Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword by Wendell Berry
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Rupture and Re-membering
- 2 Reading the Bible Through Agrarian Eyes
- 3 Seeing with God: Israel's Poem of Creation
- 4 Leaving Egypt Behind: Embracing the Wilderness Economy
- 5 A Wholesome Materiality: Reading Leviticus
- 6 Covenantal Economics: The Biblical Case for a Local Economy
- 7 Running on Poetry: The Agrarian Prophets
- 8 Wisdom or Sloth? The Character of Work
- 9 The Faithful City
- Postscript
- Notes
- Scripture Index
- Index
Postscript
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword by Wendell Berry
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Rupture and Re-membering
- 2 Reading the Bible Through Agrarian Eyes
- 3 Seeing with God: Israel's Poem of Creation
- 4 Leaving Egypt Behind: Embracing the Wilderness Economy
- 5 A Wholesome Materiality: Reading Leviticus
- 6 Covenantal Economics: The Biblical Case for a Local Economy
- 7 Running on Poetry: The Agrarian Prophets
- 8 Wisdom or Sloth? The Character of Work
- 9 The Faithful City
- Postscript
- Notes
- Scripture Index
- Index
Summary
Lately I have been thinking that the point must be reached when scientists, politicians, artists, philosophers, men of religion, and all those who work in the fields should gather here, gaze out over these fields, and talk things over together. I think this is the kind of thing that must happen if people are to see beyond their specialties. … An object seen in isolation from the whole is not the real thing.
(Masanobu Fukuoka)Perhaps we have at last reached the point that Masanobu Fukuoka, a pioneer of sustainable agriculture in Japan, envisioned thirty years ago. That gathering of minds and perspectives is occurring now, in print and other media, and occasionally in person. It is the agrarian conversation, a broad-based exchange about the health of the whole earth and its communities, human and nonhuman, a conversation from which a renewed culture may evolve. The agrarian conversation thus has a kinship with what the Benedictine tradition calls conversatio morum, the transformation of an individual's practices and thinking in accordance with the wisdom and love that animates the larger community.
The immediate aim of any conversation that is not aimless is to see how one way of thinking intersects with another. In this volume, I have extended the agrarian conversation by integrating it fully with the work of the biblical writers, believing that may be the best way to bring numbers of Jews and Christians into the urgent conversation about how we secure our food.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Scripture, Culture, and AgricultureAn Agrarian Reading of the Bible, pp. 179 - 180Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008