Welcome! Plus an Introduction

A note for new (or newish) subscribers

A number of people have come along and subscribed to the Bell Farm Miscellany in the last few weeks. I suspect this has something to do with the publication of Ask of Old Paths, a wonderful new book (with a wonderful title) about the virtues and the vices by my old friend, Grace Hamman. Many years ago, Grace and I were in grad school together, and since she graduated, she has gone on to write two books and numerous articles on medieval culture, most of which are written for lay audiences. She has always recommended my work, and I, in turn, commend her writing to you, if you aren’t already familiar with it. She is lucid writer and reading her work is a great way to immerse yourself in the world of medieval theology and literature.

If you are new here, welcome. I’m glad to have you. Here are a few brief words about myself and what you’ll find on this Substack.

Jack, Goodie, and the rest of the Bell Farm gang.

WHO ARE YOU? I graduated with a Ph.D. in English literature from Duke University in 2016. After teaching in the English Department at Wake Forest University for five years, I quit academia and started a farm in Granville County, North Carolina, which is about a half hour north of Durham. In my tenure as a farmer, I have focused mainly on animal agriculture and holistic grazing. We’ve always kept a vegetable garden and plant lots of trees and shrubs, but the size of the farms we manage makes keeping ruminants like cows and sheep a necessity. At one point we were managing nearly four hundred acres of pasture land, much of which was under conservation with the state of North Carolina. Two years ago, I began a very different sort of project and renovated our hundred-year-old farmhouse. Since then, the farm business has shrunk to the original footprint of the farm we bought way back in 2017: fifty acres, give or take, and I devote more and more time to writing, thinking, and lecturing about farming, literature, theology, philosophy, and climate justice. I also home school our four children.

What else is there to say? I am married to the incomparable Goodie Bell, senior pastor of Blacknall Memorial Presbyterian Church in Durham, North Carolina. The country and the city are two poles around which our lives are threaded. Amongst agrarians, this makes our lives somewhat unusual. But we wouldn’t really have it any other way. Our love for the city of Durham and the land we farm both feel like vital, nourishing spirits in our life together.

WHAT WILL I FIND HERE? I tend to fill this Substack with short essays on topics I am researching or writing about for bigger projects, like the book I am currently writing about farming and climate justice. I’ll also post links to articles and essays I write elsewhere.

The truth is that I have always been a magpie. For example, on this Substack, I’ve written about the realist novel, climate change, sustainable energy, patristics, medieval iconography, 18th-century poetry, contemporary music, the industrial revolution–among many other topics. I tend to use Substack as a way to force myself to make explicit the connections I find across vastly different texts and disciplines. Sometimes I’ll post essay fragments that I don’t have time to expand and turn into something longer form.

Among my motivations as a writer is a growing sense that the ways modern people relate to and encounter the natural world are impoverished and in need of deep rehabilitation. This impoverishment is connected in obvious ways to the global ecological crisis the world is enduring, but I think it also has something to do with the myriad social fractures that have increasingly come to characterize life in twenty-first-century America. I also think that the intellectual and liturgical traditions of Christianity, in all their complexity and confounding contradiction, offer surprising resources for thinking about how to relate to, and rehabilitate, our relationships with the created world.

Everything that I write on the BFM is free to the public. I’d like to keep it that way, but if you read something I’ve written and find it helpful, I ask that you think about contributing $5, $10, $15 dollars a month to keep the thing going. It may not seem like much, but it does help keep the lights on (so to speak.)

Enough about me! Whether you’re new here or not, take a moment to look through the archives and tell me what catches your eye.

Cheers,

Jack