Spiritual Misfits Podcast · Meeting Ground

Eco-Theology: Tending Soil & Soul (Samuel Dow)

·56 min·3 clips

Samuel brought refugee men carrots he had grown, and they looked at him and said, "Thanks?"

1. Spiritual Misfits Podcast speaks with Samuel Dow about eco-theology, food, and community at Baroona Farm in Brisbane. 2. Will Small interviews Samuel Dow, who is a priest, chaplain at St. John's College, urban farmer at Baroona Farm, and locum at the Parish of Green Hills. 3. The episode asks how faith can grow beyond church walls by tending land, relationships, and spiritual practice together. 4. Samuel describes growing up in a conservative evangelical tradition and later feeling that "things just weren't kind of adding up" in his late teens. 5. He says he was drawn toward "the people on the outside" and later found his own place among people on the fringes of church and ministry. 6. Samuel explains that ordained ministry has often meant chaplaincy and parish work with people he might not meet in a Sunday congregation. 7. He points to his role at the University of Queensland, where over 300 undergraduate students live on site at St. John's College. 8. Samuel traces his earlier vocation to horticultural science, shaped by his grandmother and parents and by his love of working with soil and earth. 9. He studied at Hawkesbury Ag College at the University of Western Sydney and later worked in Northwest Tasmania as an agronomist and field officer for Fresh Market Veggies. 10. Tasmania became important both for faith formation and for the first serious questions about ordained ministry. 11. Samuel says eco-theology began with awe in creation, especially on red-soil headlands overlooking the Bass Strait. 12. He also remembers seeing fruit discarded in horticulture classes and tonnes of produce fed to cattle because supermarkets wanted perfect-looking vegetables. 13. Those experiences pushed him to question waste, food access, and the environmental damage of commercial agriculture. 14. Samuel says Baroona Farm began after he looked at the old tennis court at St. Francis Theological College in Milton and imagined a place where land could support ministry. 15. He contrasts Baroona Farm with community gardens that often serve people with time, money, and flexibility rather than those who rely on the food. 16. Samuel tells the story of presenting carrots to refugee men and realizing that his own assumptions about what people needed were wrong. 17. He says the farm's mission is to grow "food and community with and for the nutritionally vulnerable," and that refugees, asylum seekers, and a friend from Sri Lanka help shape what gets grown. 18. Samuel explains that Baroona is linked to Baroona Road and may come from a First Nations word meaning "a place far away," which fits people who are far from home. 19. The tone is reflective, practical, and gentle, with long interview answers, examples from agriculture, and repeated attention to meals, working bees, and liturgical seasonal gatherings. 20. People interested in eco-theology, urban farming, and community ministry will get the most from it; listeners wanting fast, plot-driven storytelling may skip it.

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