Good Soil

Praise

“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

“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. He fills a table with fragrant dishes, overflowing with home-grown beans and greens picked just for us. 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. If Wendell Berry and David Sedaris had a love child, they could only hope he might be as fine a thinker and as funny a writer as Jeff Chu.”—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

“Delving into the soils that we come from—our families, cultures, communities—we can only humbly let go of the idea that we alone shape our path and that our roots and those around us ‘are inescapably interdependent with the world,’ . . . [Good Soil is] sustenance for the soul found while diving hands into the dirt.”—Kirkus Reviews