American Harvest Quotes

“She cannot describe for me precisely what she means, but I assume she thinks that the extra time we’ve spent reading and writing has affected Michael, Juston, and me; we are the three who have gone to college. We have been forever altered by books. We will ask questions, and in doing so, we allow an uncharted world to form in our heads. Our world is not so much a place in which problems are fixed, but one in which doors are left open and we live with the uncertainty of what we do not know. We will revisit the open doors day after day, and we share the open doors with one another.”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland

“Over and over again, I start to see that these conversations about race rest on a simple concept: to be white is to not know what it is to be a person of color. Sometimes to be white is to think one knows what it is like to be a person of color. And to be a person of color is to be like anyone else. This means that if a person of color points out that his people were victimized, then he is trying to make himself and his history sound 'special.' If we are all the same, as Christ said, then no one is special. To accept Christ, therefore, means that one does not embrace a victim mentality or emphasize the parts of one's personal history that are unpleasant. One should simply have faith. If one cannot find solace in faith, if one does not know that God is looking out for oneself, and if one thus embraces a victim mentality, then all is not well.”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland

“I think of the self-proclaimed agrarian farmer and scholar Victor Davis Hanson who in his book Fields Without Dreams, wrote sneeringly but also with grief: 'They [city people] no longer care where or how they get their food, as long as it is firm, fresh, and cheap. They have no interest in preventing the urbanization of their farmland as long as parks, Little League fields and an occasional bike lane are left amid the concrete, stucco, and asphalt. They have no need of someone who they are not, who reminds them of their past and not their future. Their romanticism for the farmer is just that, an artificial and quite transient appreciation of his rough-cut visage against the horizon the stuff of a wine commercial, cigarette ad, or impromptu rock concert.' People in the cities don't see farmers clearly. The farmers are overlooked, and instead of being seen as recognizably real, the farmer is romanticized.”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland

“In his book The Territories of Science and Religion, the scholar Peter Harrison examines the origins of the idea that science and religion must be diametrically opposed. He points to the thirteenth century religious figure Thomas Aquinas, speculating: 'Aquinas...may have said something like this. Science is an intellectual habit; religion, like the other virtues, is a moral habit.' This position feels lost to me in the way we talk about religion in the marketplace of ideas now. Somehow, the idea that God created the world became more important than our connection to God, and then it became important to discredit God. And in intellectual circles, God became stupid, and science became smart, and the being stupid and smart did not go together.”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland

“Eric told me he wanted to share his America because he feared how little we have come to understand each other. The divide between city and country, once just a crack in the dirt was now a chasm into which objects, people, grace, and love all fell and disappeared.”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland

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― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland