yearofplenty

Thoughts for a New Year - Make Time, Defy Expectations, Consider Limits

I stumbled across a few articles this week that offer some helpful thoughts on the New Year.

Anne Lamott offers some good advice at Sunset Magazine where she implores us to find time for creative expression. Lamott is one of my writing inspirations. I just love her playfully profound "voice" in the written word. She sums up her writing advice, which is good advice for most things worth doing in life:

I begin with my core belief—and the foundation of almost all wisdom traditions—that there is nothing you can buy, achieve, own, or rent that can fill up that hunger inside for a sense of fulfillment and wonder. But the good news is that creative expression, whether that means writing, dancing, bird-watching, or cooking, can give a person almost everything that he or she has been searching for: enlivenment, peace, meaning, and the incalculable wealth of time spent quietly in beauty.

Then I bring up the bad news: You have to make time to do this.

Lamott's book Bird by Bird was the inspiration for me to make more time for creative expression through writing which, in part, led to the adventure of writing a book. 

She says the key is to make time:

This is what I say: First of all, no one needs to watch the news every night, unless one is married to the anchor. Otherwise, you are mostly going to learn more than you need to know about where the local fires are, and how rainy it has been: so rainy! That is half an hour, a few days a week, I tell my students. You could commit to writing one page a night, which, over a year, is most of a book.

If they have to get up early for work and can’t stay up late, I ask them if they are willing NOT to do one thing every day, that otherwise they were going to try and cram into their schedule.

Another interesting article is from a palliative care nurse reflecting on the most common regrets expressed by people who are at the end of their lives.

Number 1 on her list is that people said, "I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me." She writes:

This was the most common regret of all. When people realize that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honored even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. 

It is very important to try and honor at least some of your dreams along the way. From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom very few realize, until they no longer have it.

The last article I'll reference is one I wrote a couple months back on Steve Jobs' advice to not settle for anything less than doing what you love. It serves as a counterbalance to the advice above that is wonderful, but can degenerate into narcissism and shallow selfishness. This post was one of the most read and most shared from this blog during the last year. I wrote at the time:

The passing of Steve Jobs last week combined with the amazing current success of Apple has created a firestorm or adoration and accolades that I have been as much a part of as anyone.

I was especially moved by Steve Jobs' often referenced 2005 commencement address at Stanford in which he lays out a vision for passionately pursuing what you love in life. He says:

You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

He concludes the address by saying:

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

After a week of adoring Steve Jobs and his advice to make the most of life, my attention today has turned to the Apple supply chain and the thousands of primarily Chinese low-income workers who have literally built the Apple empire. I'm struck this morning by the meaninglessness of Jobs' advice to the majority of the people who have worked to build Apple products all these years. If Jobs had delivered his Stanford commencement address to the morning work shift at one of Apple's factories in Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, or Czech Republic, how would they have responded? What kind of sense would it make in their lives to hear the admonition to not "settle." I have a hunch that the advice to "stay hungry" would confuse these workers who are all too familiar with a very different kind of hunger than the metaphorical variety Jobs was promoting....

I still appreciate the amazing design and efficiency of my apple products this morning, but I'm restless to find out more about their journey to my desk in Spokane, Washington. I'm reminded that I can't just enjoy this technology as an end-product, but there is a story that accompanies these items that is important to know about and that impacts the way I experience them. There are dozens of other hands that touched this computer in a far off place and that truth brings with it some accountability to those workers.

And I find this morning that I have a growing skepticism of Jobs' advice. None of us are superman or superwoman. We all "settle" in a thousand different ways in life. We all come up against limits -- even Steve Jobs, which he speaks to in his commencement address:

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. 

That's advice that stands up better to scrutiny. It might even resonate on the Foxconn factory floor. Life is fleshed out not so much in the often narcissistic pursuit of what we love, but more so in our grappling with human limits.

I had better stop here because my preacher's voice is about to kick in with a message about how we are all like grass, but the word of the Lord endures forever. I generally try to save my sermons for Sunday mornings. :)

Photo: Saw these birds along the Centennial Trail in Spokane. Finches?

