the heart of both. That Springer’s…

What you miss out on by not making the climb is too great a loss on such a morning as this.

“Now nature makes nothing incomplete, and nothing in vain…” Aristotle, Politics Sometimes we might wonder about Aristotle. Was he observing the same world we are? One thing is clear: Aristotle…

Situate the preference where it is, not where it isn’t.