Water At The Roots
$16.00
In a society uprooted by war, industrialization, hate-filled ideology, and dehumanizing technology, a revolutionary farmer-poet reconnects his people to the land and one another.
Something of a British Wendell Berry, Philip Britts (1917-1949) was a soft-spoken West Country farmer, poet, activist, and mystic. Even as his country plunged headlong into a second world war, he sought a way of life where people could work together in harmony with nature and one another. He found an answer, though it would cost him his land and his life.
These were years of turbulence and disillusionment, in Europe and beyond. Why had progress brought with it so much suffering? Britts saw that in losing our connection to nature and the earth, we are losing our humanity – our connection to one another. He watched as his friends in the peace movement, socialist circles, and Christian churches joined the battle against Hitler, but he refused to resort to violence. Instead he threw himself into an attempt to live out the radical demands of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount on a personal and local level in community.
Britts’s story is no romantic agrarian elegy, but a life lived in the thick of history. The international pacifist community he joined, the Bruderhof, was soon forced to flee Europe. Now the earth he tilled was no longer the moist soil of his homeland, but a harsh tropical climate of drought, locusts, and blight. A highly trained horticulturalist, he loved working the land and discovering new wonders of nature, “to see in growing corn the fingerprints of God.” And his expertise and research helped alleviate hunger in Paraguay and Brazil. But now the soil was also shoveled over babies’ graves, and soon Britts himself contracted a rare tropical disease that would take his life at the age of thirty-one, leaving behind a wife and three young children.
Philip Britts’s generation faced great dangers and upheavals, as does ours. His response – to root himself in God, to dedicate himself to a community, to restore the land he farmed, and to use his gift with words to turn people from their madness – speaks into our age just as forcefully. The life he chose, as well as his poetry, remain a prophetic challenge in a time still wracked by war, racism, nationalism, materialism, and ecological devastation. Britts’s insights into our relationship with the natural environment are particularly poignant now that we are even more aware of its fragility.
In a world of concrete and p
in stock within 3-5 days of online purchase
SKU (ISBN): 9780874861280
ISBN10: 0874861284
Philip Britts
Binding: Trade Paper
Published: March 2018
Publisher: Plough Publishing House
Related products
-
I Still Believe Small Group DVD Kit
$39.99Add to cartThe I Still Believe Small Group Kit combines a 5-episode DVD series, 35-day devotional journal, and thorough leader’s guide to serve as a five-week guided tour for small groups through the biblical response to commitment, sacrifice, grief, loss, and also God’s sovereignty and redemption. This kit comes as a ready-to-use package that makes it easy to implement small groups in your church or ministry.
Includes: Video Series, Leader’s Guide, and Study Journal
-
My Faith Confessions
$5.99Add to cartMy faith Confession is a colourfully illustrated confession book for children. It’s filled with Bible based confessions that will help children learn the importance of the principle of saying what God has said about them.
It’s a one-stop resource material that will inspire, sustain and build in children the culture of confession faith-filled words that would launch them into a glorious future. -
Abolition Of Man
$17.99Add to cartIn this graceful work, C. S. Lewis reflects on society and nature and the challenges of how best to educate our children. He eloquently argues that we need as a society to underpin reading and writing with lessons on morality and in the process both educate and re-educate ourselves. In the words of Walter Hooper, “If someone were to come to me and say that, with the exception of the Bible, everyone on earth was going to be required to read one and the same book, and then ask what it should be, I would with no hesitation say The Abolition of Man. It is the most perfectly reasoned defense of Natural Law (Morality) I have ever seen, or believe to exist. If any book is able to save us from future excesses of folly and evil, it is this book.” This beautiful paperback edition is sure to attract new readers to this classic book.
-
Weight Of Glory
$16.99Add to cartSelected from sermons delivered by C. S. Lewis during World War II, these nine addresses show the beloved author and theologian bringing hope and courage in a time of great doubt. “The Weight of Glory,” considered by many to be Lewis’s finest sermon of all, is an incomparable explication of virtue, goodness, desire, and glory. Also included are “Transposition,” “On Forgiveness,” “Why I Am Not a Pacifist,” and “Learning in War-Time,” in which Lewis presents his compassionate vision of Christianity in language that is both lucid and compelling.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.