Anticipating the Christmas Feast - My CNN Article

I have an article that posted today at CNN's Belief Blog that explores what we're learning as we follow the Orthodox Nativity fast. Go here to read it.

Here's my conclusion in the article:

At minimum, it’s time for American Christians to recognize what many of their nonreligious friends have discovered – that food practices are important for the journey of spiritual formation. They are a meaningful way to connect with the mystery that underlies all of creation.

Better yet, maybe it’s time for an Orthodox moment in American Christianity where Protestants and evangelicals rediscover the generative role of fasting and feasting on the journey of following Jesus. We’ll all be better off for it, both body and soul.

Merry Christmas.

The Spirit of Food - A Book Review

The Spirit of Food: 34 Writers on Feasting and Fasting Toward God (Cascade Books, 2010) is a wonderful collection of essays by an all-star cast of gifted writers on the connections between food and Christian faith. 

The book reminds me of one of those summer food festivals that feature samplings from all the best restaurants in town. I remember growing up with the annual Bite of Seattle. We would pay an entrance fee to get in and then tent by tent we would make our way around the festival stalls, gobbling up appetizer-sized portions of gourmet mu-shoo pork tacos and blackened salmon. In the same way The Spirit of Food invites the reader in to sample the gourmet writing of Lauren Winner, Wendell Berry, Ann Voskamp, Amy Frykholm, Alexander Schmemann, Robert Farrar Capon, and Leslie Leyland Fields who edited and coordinated this event/book. Interspersed among the more well-known authors are unique perspectives from dozens of others, all organized around the themes: On the Way to the Table, In the Kitchen, The Ways We Eat, Fasting, At the Table of the Lord, and Feasting. 

Given the nature of the book I'm going to approach this review like it's a conversation in the car with a friend driving home from one of those food festivals. Let's call it "Bite of the Kingdom." 

Friend: So how did you like The Spirit of Food/Bite of the Kingdom?

Me: I don't think I've ever read so many tasty morsels of food writing. (yes, the puns are irresistable) Just when I was savoring the offerings in one chapter I was drawn to the next. They did a really good job representing different perspectives on how food intersects with faith. I like that each author was given the freedom to engage the topic from their experience. I could tell that the authors really enjoyed writing on the subject and that came through in the reading of the book.

Friend: What was your favorite chapter?

Me: I'm a sucker for Berry, Schmemann, and Capon but I'm familiar with their work so their chapters were like comfort food that is flawlessly prepared, and tasty as usual, but its familiarity makes me look elsewhere for a favorite. I really enjoyed Amy Frykholm's treatment of Orthodox fasting rituals in which she writes about her experience as an exchange student in Russia where she "witnessed a fuller understanding of the body and soul in communion." I resonate with her desire for this kind communion. Suzanne Wolfe's description of her struggle with an eating disorder was wonderfully honest and served up just the right combination of the sweet hope of hunger satisfied and the sour despair of irreconcilable hungers. 

Friend: But which was your favorite.

Me: Okay, if you're going to make me choose I'd have to say Lauren Winner's reflection on her experience with Kosher food laws as a Jew and the ways her experience with kashrut, as she calls it, might inform her foodways as a Christian. I was intrigued by her statement, "While Christians are not bound by the particularities of Deuteronominic dietary laws, we still may want to pay attention to the basic principle that underlies kashrut: God cares about our dietary choices." In summing up the provocative potential of Kosher food laws for Christians she says, "At its most basic level, keeping kosher requires you to be present to your food." She cites the "logic of kashrut" as she sketches the contours of a food ethic that includes paying attention and seasonal eating. She writes, "Food is part of God's creation. A right relationship with food points us toward him."

Her chapter really got me thinking about what other practices in the Bible and the history of the church might inform Christian approaches to food. It seems like an under-explored area in many church circles.

Friend: Yeah I enjoyed her chapter too. It sure is hard to choose a favorite.

Me: The only downside to The Spirit of Food is that you only get a small portion at each stop on the journey. Many of the chapters left me wanting a leisurely 10-course meal of reading to follow-up on the tantalizing appetizer. 

