Another Life with Joy Marie Clarkson

Beneath Panama City’s gleaming skyscrapers, traditional fishermen still venture out to sea for a hard-won catch.

“When I went back to Idaho, I connected with more than just the land.” An excerpt from Gracy Olmstead’s Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind.

Christian Wiman reads the parable of Jesus writing in the sand as poetry, and unpacks poetry of doubt and faith by Yehuda Amichai, Kay Ryan, and Les Murray.

Mary Harrington on what’s for sale on online dating sites.

In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker says it’s in our nature to fear death – and to transcend that fear of death through faith.

Peter and Susannah address listener questions. First, what do we make of natural evil? Things like parasites seem to call into question the idea of nature as designed by a loving God. What’s the relationship of the fall of man to the theodicy of cicada-killing wasps?Then they turn to the question of the nature of online worlds. Can we talk coherently about the nature of Twitter, say? What does the way we behave online say about us? Is online a “place” with its own identity?Next: Why not let children be feral? What’s the point of school, and doesn’t it just ruin our ability to be naturally and fully human? Related to that, why read anything but scripture? Then, they return to the question of UFOs: if they were proved to exist, would their existence affect Peter and Susannah’s faith?Finally, they turn to the big questions: what is nature anyway? And what have they learned from doing this podcast series? What are their takeaways?

Pete and Susannah speak with Gracy Olmstead about her new book Uprooted. In this age of unrootedness, what does it mean to have a home – to be from somewhere? Gracy’s book talks about her own story: her family’s farm in Idaho, and what it means to have that be an important part of her life, even though she’s moved away. Can she go back to the land her ancestors farmed?Gracy’s work has been fundamentally shaped by her friendship with Wendell Berry, and by Berry’s own work. Is his agrarianism mere romanticism? Can there be a kind of love of the local that is not agrarian?Then, the hosts speak with Norann Voll about her move from Upstate New York to rural Australia. How can we learn to love a new place? What does it look like to put down roots when you’re ambivalent about where you are?Norann also discusses the process by which the Danthonia Bruderhof has learned how to manage their land: to regenerate the soil and to create a fertile homeplace in the midst of the badlands.

Pete and Susannah discuss Pater Edmund Waldstein’s piece “Lords of Nature.” What does it mean to respect the nature of human beings, including the integrity of their bodies? If we can reshape our own bodies and customize our children using new genetic technologies – should we? What does it look like to honor human nature rather than seek to dominate it?Then, the hosts speak with John Kempf about his piece “Regenerative Agriculture: An Amish Farmer’s Quest to Heal the Land.” What is regenerative agriculture? How is it distinguished from organic farming? Isn’t it more labor intensive, and doesn’t that mean that it will require some unrealistic percentage of people to return to farming? Above all, can it feed the world? Don’t we depend on high-input farming, complete with fertilizers and pesticides, to be able to produce as much as we do?Kempf makes a strong case that not only is regenerative agriculture – which seeks to rebuild soil health and plants’ own immune systems, as opposed to depending on chemical fertilizers and pesticides – the only kind of agriculture that will enable our farmland to feed many generations in the future, it’s also more productive now. And it honors the intricate interdependency of plant, animal, human, and microbial life that reflects the wisdom of the Creator.

Pete and Susannah discuss Kelsey Osgood’s piece on Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death. How did Becker, as a Jew struggling through secularism, face the fact of our slavery to the fear of death - and how did his refusal of the cold comforts of distraction open the way for real meaning to emerge?Then, the hosts speak with friend of the pod Sohrab Ahmari, about his recent book The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos.The traditions we are raised to respect shape us. How did the birth of Ahmari’s son encourage him to write a book wrestling with the ways that traditions can help answer some of the basic questions of human life? What does it mean to be rooted in tradition, and why would one want to be? What happens when traditions are bad? And how can we understand “traditionalism” not as a good in itself, not as a bespoke lifestyle choice, but as the guiderails of a community in which we, and our children, can flourish?

Peter and Susannah talk about Mary Harrington’s piece on the business of online dating. What happens when butchering is removed from the marketplace? And what are we doing when we swipe right on someone, treating him or her as a commodity which might or might not pass muster?Then they talk with Plough contributing editor Leah Libresco Sargeant about her piece “Let the Body Testify.” Are we disembodied wills unrelated to our bodies, using them as meat robots? Or are we embodied souls whose selfhood persists even if we are unable to advocate for ourselves?