The movement towards simple, Christian living can be a yearning for order in a chaotic age. It’s also alarmingly retrograde
Acool evening air was descending on the 25-acre farmstead, blowing across the pond, around the barn, through the apple orchard and into the windows of Mike and Jenny Thomas’s two-century-old, red brick farmhouse.
The dinner hour had come. Edith, five, and George, three, enthusiastically rang a bell hanging near the kitchen door, sending metallic peals back into the early dusk.
Mike sat down at the head of a wooden table, his wife at the other end, their four children along the benches between. He recited a prayer in Latin, then led a short grace: “Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive …” Everyone crossed themselves, and Jenny began serving homemade pizzas.
A decade earlier, Jenny and Mike had been urban Democrats of a progressive and granola bent: the sort of people who shop at farmers’ markets, read about psychoanalysis, volunteer at community gardens. But they felt some frustration – some lack. They fantasized about leaving the city behind for a simpler, purer life in the countryside, and 11 years ago they finally took the plunge.
