Norann Voll learned some of life’s most important lessons from her father while caring for sheep.

Peter Mommsen asks if humans should live by the laws of nature.

In an excerpt from her book, Joy Marie Clarkson explores the natural metaphors that we use. Are you a tree, she asks, or are you a potted plant?

Greta Gaffin asks if humans should return to nature, and looks to the lives of two saints who taught us to make peace with it instead.

David McBride introduces his new translation of The Leper of Abercuawg, a thousand-year-old Welsh poem in which an outcast seeks comfort in the wild.

Joy Clarkson discusses her new book, and the importance of metaphor.Why are metaphors important? How can they help us live well – and how can they go wrong? Why should we not think of ourselves as computers? And what does all this mean for our language about God?In the discussion, Joy and Susannah range widely through topics including apophatic theology, the inevitability of metaphorical language, Owen Barfield, Anthroposophy, Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, Suzanne Simard’s research on how trees communicate via fungal networks, and much more.

William Thomas Okie says plants can talk; but is anyone listening?

Colin Boller explains how regenerative agriculture helps farmers care for the land and pay the bills.

Clare Coffey gives a defense of the dandelion, the plant that always comes back.

Matthew Scarince and Sebastian Milbank discuss Tolkien and technology. Susannah chimes in.Is J. R. R. Tolkien anti-technology? What is the relationship between magic and technology in the world of the Lord of the Rings, and in ours? What do the elves have to do with that? What can we tell by looking at the rings, the palantíri, the silmarils?Should the Lord of the Rings be read as a straightforward critique of industrial society? How can the categories of mending and preservation be used to understand how the various heroes and heroines of Middle-earth go about shepherding this world into its next age, and how can those categories help us to do the same in our age?