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Take up a handful of soil and you will hold a miracle—the possibility of life, the product of death. Generations of plants and animals lie in a handful. Hundreds, even thousands of microorganisms live there, processing the nutrients necessary for plants and the animals that depend upon them. Soil is a grace upon which we are totally dependent yet of which we are rarely aware. For Norman Wirzba and the agrarian writers he's assembled in The Essential Agrarian Reader, soil is the standard by which we should begin to judge our culture, economy, and service to creation.

The Paradise of God: Renewing Religion in an Ecological Age Norman Wirzba Oxford Univ. Press 240 pp; $37.50

That we are dependent upon the soil and the created order that surrounds and lives off of it is an insight confirmed by both Scripture and ecology. In The Paradise of God, Wirzba explores both of these sources of knowledge, using them to understand our vocation as creatures and the possibilities of a "culture of creation." Wirzba moves with care and insight through key biblical passages from the creation of man to the garden city of the New Jerusalem. In his reading of Scripture he finds witness, not to a self-standing humanity placed in an alien landscape, but to a humanity formed from and tied up with the creation of which it is a part. The created order is then a moral order. It bares the curse that humanity brings upon it (Gen. 3:17) and awaits, with groaning, the new creation formed by Christ (Rom. 8:19-23).

We can't understand our own moral life without beginning to understand the networks of living and non-living things upon which we are dependent. This dependence is both basic and vast; as Wirzba says, "we are directly and symbiotically tied to the billions of organisms, past and present, that recycle energy and give us food and air … as much as 10 percent of our dry body weight is not us, but is instead a variety of organisms inhabiting us, organisms that facilitate life processes at work within and all around us." The understanding of these mutual dependencies, these processes within and around us, is the concern of ecology, a science that offers a revolution in self-understanding: "by helping us understand how we are implicated in the workings of creation," ecology "puts us in a better position to care and take responsibility for it."

This mutual fate of man and soil comes not only through shared dependence but also shared purpose. All of creation is aimed toward the glory of God, and it is only through the flourishing of each of its parts that creation can carry out this purpose. If one member of the choir of creation thwarts the praise of the others, then he must be called back to sing in harmony. Our culture has produced a choir of discordant soloists, and in doing so we have encouraged a "denial of creation," a denial of our own creatureliness.

The Essential Agrarian Reader: The Future of Culture, Community, and the Land Ed. by Norman Wirzba Foreword by Barbara Kingsolver Univ. Press of Kentucky 276 pp.; $27

Our dependence on the soil, a tradition affirmed by millennia of agriculture, has turned into agribusiness with its genetically engineered seeds, expensive fertilizers, and pesticides. Agribusiness, "rather than [submitting] to the grace of life … , [assaults] the earth with poisons, fertilizers, and heavy equipment so as to 'ensure' maximum crop yield." Farming is increasingly given over to a few large companies, making most people's cultural and personal link to the land only recreational. We live in what Wirzba calls an "abstract culture," a culture removed from its basic dependence upon grace and the soil. We are left to ask with Wirzba, "How will we care for what we do not know or appreciate?"

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