For many years now, I have respected the talented writing abilities (and the honesty and vibrancy and gracefulness) of a writer named Jeff Chu. We are thrilled that on his recent book tour he’s joining us here. We’ve asked our church to host the event for us since we’re hoping for a crowd a bit larger than might fit in our cluttered shop here at Hearts & Minds in Dallastown.

Instead of doing it here at the bookstore, Jeff will be speaking at First Presbyterian Church ( 225 East Market Street ) in downtown York, PA, at 7:00 PM on Tuesday evening, June 17th. As we like to say we are on the corner of Queen & Market and there is parking in the rear, across the ally.

It will be informal — he’s invited me to lead a casual conversation, as he has already done at spectacular events with the likes of author Barbara Brown Taylor, philosopher James K.A. Smith, professional interviewer Krista Tippett, and nature writer Margaret Renkl, so you can imagine how I’m already shaking in my scuffed-up shoes. Small town bookseller that I am, I’m nervous, but thrilled, to be stepping up to talk with Jeff about his recent book, a book I adored, called Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand (Convergent; $26.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59.) I hope you can join us.

There’s a lot going on in this new memoir but — even though Jeff has been a prestigious journalist working for the likes of Travel + Leisure, Fast Company, and Time — I’m going to violate the only rule I’ve heard of about journalism: don’t bury the lede. Because I want to frame this great evening of book talk with just a few other quickie comments (and other titles, natch) so it may seem like I’m drifting from my enthusiasm for Good Soil and our upcoming free event. Not at all.

Good Soil is the story of Jeff going to the Farminary, an agricultural sort of experiential theological education program at Princeton Theological Seminary founded about a decade ago by Nathan Stuckey and, hence, the near-perfect sub-title about becoming an ‘accidental farmhand.’ Chu has a substack column called “Notes from a Make-Believe Farmer.” As a gay New York writer and now a newly ordained Reformed Church in America pastor in urban Grand Rapids, he’s no Wendell Berry, if you catch my drift. Which makes his reflections on learning about dirt, about composting, about long beans, invasive species, slaughtering chickens, watersheds, planting corn, rowdy goats, (and did I mention composting?) all the more fun. He tells how he bought a new outfit for the first day on the farm, which, uh, says a bit about the unlikely nature of this story. The dude has a degree from the London School of Economics and now he’s writing about axes and horseradish.

He stands alongside several different sorts of writers in a few different fields — his writing is about his own faith, about his strict Chinese-American parents reluctance to accept his being gay, it is about farming and eco-theology, it is about the joys and hardships of community, it is about new styles of learning and radical theological education. It is about the tragic loss of a dear friend and hard, hard grief. It’s about racism in America. It is about labor-intensive, sustainable agriculture on a small scale. But it is very much about eating, about cooking and savoring real food, especially Chinese food.

You should know that if you appreciate the renaissance of faith-based foodie books in the last decade or so — all citing Supper of the Lamb by Father Robert Capon — you will love Good Soil. Just think of books like 2012’s Bread & Wine: A Love letter to Life Around the Table by Shauna Niequist or the recent By Bread Alone: A Baker’s Reflections on Hunger, Longing, and the Goodness of God by Kendall Vanderslice or the ruminations of The Living Diet: A Christian Journey to Joyful Easting by Martha Tatarnic. For years we’ve promoted Faith and Food: Justice, Joy and Daily Bread edited by Michael Shut. We’ve justly celebrated The Just Kitchen: Invitations to Sustainability, Cooking, Connection, and Celebration by Derrick Weston and Anna Woofenden. My favorite collection — one of my all time favorite books, ever, I think — is The Spirit of Food: 34 Writers on Feasting and Fasting Towards God edited by Leslie Leyland Fields.

So, too, Jeff writes nicely — clear, engaging, artful, but not fastidious — about brisket, about garlic, about fried rice. His description of daikon radish (“not the most aesthetically pleasing of vegetables”) and its place in lo bak go, is captivating. His chapter called “Salt-Baked Chicken” is beautiful, and the near-climax of the book where he has to cook an entire meal with ingredients from the Farminary plot (titled “Feast”) is reminiscent of that last scene in Babette’s Feast. If you appreciate Supper of the Lamb you will love this lovely and moving bit of (cross-cultural) food writing. You should order it today.

It may be because Ted Lasso cited Walt Whitman in the third season but many of us know that we “contain multitudes.” As does this book. As much as Good Soil is a delight for foodies or aficionados of (real, middle-class) Asian cuisine, it is even more a book about spiritual growth by way of working the land. From the aforementioned descriptions of composting to a great chapter on trees, from a lovely bit of prose about herons to the occasional reflection on land use, both ancient and industrial, the insights about theology and faith, about spirituality and stewardship are right there as his cohort of seminarian/farmers — as Job suggests, as Jesus himself suggests — listen to the land for God’s Word. Jesus’s own parables about seeds and weeds and wine all come alive when one is standing in the muck, sensing the potential. This is a tremendous book if you love gardening. Oh, how I wanted to actually go see that well-described barn. And I know some would certainly agree with his sense that weeding could be a calming, ritual-like practice.

