A Time to Plant - Softcover

Kramer, Kyle T.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 193349526X ISBN 13: 9781933495262

Publisher: Sorin Books, 2011

Synopsis

The author celebrates the joys of physical labor, prayer, and hospitality as he begins a journey of finding real community and uncovering an honest assessment of his own ambitions.

About this title

About the Author

Kyle T. Kramer is the executive director of the nonprofit Passionist Earth & Spirit Center, which offers interfaith educational programming in meditation, ecology, and compassion. Educated at Indiana University, the Universitat Hamburg (Germany), and Emory University, he is the former director of graduate theology programs and spiritual formation for Saint Meinrad, a Benedictine monastery and school of theology.

Kramer and his family spent fifteen years as organic farmers and homesteaders in Spencer County, Indiana. He serves as a Catholic climate ambassador for the USCCB-sponsored Catholic Climate Covenant and is a columnist for St. Anthony Messenger. He previously served as a columnist and essayist for America magazine. Kramer speaks across the country on issues of ecology and spirituality.

Reviews

Debut author Kramer is a farmer who came to his farm deliberately, after a divinity school degree and a life active in an Episcopalian church in Atlanta. His evolving vision led him back to his roots in southern Indiana, where in 1999 he purchased acreage in serious need of care. With that he began an agrarian life, learning through mistake, humility, and loneliness not only how to be a farmer, but how to be home, working in the earth. His homesteading is hardly glamorous, nor does he issue a back-to-the-land clarion call. His enterprise is modest and deeply personal; he cultivates his farm, marries, has children, and has an off-farm job at a nearby Benedictine monastery. He is at pains to say, and show, that his life takes a lot of work. Some additional details on his very concrete daily life as a farmer would make his story more vivid; the last three chapters contain much reflection that might well have been exchanged for more description of dailyness. Kramer has written a commendable, nonromantic book on spirituality and the land. (Jan.)
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In 1999, Kramer bought a plot of land in rural Indiana, which he eventually turned into an energy-efficient, wind-powered, working organic farm. With his home as a foundation, Kramer makes the subtle but powerful connection between his faith and the natural world. He freely admits that the journey to his new home was not a smooth one but was, instead, full of both anxious and hopeful moments. Kramer believes in what he calls authentic belonging, where the twin concepts of simplicity and sustainability are inseparable. Here he explores what it means to cultivate a healthy home economy, which can be something as fundamental as preparing food to finding a meaningful connection to the larger world. Home economics, he maintains, is nothing less than a spiritual undertaking. Inspired by the work of Luke Timothy Johnson, Wendell Berry, and especially Scott Russell Sanders, Kramer explains his gradual transformation from a self-proclaimed motor head (he loved mechanical things) with little interest in ecology to the person that he is today. A humble and charming meditation on spirituality and nature. --June Sawyers

Edition details

• Publisher: Sorin Books
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 193349526X
• ISBN 13: 9781933495262
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 175