Friend: But it's nice that the authors provide a recipe to accompany each chapter. I bet you could make a nice 10-course meal from the recipes in the book. My only complaint is that their wasn't a beer garden.

I think food may be the next big topic among American Christians and The Spirit of Food is the most accessible guide yet to the potential of food to shape Christian faith, and a convincing argument that it should. It would make a great Christmas present for your foodie friends. Buy it here. 

See Eating as a Spiritual Practice: Is Food the Next Big Spiritual Discipline for American Christians for more on this trend. 

Eating as a Spiritual Practice: Is Food the Next Big Spiritual Discipline for American Christians?

Rachel Wheeler, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University has written a paper published in three installments on the Religion in American History blog arguing that the locavore trend with its farmers' markets, CSA boxes, and school gardens has established a significant foothold in the imagination of American evangelicals, citing recent books on the subject:

There is an equally voluminous output by Christian publishers, though it has gone largely un-noticed by the mainstream media. Presbyterian pastor Craig Goodwin recently published, Year of Plenty: One Suburban Family, Four Rules, and 365 Days of Homegrown Adventure in Pursuit of Christian Living, and Ragan Sutterfield, founder of a farm-school for disadvantaged youth, published a collection of essays entitled, Farming as a Spiritual Discipline. Rod Dreher, a Methodist turned Catholic turned Eastern Orthodox, has written about conservatives who embrace what are usually seen as liberal issues in his book: Crunchy Cons: Or How Birkenstock Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party); and one of my favorites, Don Colbert’s, What Would Jesus Eat?

She calls both the religious and secular variety of food advocates "locavangelists" and argues that secular locavangelists like Michael Pollan and Colin Beavan "draw heavily – and largely unconsciously—from the deeply rooted American tradition of evangelicalism." Wheeler cites the common ground of an emphasis on the "born-again" stories that dominate the genre, a common sense approach to life that echoes evangelical common-sense approaches to the Bible, and a focus on the conversion of individuals as key to ushering in the longed for kingdom of healthy food, communities, and land.

I find her arguments provocative and compelling but I'm not convinced yet of her diagnoses that recent events like 9/11, the commercialism of the 90s, and recent economic collapse are the perfect storm that has led to this embrace of food practices as a secular and spiritual discipline. I am inclined to look back further on the historical time line to the 1960s for the source of these recent trends but it's true that more recent events have served as catalysts for launching agrarian food perspectives into the mainstream. Her three historical markers are all subjects of the story I tell about our family's journey in Year of Plenty.

While I have some reservations about Wheeler's historical analysis, I completely agree with her philosophical observation that this secular and sacred trend is motivated by a desire to integrate belief and action. She writes:

The writings of locavangelists, of the lefty and Christian Agrarian variety, are rife with professions about the incongruity of belief and action. All the authors considered here write of the impulse to bring belief and action together....So, I think there is something of a widespread re-alignment of values going on, with many people opting to focus their energies on the familial and the local, shunning the plastic and the consumerist, and seeking above all, the authentic, however that might be constructed. Beavan, the No Impact Man, writes: “I want my work to align with my values. I want to write about what’s important. I want to help change minds. The blurb for Year of Plenty (by Goodwin, the Presbyterian pastor) announces, this is the story of “one family wrestling with what it means to re-integrate life and faith.”

Along with her historical assessment, Wheeler offers an observation about an American embrace of "practice." She writes in her introduction of the paper:

What locavores on the left and right seem to have in common is their emphasis on the importance of practice. It seems to me to be a commentary on what many now see as the superficiality of the 1990s....I find it fascinating, that a predominantly Protestant country has suddenly discovered “practice.” I don’t know quite what to make of this: it could be a response to the broader political and cultural forces, or it could suggest the assimilation of important religious ideas and practices from other religions. Americans are clearly hungry for practical guidance: Michael Pollan’s prescriptive book Food Rules, was quickly vaulted to the top of best-seller lists. Americans seem to want to be told what to do and many are finding new spiritual rewards in practicing the discipline of eating according to Pollan’s rules. Locavorism may well be the new Kosher, but it is being embraced with evangelical fervor.

