Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand
Jeff Chu
Convergent Books, 336 pages
Published March 25, 2025
Reading Good Soil feels like how I imagine it would feel to pull up a chair at one of the agape meals Jeff Chu hosts for beloved friends. He fills a table with fragrant dishes, overflowing with home-grown beans and greens picked just for us. We listen as he reflects on the seasonal rhythms of growing veggies and raising chickens — all because, as Professor Kenda Dean says, “we expect love to grow here.”
Chu, a New York City journalist turned seminarian, found his “just right” place in Princeton’s Farminary, a working farm/classroom. He and his classmates learned to dig into their own pasts, cultivate community, and understand their rootedness — all metaphorical activities that corresponded with the literal experience of working the soil.
Seminarians joke that the Farminary’s primary crop is sermon illustrations. They aren’t entirely wrong. The reclaimed land and rocky soil offer insights into the parable of the sower and other stories from Jesus’ agrarian world. And Chu’s fascination with the compost pile pays off in a “robust theology of compost.” He says our mistakes and the ways we hurt one another aren’t the end of God’s story but rather the stuff of “new life and new soil and new growth.” That’ll preach.
Chu shares most lessons with deep self-awareness and gentle humor, though others unfold with sighs too deep for words. The occasional loss of a fragile chick is understood as part of nature’s life cycle, while the heart-breaking loss of Chu’s dear friend and colleague, 37-year-old Rachel Held Evans, is inexplicable.
This and other parts of Chu’s story are difficult to read, particularly his parents’ rejection of his husband, Tristan. Chu has struggled and is buoyed by Tristan’s “almost shocking grace” as he encourages Chu to stay in a relationship with his family. “My mom’s example reminds me that I believe in a difficult love,” Chu writes, and we believe him. When we expect love to grow, even in rocky soil, we create space for God to bring about new life.
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