Compare Traditions on One Technology
Choose a technology and read the traditions' recorded stances side by side — each with its rationale in its own terms. The comparison is the section's method in one view: the differences are in the reasons.
Industrial agriculture
The yield is not in dispute; the terms are: horsepower governed by scale among the Amish, waste forbidden by bal tashchit, the technocratic paradigm indicted by Laudato si’ — and the Green Revolution’s billions fed, recorded in the same ledger. The full register entry
Anabaptist, Mennonite, and Amish
Selectively adopted
The Ordnung governs method, not output: draft power and scale are kept at the size a family and a settlement can work and owe nothing on, while fertilizers, seeds, and much else are admitted. Hutterite colonies, holding goods in common, run fully mechanized large farms — the family’s own internal comparison, kept in this register because it isolates the variable: the rule is about ownership and scale, not horsepower.
- Donald B. Kraybill et al., The Amish (2013)
Catholic
Contested within the tradition
Laudato si’ treats industrial agriculture under the technocratic paradigm: efficient and corrosive where it treats soil, water, and rural communities as inputs. The encyclical commends small-scale, diversified farming and the peasant agriculture of the poor as the system’s standing alternative — a position, not a nostalgia.
- Pope Francis, Laudato si’ (2015), §§120–129
Jewish
Regulated
Bal tashchit — the prohibition of wasteful destruction, extended by the rabbis from Deuteronomy’s fruit trees to resources generally — grounds a Jewish environmental agriculture ethic; the sabbatical year (shmita) and its modern Israeli reinventions supply the institutional form.
- Deuteronomy 20:19–20 and its rabbinic extensions