Students gather on a local farm once a week, where the day is structured by a liturgy that, as we enter it, also shapes us. The love of God, neighbor, and creation is one. Learning as neighbors from local homesteaders, and as a discipline of love, we seek to practice care for the created world in our local place, from animal husbandry and regenerative gardening to exploring the beauties and threats to local ecology.

As a discipline aiding love, our fellowship embarks on the learning of Koine (Biblical Greek), to move us beyond ourselves and foster postures of attention, care, and prayer in the midst of that which is difficult. Greek is a honing stone for our fellowship.

After Greek, our fellowship practices a time of solitude, as each student aims to be prayerfully alone and silently attentive in creation, and, if need be, to seek reconciliation with one another.

Because our imaginations foster our love, our fellowship also practices the discipline of listening to, reading, and discussing powerful literature around a fire, for literature as word—like the Word himself—can be wood on the fire within a student, gifting warmth in the cold and light in the darkness. The literature we enter helps us reach beyond what is merely seen, to see afresh the reality in which we live and so live more intently within it. Students also prepare a baked good each week for one another as an effort of hospitality and love.

Students end the day having come full-circle, in further care for the created world and in evening prayer.

Because of its commitment to sustainable agriculture, The Local Academy is proud to participate as civic scientists in The Land Institute’s Perennial Atlas Project, a three-year project growing and researching perennial grain crops and their annual counterparts.