And so, Chu — perhaps without knowing all of this himself — stands on the sturdy shoulders of many who have written about faith and farming. From the lovely and important Making Peace with the Land: God’s Call to Reconcile with Creation by Fred Bahnson & Norman Wirzba (both who have done fabulous other books along these lines) to A Time to Plant: Life Lessons in Work, Prayer, and Dirt by Kyle Kramer to Jesus for Farmers and Fishers: Justice for All Those Marginalized by Our Food System by Gary Paul Nabhan to Everyone Must East: Food Sustainability and Ministry by Mark Yackel-Juleen and on and on, we have an abundance of books on this topic. Last year I named Soil: The Story of A Black Mother’s Garden by Camille T. Dungy as one of the Best Books of 2024. Set in Fort Collins Colorado, it is a tremendous read. We take special delight in the great writing and artful photos in the full-color gift book by Christie Purifoy, Seedtime and Harvest: How Gardens Grow Roots, Connection, Wholeness, and Hope. I just started the gorgeously done Milkweed edition of Soil and Spirit: Cultivation and Kinship in the Web of Life by the agrarian poet and farmer Scott Chalky. If you know of any of these great reads, you will love Good Soil.

The great Southern nature writer, Margaret Renkl is exactly right about the book:

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, author of The Comfort of Crows

And so Good Soil: The Education of… is somewhat about the emotionally-complicated relationship Jeff (like most men) has with his mother. And father. That he came out years ago and that his parents are pretty typical fundamentalist Asian evangelicals — he grew up singing Jesus Loves Me and a whole host of revivalists hymns — makes this relationship that much more vexing. His mother’s love language, it seems, is cooking for others and while I don’t want to spoil too much, it is beautiful to learn how his mother (who refused to attend his wedding) would nonetheless cook for them. The stories of his parents and their parents and Jeff’s boyhood travels to Hong Kong and mainland China are well crafted and deeply moving, even poignant, at times.

This is one of the reasons we read memoirs, it seems to me, to hear how people narrate their lives, to understand the beauty and brokenness in human families, and see how others cope. To excavate memories. To be invited in.

Barbara Brown Taylor has lots of “shiny things” to say about the book, but she writes, “the truest thing I can say is how befriended I felt from the very first page.”

I suppose that all who attend our event on June 17th will experience a glimpse of this same embrace, but I was especially struck by Jeff’s friend Barbara Brown Taylor’s assessment of his character:

“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.”

Taylor continues, saying that “Good Soil won’t let go until it has made you want to do that at your very next opportunity.”

That is almost exactly how I felt as I read his previous book (first published in 2013) called Does Jesus Really Love Me? A Gay Christians Pilgrimage in Search of God in America (Harper Perennial; $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19.)

In this travelogue of a book he visits folks all over the country, trying to “get at the heart of a question that had been haunting him for years. Does Jesus really love me?” His mother cried for weeks because of his sexual coming out and yet he loved her. He wasn’t convinced by his friends who told him to cut ties with his parents, that they were repressing him, causing him trauma, that their toxic faith was hurtful and should be abandoned. While deconstructing that strict fundamentalism of his youth (and coming to friendship with post-evangelical writer Rachel Held Evans and her husband, who make a brief but important appearance in Good Soil) Jeff grew to want to tell the stories of those having these kinds of conversations.

And honest face-to-face conversations about faith and being gay are hard to find, making this work a treasure.

I have read this book twice and appreciate so much about his storytelling insight about the religious landscape, his snapshots of characters and the ethos of their institutions. He goes to Nashville to meet Southern Baptists and big time evangelicals; he visits inclusive (but still evangelical) congregations like Highland outside of Denver. He spends time with the Westboro Baptist cultists and he meets mainline clergy and tells vivid stories that are (as the back cover puts it) “funny and heartbreaking, perplexing and wise.” It is a gracious survey of what many thought all over the country just a few years ago. I suspect that many are dug in even deeper in their respective positions as our cultural polarization widens. Man, we need this book where respective stories are told well. I really do recommend Does Jesus Really Love Me? regardless of your own convictions about sexual and cultural ethics.

Which brings us back to our time at FPC in York with Jeff on the 17th at 7:00.

We hope many will come. It’s going to be fun. I have no idea what I’m going to ask him, but I bet he’ll make us laugh. Maybe he’ll tell some of the episodes of the new Good Soil book — I’ve got some favorites, although maybe we’ll skip the chicken strangling. Maybe we’ll talk about the chapter entitled “Telos” in which he ruminates on Jesus’ words at the beginning of the Last Supper narrative in John, eis telos. I know I want to talk about the appendix which explains how his grandma cooked her fried rice. As Jeff notes, “Grace abounds.”

Writer R. Eric Thomas is right when he says, “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.”

I don’t know what you are looking for when you pick up a book, but I’m sure that for many of us, some of Jeff’s story is going to resonate deeply — whether you’ve been an “accidental farmhand” or not. Whether you’ve had estranged relationships in your family (or church community) or not. Whether you’ve felt the sting of rejection because of your ethnicity or race. Whether you are stable in your solid faith, or not. We contain multitudes.

We enjoy bringing in authors and writers and have had lovely times with good folks over the years. We are truly honored to host Jeff Chu and hope you can join us at First Presbyterian Church, York, PA. We’ll start about 7:00 PM and have a book signing (and some tea and light goodies) afterwards. Thanks to our Racial Justice Task Force at FPC for co-sponsoring.

If you can’t come — most BookNotes readers are farther away, we know — but would like an autographed copy, order one now (at our 20% off price) and we’ll get him to inscribe one for you. If you want a name on it, be sure to tell us. We’ll do our best to mail signed copies to you the day or so after the York event.

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