The Art of Being a Creature: Meditations on Humus and Humility

From AI to the Anthropocene, technological power has pushed human life to the limits. It’s at those limits that we’re faced again with the questions of who we are and how we should live. What if a study of the soil, the humus from which humanity came, could shed light on our condition? What if attending to the soil could teach us something about how we should live?

In The Art of Being a Creature, Ragan Sutterfield explores these questions in conversation with the ground. Turning a compost pile while meditating on kenosis or reflecting on St. Bernard while examining fungal hyphae, Sutterfield seeks to recover the practice of humility by looking at the humus. The path toward being fully human, he finds, is not to be discovered through a spiritual seeking in the heavens, but through a pilgrimage to the soil beneath our feet. Anyone who reads The Art of Being a Creature will never see the soil, or their life upon it, the same again.

Ragan Sutterfield is a writer, pastor, and permaculturalist in his native Arkansas. He is the author of Cultivating Reality (2013), This Is My Body (2015), and Wendell Berry and the Given Life (2017). His essays and articles have appeared in Plough, The Christian Century, Sojourners, Christianity Today, The Washington Post, and The Oxford American, among others. More about his work can be found at ragansutterfield.com.