Good Soil

“A big-hearted meditation on belonging, compassion, and the transformative power of friendship … I needed this book. I think you need it, too.”—Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful “By turns wrenching and funny, heartbreaking and hope-filled, Jeff Chu’s Good Soil teaches us how to keep going despite our own gravest doubts, and how to keep loving when love has already failed us too many times. By whatever name you may call it—God, family, partnership, community, the whole living world—love is what this book is about. At its true heart, this is a book about love.”—Margaret Renkl, New York Times bestselling author of The Comfort of Crows “A beautiful book on the growth that we spark when we tend to our soil.”—Katherine May, New York Times bestselling author of Wintering and Enchantment “Chu’s award-winning journalistic prose translates seamlessly to memoir as he shares his experience as a mid-life seminarian. He captures detail in a way that invites readers to practically smell the radishes rotting in the compost bin and easily imagine the playful cast of seminarian farmhands Chu learns beside… . Chu’s spiritual insights sound akin to the wisdom of Wendell Berry or Mary Oliver—theology written by hands with dirt under the nails.”—Sojourners“Reading Good Soil feels like how I imagine it would feel to pull up a chair at one of the agape meals Jeff Chu hosts for beloved friends. We listen as he reflects on the seasonal rhythms of growing veggies and raising chickens—all because, as Professor Kenda Dean says, ‘we expect love to grow here.’”—The Presbyterian Outlook“This book is so chock-full of small miraculous moments, in word, in story, in revelation. And the cumulative effect is exactly what I crave when I pick up a book—I feel more connected, a sense of possibility, glad to be alive. Good Soil is a book to keep and a book to give to everyone you love.” —R. Eric Thomas, national bestselling author of Here for It “This book is pure grace for anyone who has wrestled with questions of faith and belonging, offering hard-won insights on who we are and who we might yet become.”—Kate Bowler, New York Times bestselling author of Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day!“Part memoir, part meditation, Good Soil is an extraordinary work of grace and courage that announces Jeff Chu as a major figure in an emerging field of modern and rigorous Christian thinkers.”—Eliza Griswold, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Amity and Prosperity and Circle of Hope“Jeff Chu has a gift for loving people he has never met (and may not even like), having decided ahead of time that the best thing any of us can do is pay attention to what gives us life and tell one another about it.”—Barbara Brown Taylor, author of An Altar in the World and Learning to Walk in the Dark“[Good Soil is] sustenance for the soul found while diving hands into the dirt.”—Kirkus Reviews

Jeff Chu is an award-winning journalist and editor-at-large at Travel+Leisure. He is the author of Does Jesus Really Love Me? and the co-author, with the late Rachel Held Evans, of the New York Times bestseller Wholehearted Faith. Chu is a former Time staff writer and Fast Company editor whose work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Modern Farmer. In his weekly newsletter, “Notes of a Make-Believe Farmer,” Chu writes about spirituality, gardening, food, travel, and culture. He lives with his husband, Tristan, in Grand Rapids, Michigan.