Agrarian Theology and Learning by Doing

Change can come in the most unlikely places. For Jeff Chu, he found meaning and purpose in a pile of compost.

At the peak of his journalism career — writing for Time and Fast Company, perched 29 floors above Manhattan — Jeff Chu stared out his office window and asked a question he could no longer avoid: “What is this all for?” That moment of vocational and existential reckoning set him on an unexpected journey — one that led to Princeton Theological Seminary, a plot of farmland known as the Farminary, and ultimately, to the compost pile that led him to write his book Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand, which we discuss in today’s episode.

Key Ideas:

• How Jeff’s successful journalism career left him asking, “What is work for?” and wondering how to live with more meaning and purpose rather than producing a “luxury product” that might vanish without changing anyone’s life.

• The long, honest work of vocational discernment: rage, anxiety, hard conversations with his husband, and the slow dawning realization that questions of calling and authentic living are often answered over years, not days.

• Life at the Farminary: learning theology with his hands in the dirt, discovering in the compost pile that what looks like waste and failure can, through community and time, become good soil for new life, faith, and hope.

• The practice of attention and slowing down—walking land after a snowfall, watching purple martins swirl over downtown Nashville, greeting a backyard mulberry tree—as a quiet path into wonder, gratitude, and the psychology of well-being in a distracted age.

• What gardening teaches about relinquishing control and embracing interdependence: we can plant and tend, but we cannot make a seed grow—an agrarian lens for habit formation, spiritual practices, and surrendering our illusion of power.

• Jeff’s journey of belonging as a gay Christian and Chinese American—learning to claim his story, honor his ancestors (and his grandmother’s fried rice), trust that he belongs to God, and extend that belonging outward through friendship, hospitality, and communal care.

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⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Show Notes, Resources, and Transcript⁠ for abridged episode with Jeff Chu

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No Small Endeavor: An award-winning podcast that asks what it means to live a good life. Through conversations with leading thinkers across theology, philosophy, psychology, politics, and the social sciences, we explore human flourishing, meaning and purpose, faith and culture, science and religion, virtue and character, community, and the practices that help shape a good life grounded in truth, beauty, and goodness.

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Host Lee C. Camp: Lee has worked as a professor of theology & ethics for more than 25 years, teaching and writing on topics of faith & politics, inter-religious dialog, and human flourishing at the intersection of theology, moral philosophy, and social sciences. Follow ⁠⁠⁠⁠@leeccamp ⁠

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