About Ellen F. Davis: Ellen F. Davis is an American theologian and Old Testament scholar. She is the Amos Ragan Kearns Distinguished Professor of Bible and Practical Theology at Duke Divinity School.
Appreciation and enjoyment of the creatures are the hallmark of God's dominion and therefore the standard by which our own attempt to exercise dominion must be judged.
Sloth may disguise itself as "conscientious work" and meet with various forms of public approval or success. But work that is not motivated by love for the life of the community, beyond the temporal and spatial confines of one's own small life, canno...
Careful practical work is the best expression of our freedom and safeguard of our sanity. In a healthy society, such work is the means most consistently available for people to practice holiness of life, to imitate God's enabling and sustaining care ...
Agrarians are committed to preserving both communities and the material means of life, to cultivating practices that ensure that the essential means of life suffice for all members of the present generation and are not diminished for those who come a...
It is appropriate to speak of the artisans as possessed of wisdom (and not just "skill"), because the biblical writers share the understanding common to most traditional societies that the active form of wisdom is good work. Wisdom does not consist o...
Blessing is essentially the transformative experience of knowing and honoring God as the Giver; it means valuing the steady flow that sustains the world even above the gift of life that each of us receives and is in time constrained to relinquish.
The land's fruitfulness is the "natural" consequence of covenant faithfulness enacted on both sides, Israel's and God's. A productive land is a gift something like a child to a healthy marriage; in each case, thriving results from and witnesses to lo...