This paper raises some important questions: Could food practices be the next big thing in the spiritual disciplines and practices of American Christians, especially evangelical Christians? In a fragmented culture where people have a growing awareness of a disconnect between belief and action, could food lead the way to more authentic and integrated experiences of faith? Given the common ground between evangelicals and their secular foodie counterparts, could food practices be a productive place of dialogue and faith sharing for American Christians who are often lacking generative places of engagement with non-Christians? 

These are all questions that motivate me as our family launches the Tables of Plenty project. For a culture that is hungry for "food rules" I suspect the church has a rich history of practices to draw from and share. I also believe that evangelical Christians, who are especially prone to being trapped in the modern divide between spirit and material realities, have something to learn from secular and religious food practitioners about the journey of integrating faith and action in the world. I'm excited to dive into these issues in the coming year.

You can read Wheeler's paper in three installments: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Picture: Polish priest blesses baskets of food on Holy Saturday before Easter.

Note: This is also cross-posted at the Tables of Plenty blog. In case you're wondering, I will be sharing some posts between this blog and Tables of Plenty but over time I'll share fewer and fewer posts between the two blogs.

Introducing "Tables of Plenty": A Yearlong Exploration of Christian Food Practices

It's a new yearlong adventure for the Goodwin family and a new blog called "Tables of Plenty" to connect with others around the themes of food and faith. Go here to see the new blog.

Starting on November 28, 2011 with the Orthodox Nativity fast, our family is dedicating a year to explore the role of food in Christian spiritual formation, one month at a time. Our monthly excursions will include following kosher food laws and eating in the tradition of the early church. We'll plant community gardens with the Benedictines, go vegetarian with Seventh Day Adventists, and vegan with the Orthodox. We'll even explore the spiritual depths of potlucks and jello-salad with our own tribe, the White Bread Protestants. We'll be reading, reflecting, blogging, and eating our way through the year at the Tables of Plenty blog.

It was almost four years ago that I started blogging about our family's Year of Plenty in which we committed to consuming only items that were local, used, homegrown, or homemade. Here's the linkto the first blog post with pictures of our fated attempt to make a flamingo pinata. It has been four enriching years of learning and writing about food, agriculture, consumerism, the environment, and faith. Our YoP experience has led to wonderful friendships and conversations that have sparked our imaginations for more learning and more exploration, especially when it comes to the role of food in Christian faith practices and spiritual formation. 

In recent years I've been struck by the strong connection between faith formation in the Bible and food practices. I've developed what I call a foodie hermeneutic of the Bible, reading the Bible through the lens of food and food practices, and I've been amazed at how central food is to the unfolding story of God's people in the Bible. It starts with the words to Adam, "You are free to eat," and ends with the grand vision of a feast. From manna during the exodus to Jesus fasting in the wilderness to Peter's hunger-induced vision of unclean foods in the book of Acts, the path to following God's will is often negotiated at some point on food's journey from field to table.

In contrast to this prominent role of food in the Bible, I've been surprised by the relative absence of food as a means of spiritual formation in my experience as a Protestant, evangelical, North American Christian. I never thought much about it until our YoP experiment led us into conversations with locavores, slow food foodies, vegans, sustainable agriculture activists, and others who all seem to understand the powerful role of food choices in the formation of a person. In these communities we have found people fleshing out the meaning of life and embracing food as a central practice in that process. While most of these movements are considered "secular," they often have a sacred feel to them.  

For example Novella Carpenter writes in her book Farm City about her experience raising a pig named Harold:

Although I usually call myself an atheist, a lonely universe offers little comfort to a person confronting death...But to hold Harold, this amazing living creature, to know that his life force would be transferred to me in the form of food, felt sacred.

Michael Pollan writes at the conclusion of The Omnivore's Dilemma about a dinner with friends that he calls the "perfect meal":

The stories, like the food that fed them, cast lines of relation to all these places and the creatures living (and dying) in them, drawing them all together on this table, on these plates, in what to me began to feel a little like a ceremony. And there's a sense in which the meal had become just that, a thanksgiving or a secular seder, for every item on our plates pointed somewhere else, almost sacramentally, telling a little story about nature or community or even the sacred, for mystery was often the theme. Such stories food can feed us both body and soul..."

