Best 8 quotes of Ellen F. Davis on MyQuotes

Agrarians are committed to preserving both communities and the material means of life, to cultivating practices that ensure that the essential means of life suffice for all members of the present generation and are not diminished for those who come after. Agrarianism in this sense is, and has nearly always been, a marginal culture existing at the edge or under the domination of a larger culture whose ideology, social system, and economy are fundamentally different. So agrarian writers, both ancient and modern, always speak with a vivid awareness of the threat posed by the culture of the powerful.

Appreciation and enjoyment of the creatures are the hallmark of God's dominion and therefore the standard by which our own attempt to exercise dominion must be judged.

As Christians, we are all engaged in the business of discerning and obeying God’s call, and this usually means that soon enough we find ourselves out beyond our own competence, frightened at what God demands and feeling cosmically abandoned, left in the lurch with a job for which our own resources are completely inadequate…Sooner or later, the panic touches each one of us who accepts God’s call and heads, eyes wide open, straight into some difficult and mysterious work—like pastoring a church, teaching a class, going back to school, learning a language, creating a work of art. The panic descends on everyone who accepts God’s call to do something that engages our heart and wracks our soul—like making a marriage proper through better and worse, raising a child and letting her go into adulthood, enduring a terrible illness, growing up, growing old. In fact, being called out far beyond our own competence is part of our regular experience with God.

Blessing is essentially the transformative experience of knowing and honoring God as the Giver; it means valuing the steady flow that sustains the world even above the gift of life that each of us receives and is in time constrained to relinquish.

Careful practical work is the best expression of our freedom and safeguard of our sanity. In a healthy society, such work is the means most consistently available for people to practice holiness of life, to imitate God's enabling and sustaining care for the world.

It is appropriate to speak of the artisans as possessed of wisdom (and not just "skill"), because the biblical writers share the understanding common to most traditional societies that the active form of wisdom is good work. Wisdom does not consist only in sound intellectual work; any activity that stands in a consistently productive relationship to the material world and nurtures the creative imagination qualifies as wise.

Sloth may disguise itself as "conscientious work" and meet with various forms of public approval or success. But work that is not motivated by love for the life of the community, beyond the temporal and spatial confines of one's own small life, cannot free either worker or community from profound anxiety.

The land's fruitfulness is the "natural" consequence of covenant faithfulness enacted on both sides, Israel's and God's. A productive land is a gift something like a child to a healthy marriage; in each case, thriving results from and witnesses to long-sustained faithfulness between two partners.