What if a flourishing family life depends less on doing more and more on recovering rhythms of work, rest, attention, and belonging? Christine Perrin talks with Dr. Kerry Hasler-Brooks about the life she and her family have built on a small Pennsylvania farm, where agricultural seasons make limits, dependence, and renewal impossible to ignore. Their conversation explores how parents can create room for boredom, Sabbath, reading, meaningful work, and life together, even without radically rearranging their circumstances. Kerry also reflects on technology, simplicity, literature, and the formative power of returning to the same places and texts over time. For families feeling crowded by schedules and competing demands, this conversation offers a hopeful vision of choosing what to value and making space to live accordingly. Along the way, Kerry considers the sustaining power of literature, from Zora Neale Hurston to Emily Dickinson, and the way reading can help us attend more deeply to ourselves, one another, the natural world, and God. Her reflections suggest that formation often happens through ordinary practices repeated faithfully: walking the same ground, rereading a beloved poem, sharing work with children, welcoming others, and protecting stretches of time in which nothing has been planned. About the GuestDr. Kerry Hasler-Brooks researches and teaches the literary history of American life, with a particular focus on race and gender, from Phyllis Wheatley to Marilynne Robinson, Sherwood Anderson to Zora Neale Hurston, Herman Melville to Toni Morrison. In her work, Dr. Hasler-Brooks pursues engaged pedagogy, literary reading as spiritual practice, and literary studies toward Christian vocation. She believes stories speak truth and can teach all of us to be the creative thinkers, engaged communicators, perceptive readers, and responsible writers the world needs. Kerry lives with her husband and two children on a small, sustainable farm in Pottstown, Pennsylvania where they toil together to produce organically-grown fruits, vegetables, and flowers for families in their CSA program, at local farmers markets, and through collaborations with local non-profit organizations. Connect with the Humanitas Institute Humanitas Institute | https://humanitasinstitute.org X | https://x.com/HIClassicalEd Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/humanitas_institute/ TikTok | https://www.tiktok.com/@humanitas_institute Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61588606585070 YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/@TheHumanitasInstitute