Bestselling books like Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, preach the gospel of food as spiritual formation and the message is resonating.

Alexander Schmemann, a prominent Eastern Orthodox theologian sums up this situation well in his book, For the Life of the World:

Centuries of secularism have failed to transform eating into something strictly utilitarian. Food is still treated with reverence. To eat is still something more than to maintain bodily functions. People may not understand what that ‘something more’ is, but they nonetheless desire to celebrate it. They are still hungry and thirsty for sacramental life.

Just as our Year of Plenty experiment was launched out of a desire to answer questions about how our faith speaks into contemporary issues around consumerism, this Tables of Plenty project is motivated by a desire to answer questions about how our faith speaks into these contemporary conversations around food. With Michael Pollan and Novella Carpenter, we have a sense that there is something sacred about what we eat and we suspect that there is a rich Biblical and historical tradition in the Christian faith that has been mostly lost in current expressions of church. Like so many, we are hungry and thirsty for a sacramental life, so we're going to read, and explore, and eat our way through the year, hoping to reconnect with sacred food practices and maybe even help others do the same.

Each month we'll focus on one historic tradition and eat all of our food according to those rules. Here's the calendar so far:

December - Eastern Orthodox Nativity Fast

January - Getting Kosher with Jewish Food Laws

February - Eating With the Early Church

March - Fasting with the Desert Fathers, Ascetics, and Monastics

April - Celebrating the Eucharist and the Lord's Supper (Roman Catholic Tradition)

May - Seeking Social Justice with the Mennonites

June - Planting Community Gardens with the Benedictines

July - Eating Vegetables with the Seventh Day Adventists

August - Harvesting with the Hutterites (and Amish)

September - Soul Food with the African-American Church

October - Potlucking with White-Bread Protestants

Along with eating we'll be reading and reviewing books, sharing recipes, and hopefully making new friends to gather with around the table.

We also hope to crowd-source this endeavor. Please let us know if you have recipes, experiences, or insights into the role of food in Christian spiritual formation. Is there a unique tradition that we've left off our calendar that we should explore? Are there books that you would recommend?

As was the case with the Year of Plenty, it's hard to say at this early stage if we'll be successful in carrying this plan to the end. We may run into unexpected roadblocks that require adjustments along the way. Noel, Lily, and I have committed to taking on a larger role in the kitchen and I'm excited to expand my culinary skills. I'll continue blogging here at Year of Plenty and sharing some content between the two blogs.

You can follow Tables of Plenty on Facebook and Twitter. I'm still working on getting the RSS feed up and running.

 

"Project Hope" in Spokane Teaching At-Risk Youth Urban Gardening & Life Skills

Project Hope is a great model program in Spokane teaching at-risk teens life skills through urban gardening, backyard chickens, farmers' markets, and landscaping. Project Hope was initiated by a group in the west central neighborhood, with Salem Lutheran Church as a key sponsor. It's yet another example of how churches are leading the way in these kinds of earthy outreach endeavors. Here's a recent TV report

John Muir - Paying Attention to Nature as a Spiritual Discipline

John Muir's writing and approach to life have had a big influence on the way I see the world. Muir is the iconic naturalist who helped pioneer the concept of national parks, founded the Sierra Club, and shaped the early contours of America's appreciation for pristine wilderness areas.

I recently read his classic journal/book titled, A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf. The backstory is that the young Muir was injured while working in a wagon wheel factory, almost losing his vision. His eyesight returned and left him with a new resolve to live a life true to his passion for nature and plants. His thousand-mile walk from Indianapolis to the Gulf Coast of Florida in 1867 was his maiden voyage on this new alternative path. He didn't plot out his course other than to take "wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way I could find." The book is a fascinating window into the wilds of post-Civil War America.

Muir encounters all kinds of interesting characters on his journey including roving Appalachian gangs, displaced slaves, and desperate robbers, but my favorite interactions are his encounters with the respectable and reasonable folk. His commitment to wander the woods taking plant samples and rejoicing in the glory of wild places is most confusing to the people who are oriented in the economy and industry of the day.

