Rural life has had an enormous impact on humanity throughout the millennia. This monumental change has taken place principally over the last 200 years in the West—and much of the rest of the world has been following.

Charles Moore commented: "What are its effects? A crisis of the great religions, whose language of elemental truth assumes an understanding of what it is to be a good shepherd, to sow and reap, to have murrains of cattle and crops that fail" (ibid.). It's impossible to fully understand many of the illustrations Jesus Christ and His apostles used without a fundamental grasp of these subjects.