March 28, 2025
Parallel Polis Publishing
Jesus expected His students to become disciples. Messengers of His truth once He left to prepare our mansions. He didn’t want lifelong learners who refused to leave the classroom. And He still doesn’t.
Influenced by people we follow online, it’s time for us “regular joes” to step out. In faith, I’m taking that first action. My hope is that you’ll join me.
Modern life is meaningless. Our young people believe they have no other purpose on this earth other than to seek pleasure and entertain away their boredom. Tens of millions in our country live this way. Is it any wonder that we have never been more anxious, depressed, and suicidal?
Like many in the Millennial Generation, I went to college and enjoyed four years of few responsibilities and seemingly endless opportunities for fun with friends. Your first taste of life as an adult is pleasure island. You are young with unlimited free time and can do whatever you want. Even if you are a Christian and you avoid the bacchanal of drunkenness, drugs, and fornication, you still become accustomed to a slightly more wholesome dissipate lifestyle. You assume this is what adult life is. For many in my generation, you leave college and continue to chase that same high. You find a job—if you are lucky—and have less free time. You are separated from most of your college friends. But you become desperate to relive those glory days, even if only Friday night through Sunday.
The United States is well within a period of terminal decline. This is a cause of great discouragement and even despair for many. For many years the decline was noticeable but easy to deny. Slowly, imperceptibly you notice that things are not as good as you once remembered. “Oh it is just a recession. Things will return to normal soon.” Services that you always took for granted, whether it be courteous help or functioning roads and bridges disappear.
By Joel Salatin, Plain Values
In 1961 as our family looked out over this newly-acquired farm property with its rocks, gullies, and weeds, we needed a roadmap to healing. In our imagination, we could see fertile fields, filled-in gullies, and soil-covered rocks, but how to get there was intimidating. Our redemption project seemed impossible.
My dad contacted both private and public (government) agriculture experts to receive as broad a range of counsel as possible. Every advisor recommended borrowing more money, planting corn, building silos, grazing the woods, and feeding the soil chemical fertilizers.
By Lisa Miller, Wife to Marlin, publisher of Plain Values Someone once told us, “If you are looking around hoping for someone to do something…
By Marlin Miller, Publisher of Plain Values
I began our first post with this question and a statement. “What do the Amish, little ones with special needs, two nonprofits, four adoptions, two one-room schoolhouses from the 1800’s and a monthly print magazine have to do with homesteading in 2023? It is the story of our family, and it is a joy to share how the Lord has pieced it together over the last twenty years.” This is the second installment of that story.
Everything we discuss and share inside Plain Values magazine is focused on loving our neighbor. From adopting a child, raising extra tomatoes and peppers, helping that neighbor build a fence or a woodshed… it’s all about living out the two greatest commandments: to love God and love your neighbor.
By Joel Salatin, Plain Values
Does God Care How I Farm? That question defines my life’s work and vision because it moves the visceral, practical decisions I make in my farming vocation to a place of sacredness and godly living. If God cares about physical and practical things in my life, then my theology and belief structure are more than academic pursuits.
They are not just discussion groups and conversations. If God cares how I farm, then I should enthusiastically embrace searching for techniques and protocols that please Him. After all, it’s all His stuff. The courthouse may say I own this land, but ultimately I don’t. Legally and culturally, I may advocate for property rights, but really it’s all God’s property. Does He care how it’s handled? Does He care how I leave it? Does He care what I do with it?
If you are an engineer who has experience with AI and are interested in working on this project with us, please get in touch: [email protected]
There has been a lot of debate recently about artificial intelligence with the launch of Chat GPT, Silicon Valley’s latest technology darling. To call Chat GPT “intelligent” is misleading, as it has no actual intelligence.
Technology like Chat GPT is trained to generate information by ingesting enormous data sets and generating sentences based on that data. It is subject to the biases of both the data it ingests and the programmers who train it. It can mimic different writing styles and be forced to ignore taboo or “hateful” subjects its designers program it to avoid. Think of it more as a Google search and Wikipedia on steroids than a Terminator-esq sentient AI.
In our passage today, we see the heir to the house of Saul pledge his covenant loyalty to the heir to the house of Jesse. We see a transfer of loyalty in Jonathan between his father’s doomed house and his father’s replacement. That is what is in view here, and, if we have eyes to see it, it is a picture, with stunning clarity, of what the gospel of Jesus Christ is.
What do the Amish, little ones with special needs, two nonprofits, four adoptions, two one-room schoolhouses from the 1800s, and a monthly print magazine have to do with homesteading in 2023? It is the story of our family, and it is a joy to share how the Lord has pieced it together over the last twenty years. My name is Marlin Miller, and here we go!
The other day I was hauling a couple of cows to the slaughterhouse when a new-model truck with blacked-out windows blazed past me on the left. Big block letters on the rear window read: “LIONS NOT SHEEP.”
It was a nice truck, and I’d guess that the driver was an impressive guy — strong bench press, profitable business, maybe no exogenous mRNA in his bloodstream — but I’m also sure this truck bro is actually a particular type of sheep. A sheep in lion’s clothing, if you will, and I know that precisely because he considered himself to be a lion.
When animals become numbers, human numbers are not far behind. For the past several hundred years since the imaginations of Descartes and other enlighteners permeated our power structures, people have been treated as machines or numbers – abstract variables that can be subtly manipulated, to achieve certain goals. This is how the modern government exercises its power through an upside-down form of Christian “pastoral” leadership.
What if the way a culture treats livestock is an indication of how its political leaders will treat people?
