Homesteading Is Theology with Dirt on Its Boots
Robert Malone’s recent post on barn cats was the “cat”alyst that finally pushed me to write something I’ve been meaning to write for quite a while.
Not because the cat question itself is so momentous, though anyone who has paid thousands of dollars for rodent damage to cars, tractors, or equipment knows it can feel plenty momentous. And not simply because his story mirrored our own enough to make me smile in recognition. In our case, what began years ago as a daughter’s dream of kittens eventually became two beloved but largely non-mousing cats, a move to the country, and a growing realization that sentiment and stewardship are not always the same thing. We too have paid our tuition in chewed wiring, damaged machinery, and the low-grade frustration that comes from discovering that the animals you love have no intention of earning their keep as rodent control specialists.
No, what moved me to write is that Malone’s cat essay is only the latest in a homesteading series I’ve followed with growing admiration.
What I respect is not merely the content. It is the method.
There is something increasingly rare, and deeply refreshing, in watching a mind like his move back and forth between the world of high controversy and the world of ordinary created reality: barns, animals, land, weather, pests, repairs, tradeoffs, limits. Those things have a way of stripping away illusion. They do not care about narratives. They do not yield to credentials. They are stubbornly, gloriously real.
And that matters, because one of the central crises of our age is that what passes for Science has, in too many quarters, become unmoored from reality.
I do not mean science rightly understood. Properly understood, science begins in wonder, observation, humility, and a willingness to let reality correct us. It is grounded, embodied, and personal before it is institutional. It is tested not only in journals but in creation itself. A farmer, a mechanic, a homesteader, a mother, a physician who still trusts his own eyes—these are not enemies of science. They are often its last guardians.
What we increasingly have instead is something more esoteric, more abstract, and too often more corrupted: a system built on paid research, institutional incentives, career dependencies, and conclusions that are expected in advance. It is science as bureaucracy. Science as performance. Science severed from the grounding discipline of direct encounter with reality.
That is one reason Malone’s homesteading reflections carry weight with me. They arise from a man who, whatever else one may say, is still willing to look at the world as it is. To observe. To compare claim with consequence. To let life answer back.
And that, to me, is not only good science. It is also deeply biblical.
Genesis tells us that man was placed in the garden “to dress it and to keep it.” We were also commanded to “be fruitful and multiply.” Those are not separate callings. They belong together. Human beings are not merely consumers of creation, nor spectators within it. We are stewards, cultivators, householders. We are meant to receive the world as gift, but also as responsibility.
That is why I have come to believe that homesteading, farming, gardening, and all forms of serious husbandry are not lifestyle accessories. They are theology with dirt on their boots.
They reveal what we think man is.
They reveal whether we believe creation has an order that precedes us, or whether we imagine it is raw material for the will. They reveal whether fruitfulness is a blessing received through obedience, patience, and alignment with reality—or whether we think we can force outcomes by technique alone. They reveal whether we understand dominion as stewardship under God, or domination in defiance of Him.
This is where a theme from my own book, Hardness of the Heart, becomes relevant.
One of the central human temptations—arguably the central temptation east of Eden—is to disregard Divine Revelation and insist on learning everything the hard way. We are given what I call the Curriculum: God’s revelation, His instruction, His ordering wisdom. But because of hardness of heart, we dismiss the Curriculum and prefer the Laboratory. We want to hack our way through creation by trial and error, by consequences, by pain, by the school of hard knocks.
The tragedy is not that the Laboratory teaches nothing. It teaches plenty. Creation is an excellent teacher. But it is a costly one. We break things. We damage ourselves. We wound one another. We spend years rediscovering truths that were available to us all along, had we possessed the humility to receive them.
Agriculture is one of the clearest places where this drama unfolds.
The land does not care about our abstractions. Soil does not respond to ideology. Animals do not thrive on slogans. Fertility, nutrition, resilience, and ecological balance cannot be permanently manufactured by public relations. Reality asserts itself eventually. Always.
That is why agriculture matters so much right now—not just economically, but spiritually and civilizationally.
If we cannot learn to “dress and keep” the garden, we will not long remain capable of “being fruitful and multiplying” in any deep sense either. A people alienated from land, food, husbandry, and limits becomes vulnerable not only to bad farming but to bad philosophy. It loses contact with consequence. It loses gratitude. It loses the habit of perceiving life as dependent on order, season, sacrifice, and care.
That is one reason I’m especially excited about the agriculture track at the Better Business Better World conference - December 18–20, 2026 at the Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida.
Too often, business conversations remain suspended in abstraction—strategy, systems, metrics, capital, messaging—without returning to the basic question of what human flourishing actually requires. Agriculture forces that question back onto the table. It asks us to think about life, nourishment, stewardship, poverty, interdependence, and the future in a way that no purely financial model can.
I’m especially looking forward to presentations like Mollie Engelhart’s “Farming for the Future” and Paul Hanley’s “Can Regenerative Agriculture Feed the World, Solve Poverty, and Address Climate Change?” Those are not peripheral questions. They are central questions. And they bear directly on the kind of civilization we are becoming.
Because if business is to be better, it must become more reality-based. More accountable to life as it is actually lived. More grounded in stewardship than extraction. More willing to learn from creation than to impose upon it. In that sense, the future of agriculture is not a niche concern. It is a test case for whether we still know how to inhabit the world as creatures rather than engineers of our own escape from creatureliness.
This is why Malone’s homesteading series resonates beyond its immediate subject matter.
A post about cats is never just about cats.
A post about rodents in the barn, wiring in a car, retired mousers in the house, or the practical challenge of keeping animals aligned with their purpose becomes, in the hands of an honest observer, something larger. It becomes a meditation on order, vocation, limits, adaptation, and the stubborn wisdom of reality. It becomes, whether explicitly or not, a meditation on creation.
And that is why I finally wanted to write this.
Dr. Malone, if this reaches you: one reason your homesteading reflections have earned my respect is that they demonstrate a kind of integrity increasingly absent from both public discourse and institutional science. You have shown a willingness to thread the needle between contested expert culture and the plain testimony of lived observation. That matters. More than many realize.This is why I’m not only writing this, but also plan to reference it at my presentation at SOOPMedia’s “Threading the Needle between Good and Evil” summit, ongoing this weekend.
I think we have a great deal in common in the questions that interest us: health, stewardship, embodied reality, truth-telling, the dignity of ordinary life, and the need to recover forms of knowledge that cannot be reduced to institutional approval.
So let me make the invitation explicit.
I would love to invite you to attend the Better Business Better World conference and, ideally, to participate as a speaker. I believe your voice would add something important to the conversation, especially as it relates to agriculture, stewardship, scientific integrity, and the recovery of reality-based thinking in a culture increasingly adrift from reality itself.
And if that is not possible, I would be honored to welcome you as a guest on Created in the Image of God. I suspect a conversation between us would find no shortage of common ground—beginning with cats and homesteads perhaps, but quickly reaching the deeper questions underneath them.
Because in the end, this is not only about cats, or rodents, or barns, or even agriculture.
It is about whether we are willing to receive creation as something given, ordered, and meaningful.
It is about whether we will learn from the Curriculum—or continue paying, year after year, for the Laboratory.
