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.