Here is Muir's description of one such encounter with a blacksmith in the woods of North Carolina who was willing to take him in for dinner and a provide a place to sleep for the night. When Muir explained his adventure the man was baffled:

Looking across the table at me, he said, “Young man, what are you doing down here?” I replied that I was looking at plants.“Plants? What kind of plants?” I said, “Oh, all kinds; grass, weeds, flowers, trees, mosses, ferns, — almost everything that grows is interesting to me.”    

“Well, young man,” he queried, “you mean to say that you are not employed by the Government on some private business?” “No,” I said, “I am not employed by any one except just myself. I love all kinds of plants, and I came down here to these Southern States to get acquainted with as many of them as possible.” “You look like a strong-minded man,” he replied, “and surely you are able to do something better than wander over the country and look at weeds and blossoms. These are hard times, and real work is required of every man that is able. Picking up blossoms doesn’t seem to be a man’s work at all in any kind of times.”

To this I replied, “You are a believer in the Bible, are you not?” “Oh, yes.” “Well, you know Solomon was a strong-minded man, and he is generally believed to have been the very wisest man the world ever saw, and yet he considered it was worth while to study plants; not only to go and pick them up as I am doing, but to study them; and you know we are told that he wrote a book about plants, not only of the great cedars of Lebanon, but of little bits of things growing in the cracks of the walls. “Therefore, you see that Solomon differed very much more from you than from me in this matter. I’ll warrant you he had many a long ramble in the mountains of Judea, and had he been a Yankee he would likely have visited every weed in the land. And again, do you not remember that Christ told his disciples to ‘consider the lilies how they grow,’ and compared their beauty with Solomon in all his glory? Now, whose advice am I to take, yours or Christ’s? Christ says, ‘Consider the lilies.’ You say, ‘Don’t consider them. It isn’t worth while for any strong-minded man."’

This evidently satisfied him, and he acknowledged that he had never thought of blossoms in that way before. He repeated again and again that I must be a very strong-minded man, and admitted that no doubt I was fully justified in picking up blossoms. He then told me that although the war was over, walking across the Cumberland Mountains still was far from safe on account of small bands of guerrillas who were in hiding along the roads, and earnestly entreated me to turn back and not to think of walking so far as the Gulf of Mexico until the country became quiet and orderly once more.

I replied that I had no fear, that I had but very little to lose, and that nobody was likely to think it worth while to rob me; that, anyhow, I always had good luck. In the morning he repeated the warning and entreated me to turn back, which never for a moment interfered with my resolution to pursue my glorious walk.

John Muir (2010-03-28). A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (American Classics) (pp. 10-11)

This conversation happened almost 150 years ago in a world without cars, airplanes, and limited electricity, but the assumptions and social pressures that underly it are just as relevant today. The blacksmith describes a world where "picking up blossoms" and dedicating yourself to what you find "interesting" doesn't have a place "in any kind of times." He can't imagine anyone paying attention to nature and plants unless they are working for the government or some private money-making venture. Besides all that, he considers it foolhardy to take the road less traveled where unknown dangers awaited. He even hints at an economy that needs all hands on deck to make it grow and thrive.

In response, Muir refers to Jesus' command to consider the lilies, a scripture passage that we drew on for inspiritation as we planned our Year of Plenty experiment. He makes the case for a life of paying attention to nature as a discipline, something worthwhile for its own sake. His brush with blindness had filled him with a passion to open his eyes, literally and figuratively, to the wonder of Creation at every possible turn.

The longer I am a pastor (and a person), the more I am aware of this need to nurture simple and subversive disciplines of paying attention in a world that says there is no room for considering such unproductive endeavors. I am reminded of Muir's words of advice to his friend Samuel Hall Young, a Presbyterian pastor who was preparing to serve at a mission outpost in the Kondike region of northern Canada during the Klondike gold rush days. Hall tells the story in his book, Alaska Days With John Muir:

"You are going on a strange journey this time, my friend," he admonished me. "I don't envy you. You'll have a hard time keeping your heart light and simple in the midst of this crowd of madmen. Instead of the music of the wind among the spruce-tops and the tinkling of the waterfalls, your ears will be filled with the oaths and groans of these poor, deluded, self-burdened men. Keep close to Nature's heart, yourself; and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean from the earth-stains of this sordid, gold-seeking crowd in God's pure air. It will help you in your efforts to bring to these men something better than gold. Don't lose your freedom and your love of the Earth as God made it." Young, Samuel Hall, 1847-1927. Alaska days with John Muir (Kindle Locations 1667-1674). New York [etc.] Fleming H. Revell Company. 

