A Time to Plant: Life Lessons in Work, Prayer, and Dirt

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.)