Touching Grass: Why I Gave Up My Homestead Dream

What if the answer isn’t escaping modern life, but learning to inhabit it differently?

In this season finale, Samantha reflects on her own attraction to the homestead ideal — and why she ultimately reconsidered what it means to live sustainably, faithfully, and attentively in the place God has already given her.

This episode marks the beginning of a summer pause for Brave New Us and an invitation to continue the conversation through gardening, stewardship, and cultivation on YouTube.

In this episode:

• The appeal and limits of the homestead dream

• Stewardship versus escape

• Gardening as an embodied spiritual practice

• An invitation to grow where you’re planted

Summer Update:
Brave New Us will return after a seasonal break. In the meantime, join Samantha on YouTube for garden stories, practical growing, and reflections on embodiment, limits, and care for creation.

Buy the book:

Grow Where You’re Planted: Reclaming Eden in Your Own Backyard

Your Uterus or Mine? How Transplantation Is Changing the Face of Reproductive Medicine | Dr. Andrew Kubick

Medical breakthroughs often arrive faster than our moral vocabulary can keep up.

Samantha speaks with Andrew Kubick of the National Catholic Bioethics Center about uterine transplantation — from its therapeutic promise for women experiencing infertility to the profound ethical questions raised as reproductive technology expands toward increasingly experimental possibilities.

When medicine gains the power not only to heal but to redesign reproduction, how should we think about human dignity, motherhood, and the meaning of the body itself?

In this episode:

• The science and ethics of uterine transplants

• Therapeutic medicine vs. technological expansion

• Bioethics and Catholic moral reasoning

• The cultural implications of redefining reproduction

Buy the book:

Transplanting the Womb

Made Good: Making Peace with the Body (with a Catholic Nutritionist)

What if health begins not with control, but with trust?

Samantha speaks with a Catholic nutritionist about holistic health, women’s metabolism, and the growing desire to step out of cycles of restriction and anxiety surrounding food and wellness.

Together they explore how Christian anthropology offers a different starting point for health: the body as created good, meaningful, and worthy of care rather than suspicion.

In this episode:

• Holistic health and the limits of modern wellness culture

• Women’s health, metabolism, and stress

• Faith and nutrition

• Learning to cooperate with the body instead of fighting it

Buy the Book:

Made Good

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Disembodiment — Or Something Else?

Modern culture is often described as disembodied — detached from physical reality and increasingly virtual. But is that diagnosis accurate?

In this episode, Samantha responds to arguments about “disembodiment,” proposing instead that modern life has produced a cluster of bodily effects: heightened anxiety about health, constant self-monitoring, and confusion about what the body means or how it should be understood.

Rather than abandoning the body, we may be struggling to interpret it.

In this episode:

• A response to Helen Roy’s argument on disembodiment

• Why modern people are hyper-focused on their bodies rather than detached from them

• Technology, medicine, and the loss of bodily intelligibility

• How diagnosing the problem shapes the path toward healing

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