For a previous post on the topic of paying attention go here. 

FYI - almost all of Muir's writings are available for free download as pdf or Kindle versions here.

"Year of Plenty" Book Update - Free Small Group Study Guide Now Available

A study guide for small groups who are reading Year of Plenty is now available for free download. 

Download Year of Plenty Study Guide v 1

In other news YoP was selected by the Englewood Review of Books as one of the best books of the first half of 2011. Thanks to Chris Smith for your work at ERBks.

I think I forgot to mention on the blog that YoP was selected as one of five book on faith and spirituality included in RELEVANT Magazine's summer reading list.

There are also some great recent reviews at Jason Fowler's Sustainable Traditions and at Dr. Bob Cornwall's blog, Ponderings On a Faith Journey.

Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible - Paying Attention to the Land

I'm reading Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible by Ellen Davis. In the book she argues that agrarian perspectives offer a helpful lens through which to understand the Bible, especially the Old Testament. She writes; "agrarianism is the way of thinking predominant among the biblical writers, who very often do not represent the interests of the powerful." (page 1)

I plan on writing several posts on the book but I wanted to highlight the theme that struck me from the first couple of chapters. In the foreword Wendell Berry lifts up the importance of local engagement in agrarian thought. He writes:

...this is one of the indispensable gifts of her book - she sees the similarity between this modern corporate colonialism and that of the ancient empires. She sees as well, and even more indispensably, the necessity and possibility of local resistance by means of local religion, local knowledge, and local language.

An agrarian reading of the Bible thus forces the de-specialization of one's thoughts about agriculture. With equal force it de-specializes one's thoughts about religion. It does this simply by seeing that the Bible is not a book only about "spirituality" or getting to Heaven, but is also a practical book about the good use of land and creatures as a religious practice, and about the abuse of land and creatures as a kind of blasphemy. (page x)

Davis picks up on this theme of local engagement and de-specialization in the opening chapter and argues that it's important for a Biblical scholar like herself venture beyond her specialty to explore agrarian perspectives that, it turns out, are helpful in understanding the Bible. It's a move away from de-contextualized specialization to locally-informed, locally adapted practices and thought.

The more I read Berry and understand agrarian perspectives, the more I see how a primary impulse of the movement is to re-integrate human thought and action that has been partitioned by the modern industrial project. For those of us who have been specialized away from land and agriculture we are invited to re-engage, to venture out as amateurs. Davis writes:

For me as a biblical scholar, engaging questions of contemporary social analysis means consciously working as an amateur, going outside my area of professional expertise for the sake of love. Augustine's famous interpretive principle of caritas may provide a theological warrant for such a move: reading the biblical text in a way that conduces to knowledge and love of God and neighbor is the touchstone for accurate interpretation.'

In our present intellectual environment, Wendell Berry advocates amateurism as a corrective to the tendency toward overspecialization and abstraction that afflicts all disciplines. He suggests widening the context of all intellectual work and of teaching - perhaps to the width of the local landscape....

To bring local landscapes within what Wes Jackson calls "the boundary of consideration," professional people of all sorts will have to feel the emotions and take the risks of amateurism. They will have to get out of their "fields," so to speak, and into the watershed, the ecosystem, and the community; and they will have to be actuated by affection. (pp. 3-4).

For Berry and other agrarians the starting place for this kind of integrative work is simply paying attention to one's "local landscape," and while I'm no farmer or soil scientist, I CAN open my eyes and pay attention to the land and agriculture that surrounds me. I can go to Steptoe Butte, like I did last night (see picture), and take some photos. And I can dwell on the abundance of our region and also wonder with concern about how this land came to be understood as "industrial." And I can reflect on the ways this land shapes my faith and practice, and how my faith compels me to advocate for its care.

