Agrarian Spirit

Norman Wirzba has done it again: this is-literally and figuratively-the most grounded (and grounding) book I've read in a long age. It will lead you to contemplation, and then, if you're lucky, to change. -Bill McKibben, author The Comforting Whirlwind This lovely book is full of invigorating surprises. For the many of us who don't live on farms, Wirzba's reflections offer an invitation to reclaim in practical ways our relationship with the earth and its creatures who, with us, depend on all that has been entrusted to us for stewardship, for sharing, and for grateful enjoyment. -Marilyn McEntyre, author of Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies What ails us most is not susceptible of mere technological remediation, which by now has become an expensive enterprise in endless and ineffectual tinkering. Our most serious problems run much deeper, and they require the diagnostic and prescriptive powers of a mind at once capacious, clear, and reverent-a mind such as we see at work here. This would merely be a fine book were it not also a necessary one. -Jason Peters, author of The Culinary Plagiarist Incisive in its critical analysis, Agrarian Spirit is inspirational in how it opens up renewed possibilities of collective flourishing in our wounded world. -Kate Rigby, author of Reclaiming Romanticism Norman Wirzba traces, in bold compelling strokes, the difference between the world taken as creation to be inhabited in gratitude and as nature to be exploited in greed, the difference between the world as commodity and the world as relationship. In the context of that difference he explores specific hands-on practices and disciplines that make it possible to live as a soil-embracing creature of God outside the grasp of an anti-creation economy of greed. This welcome book offers transformative energy and courage for a different way of living. -Walter Brueggemann, author of A Wilderness Zone With uncommon depth and breadth, Norman Wirzba's Agrarian Spiriturges us to embrace and celebrate human and non-human creatures as co-becoming, embodied expressions of God's creating and sustaining love. He urges us to acknowledge our self-insufficiency and our dependence on others as a gift and as a challenge to develop the nurturing relationships that can heal our world and inspire our hope. -Steve Bell, author of the Pilgrim Year book series Agrarian Spirit is a beautiful consideration of what it means to be interdependent and embodied. Wirzba opens up the possibilities of stewardship and care to all humans living in community, no matter their locale or vocation, and roots the truths of an agrarian faith in the example of Christ. -Gracy Olmstead, author of Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We've Left Behind Norman Wirzba's agrarian spiritual exercises reposition us 'down and among' all living things, close to the God who sustains the life of every creature. Agrarian Spirit renews our desire to make a home in this world and to keep faith with the generations coming after us. -Stephanie Paulsell, author of Goodness and the Literary Imagination If 'incarnate spirituality' sounds like an oxymoron to you, let Norman Wirzba be your guide to the agrarian arts of faith. This book is the culmination of decades of thinking and writing and work, and there is no writer better equipped to articulate how an agrarian sensibility should shape our spiritual practices. -Jeffrey Bilbro, author of Reading the Times and editor-in-chief at Front Porch Republic Agrarian Spirit isn't luddite, nostalgic, or angry. Rather, it's a gentle, wise, and hopeful call forward, casting a vision for how to live as God's people in God's world. I loved this book, and it flooded my imagination with pictures of what the Kingdom of heaven could be, right now, right in my neighborhood. -Andrew Peterson, author of The God of the Garden