Before Norman Wirzba became a theologian, philosopher, and public intellectual, he was a farm boy in Southern Alberta, waking before sunrise to tend to the land and animals in his care, and he says that these early experiences working with the natural world taught him one essential lesson: life does not exist on our terms.

Now a professor at Duke Divinity School working at the intersection of theology, philosophy, and agrarian studies, Wirzba argues that modern culture has trapped us in an illusion of self-reliance, when the key to a good life may simply require a deeper understanding of our place in what he calls the meshwork world. 

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