A night with Jeff Chu

Name: A night with Jeff Chu
Start: 2025-09-16T19:00:00-05:00
Location: 222 E 8th St, Little Rock, AR, United States, Arkansas 72202

Schedule

Tue, 16 Sep, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

222 E 8th St, Little Rock, AR, United States, Arkansas 72202 | Little Rock, AR

Join us for a night of conversation with New York Times bestselling author, Jeff Chu, at Second Baptist Church as he discusses his new book, Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand. This is a free event and is open to all.
About Jeff Chu:
Jeff Chu is an award-winning journalist, essayist, preacher, and speaker. He serves as an editor-at-large at Travel+Leisure magazine, teacher in residence at Crosspointe Church in Cary, N.C., and parish associate for storytelling and witness at the First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, Calif.
Over his eclectic journalistic career, Jeff Chu has interviewed presidents and paupers, corporate execs and preachers, Britney Spears and Ben Kingsley. As a writer and editor for Time, Conde Nast Portfolio, and Fast Company, he has compiled a portfolio that includes stories on megahit-making Swedish songwriters (a piece for which he went clubbing in Stockholm); James Bond (for which he stood on a Spanish beach and watched Halle Berry emerge from the waves over and over and over); undercover missionaries in the Arab world (he traveled to North Africa and went to church); and the decline of Christianity in Europe (he prayed). Senator John Warner once told Jeff: "You're a good little interviewer!"
A California native, Jeff went to high school at Miami's Westminster Christian, where he sat behind Alex Rodriguez in Mr. Warner's world history class. A graduate of Princeton, the London School of Economics, and Princeton Theological Seminary, Jeff has received fellowships from the International Reporting Project and the French-American Foundation, and in 2012, was part of the Seminar on Debates in Religion and Sexuality at Harvard Divinity School. The nephew and grandson of Baptist preachers, he is an ordained minister of Word and sacrament in the Reformed Church in America. He loves fried rice and the Book of Ecclesiastes and detests marzipan more than he can explain in words. He and his husband, Tristan, live in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
About "Good Soil":
In his late thirties, Jeff Chu left his job as a magazine writer and found himself at Princeton Theological Seminary’s “Farminary”—a twenty-one-acre working farm where students learn to cultivate the earth while examining life’s biggest questions. Now, he unpacks what he learned about creating “good soil,” both literally and figuratively, drawing lessons from the rhythms of growth, decay, and regeneration that define life on the land.
In gorgeous, transporting reflections, Chu introduces us to the cast of characters, human and not, who became his teachers. While observing the egrets that visit the pond, the worms that turn waste into fertile soil, and the Chinese long beans that get passed over in the farm’s CSA, Chu considers our desire to belong, the story behind the food on our plate, and the significance of his own roots. What is the earth trying to tell us, if we’ll only stop and listen?
Good Soil helps readers connect to the land and to one another at a time when we seem drawn most to the phones in our hands. For nature lovers, foodies, and anyone who has daydreamed about a more fulfilling life, this book is a tribute to friendship, to the sacredness of our bond with the natural world, and to how love can grow from the unlikeliest of places.