Hi there, and welcome to the Bell Farm Miscellany. We’re Jack and Goodie, two farmers who run a regenerative farm in the Piedmont of North Carolina. We’ve designed this Substack to gather and share the many different types of writing that happen on our farm. We hope you’ll enjoy essays and images that describe farm life, agriculture, ethics, agrarianism, the theology of agriculture, and creation care. But we also think you’ll be delighted by other things, too: notes, queries, and reflections on poetry, art, history, and philosophy (Jack is a literary historian by training); snippets of sermons, pastoral reflections, and theological essays (Goodie also works as a pastor in Durham, North Carolina); as well as guest posts by friends, fellow travelers and farmer-comrades.
Each month we’ll send out a meditation that will contain an essay, along with links to books, articles, essays, and literature that we’re reading. We’ll send our first installment out June 12th. Be on the lookout, and if you can’t find it in your inboxes, check your Spam and Promotion folders. In the meantime, please check out Jack’s latest essay in Plough Quarterly (in print or online) on William Cobbett (1763-1835), a radical journalist, farmer, and pamphleteer. Cobbett just may be the greatest English writer you’ve never heard of. Jack’s essay is on the deep and disturbing changes to the English countryside that Cobbett saw taking place on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. Enjoy, and please share with your family, friends, and neighbors.
A final note on our name: why miscellany? A miscellany is (or was) a collection of different pieces of writing organized and bound in a single volume. In the early modern period, miscellanies were a popular way to store favored quotations, aphorisms, phrases in a single, bound book. Although we’ll categorize our posts chronologically and not alphabetically (like most miscellanies I’ve seen), we’d like to think that that this blog functions in the spirit of the miscellany: snippets of our writing and the writing of those we love and look to for wisdom, whether they are living or long dead.