"The Friends We Keep: Unleashing Christianity's Compassion for Animals" - A Book Review

While I dedicated a whole chapter in Year of Plenty to the topic animal dignity as it relates to faith and consumption, I am still a novice on the topic so I was grateful to recently come across Laura Hobgood-Oster's book, The Friends We Keep: Unleashing Christianity’s Compassion for Animals. It is a timely book on the hopeful and sometimes problematic relationship between the Christian faith and animals.

The heart of the book is three chapters on "non-human animals" as companions, in sport, and for food. Hobgood-Oster offers a compelling combination of scholarly research, historical review, and contemporary commentary on each of these topics as they relate to Christian faith and practice. While the emphasis on faith is the unique contribution of the book, I also appreciate it as a general resource of information about these topics. The sections on the evolving role of animals as companions in human history and the use of animals in blood sport in the ancient world are especially compelling.

The thesis that I took away from the book is that despite a rich history of animals involved in the unfolding good news of God in the Bible and in Church history, there is currently a troubling disconnect between Christianity and concern for the welfare of animals. Hobgood-Oster sets forth the goal of highlighting these many resources in order to "provide a foundation for contemporary Christian action and theological development" as it relates to animal welfare.

My general assessment of the book is that is delivers on this promise. It is a veritable treasure chest of stories about the role of animals in the Bible and church history. But Hobgood-Oster does more than just offer anecdotes, she takes this collection of disparate stories and passages and proposes a cohesive vision for animal welfare based on the Christian practice of hospitality in which we open ourselves up to the "the 'other,'"

Justly or not, we have, for all practical purposes, claimed the entire earth as our possession. We have taken over the homes of the many other animals who have lived here for millenia. It is in recognition of this reality that I chose the concept of hospitality as a way to consider our relationship to animals.

In a beautiful act of theological imagination she also speculates that humans are not the only ones with hospitality to offer:

If other animals are going to survive our presence, we must extend radical hospitality to them. I also wonder if we might not invert that idea as well. Might it be that for us--for humans--to survive, we must also find a way to live with other animals flourishing around us?

I love the idea of the flourishing of animals on earth offering hospitality to us humans. It adds a whole new way of understanding bees buzzing around the fruit trees and the bats swallowing up pests. For Hobgood-Oster it's not the "circle of life," rather it is a circle of hospitality with the image of the baby Jesus surrounded by animals as the icon.

Having offered an affirmative vision for the relationship of animals and humans within the Christian tradition, the author sets out in the concluding chapter to challenge the root causes of the disconnect. She argues that it can be primarily traced to overly anthropocentric understandings of Christianity that have proliferated in the western world where the earth is imagined as an incidental stage for the unfolding drama of human salvation. 

I offer my own version of explaining this disconnect in Year of Plenty, but I was very aware as I read this concluding chapter that Hobgood-Oster and I have different ways of understanding how the disconnect came to be and how people of faith might go about reweaving connections.

In a curious twist she points to central orthodox doctrines of the western church ("the Word of God" and "sacrifical atonement") as key developments in recent history that have contributed to the disconnect. Citing Karl Barth she writes of atonement theory:

This is the root of the turn to the human in Christianity. With all of God's attention focused on our story, there is little room left for any other creatures.

The references and historical background offered on these key doctrines of the Christian faith are too abbreviated and simplistic. For example I have an entire shelf of my library that is taken up by Karl Barth's Dogmatics wherein Barth lays out thousands of pages of complex theological perspectives (the joke is that not even Barth read all of Barth.) To sum up Barth's theology of the atonement in a few paragraphs and to suggest that this is a root cause of the problem is inadequate for the argument being put forth in the chapter. 

Hobgood-Oster's arguments in the concluding chapter regarding the influence of the Enlightenment on the disconnect are much more on target. The quote from Descartes regarding animals as unthinking "automata" is fascinating and informative. 

I highly recommend this book as a resource for discerning the relationship between Christian faith and animals. As someone who feels passionately that faith should inform the way we treat animals, I come away from the book feeling more deeply rooted in my conviction and more initiated in a wonderfully rich faith tradition of caring for animals.