How to Use pastoral in a Sentence

pastoral

1 of 2 adjective
  • The bishop outlined the church's views in a pastoral letter.
  • Her favorite painting in the collection is a pastoral landscape.
  • The house is situated in a charming pastoral setting.
  • There’s a porch to enjoy the pastoral view and a fire pit.
    William Thornton | Wthornton@al.com, al, 14 Sep. 2022
  • The pastoral grounds are an ideal place to unwind after a busy day.
    Perri Ormont Blumberg, Southern Living, 5 Oct. 2023
  • At the least, though, this might suggest that witness to the cross must always be the principal pastoral work of the leaders of the faith.
    WSJ, 15 June 2022
  • Jean Kennedy Smith and her husband Stephen owned a pastoral estate there.
    Time, 29 Oct. 2022
  • Hodges’ son Michael has also been through a pastoral restoration process.
    Anna Claire Vollers | Avollers@reckonmedia.com, al, 10 July 2023
  • The ban has made the atmosphere at Timber Creek both more pastoral and more carceral.
    Natasha Singer, New York Times, 31 Oct. 2023
  • Many of their selections are far from the pastoral climes of their 2022 album Ashbalkum.
    Philip Sherburne, Pitchfork, 22 Aug. 2023
  • Then came the movies, and over a few short years its pastoral landscape was transformed completely.
    Vulture, 12 Sep. 2022
  • But, at midday comes a disturbance in this pastoral scene — the notes of a marching band warming up.
    Freep.com, 10 June 2022
  • The Lodge currently does not have staff or programs geared to pastoral restoration, Hodges said.
    Greg Garrison | , al, 14 July 2023
  • The vineyard offers a pastoral peace and calm that renders the guest decompressed and relaxed.
    Jillian Dara, Forbes, 18 Aug. 2022
  • That pastoral landscape now looks more like the Pacific Ocean in many areas.
    Evan Bush, NBC News, 2 Apr. 2023
  • The pastoral vista shook with tremors from shelling, and every few moments, bits of the landscape burst into three-story clouds of dust and debris.
    Matt Bradley, NBC News, 2 Nov. 2023
  • The open floor plan is accented by large windows, casting in views of its pastoral setting.
    Rachel Chang, Condé Nast Traveler, 10 Jan. 2023
  • In a complaint echoed by those living near wind farms around the world, the turbines, which stand at about 680 feet tall, would ruin their land’s pastoral beauty.
    Popular Science, 26 July 2023
  • Benedict, on Monday, said that in the meeting no decision was made about whether to return the priest to pastoral duties.
    Washington Post, 24 Jan. 2022
  • Priests could not catechize children, bring the sacraments to the sick, or do pastoral work outside the local churchyard.
    George Weigel, WSJ, 17 Mar. 2022
  • Rural and private, Chilmark has a pastoral landscape: rolling hills, stone walls and sheep grazing on hillsides.
    Jessica Flint, WSJ, 31 Aug. 2022
  • The plates and linens come in two country colorways of blue and white (swoon) and red and white, with both featuring a mix or pastoral scenes and classic floral prints.
    Hannah Jones, Country Living, 10 Apr. 2022
  • But they were also deeply enmeshed in the politics of their time—not least because some of those pastoral retreats were in fact the result of exile by the court.
    WIRED, 19 Sep. 2023
  • On a summery July day, the Port of Rotterdam in the southern Netherlands feels almost pastoral.
    Vivienne Walt, Fortune, 5 Aug. 2022
  • And yet, sleeping in the pastoral elegance of the Texas Hill Country has apparently opened a new creative door.
    Michael Granberry, Dallas News, 27 June 2023
  • The third movement supplied pastoral effects with oboe and harmonic flute stops.
    Dallas News, 15 Feb. 2023
  • The play is an end-of-the-Elizabethan-age work, full of wry contempt for its own pastoral form and rueful melancholy for a golden age already in sunset.
    Helen Shaw, The New Yorker, 1 Sep. 2022
  • The church in Ireland, once a fortress for Catholicism, was so decimated by abuse scandals that Benedict in 2010 wrote the first pastoral letter from a pope on the issue of abuse.
    Erika Solomon, New York Times, 4 Jan. 2023
  • In the quiet pastoral countryside north of London sits a small custom Porsche restoration shop called Theon Design.
    Michael Van Runkle, Forbes, 24 Feb. 2024
  • East Baltimore artists began painting screens with elaborate pastoral scenes that allowed homeowners to look out and for those on sidewalks and streets not to be able to see inside homes.
    Frederick N. Rasmussen, Baltimore Sun, 15 Feb. 2024
Advertisement

pastoral

2 of 2 noun
  • Now a new documentary will look at the history of this genre, in which the pastoral is routinely entwined with the painful.
    Clark Collis, EW.com, 10 July 2019
  • The pastoral of Shakespeare lies deep beneath the play’s surface, and below that are even older cultural strains.
    Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker, 19 June 2022
  • Nothing takes me back to the Midwestern pastoral of my youth quite like the smells of springtime: freshly cut grass with an edge of lawnmower fuel, the sweet ozone of an imminent thunderstorm.
    Helen Rosner, The New Yorker, 3 June 2021
  • Watkins is a necessary writer for a changing American pastoral.
    Hillary Kelly, Vulture, 15 Dec. 2021
  • In considering the relationship between Sublimity and the English pastoral, there appeared to be two schools of thought.
    Henry Wismayer, Washington Post, 8 Sep. 2021
  • This is not Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 adaptation Romeo + Juliet—with its psychedelic dystopia and doomed romanticism—but an agrarian pastoral of blues and oranges and blacks.
    Tiana Reid, The New York Review of Books, 20 June 2020
  • The result is something that is looser and more open-ended, less hard science fiction than a dreamy kind of science pastoral, albeit one populated with mutant crocodiles.
    George Pendle, Esquire, 21 Feb. 2018
  • Instead of rising to this responsibility, Gomez — L.A.'s first archbishop of Mexican descent — has shirked it by paying more attention to the political than the pastoral.
    Los Angeles Times, 2 Sep. 2022
  • Ashbery chose fractured pastoral; Rich extracted metaphors from geology, archaeology, astronomy and biology.
    Wayne Koestenbaum, New York Times, 15 July 2016
  • Now a new documentary will look at the history of this genre, in which the pastoral is routinely entwined with the painful.
    Clark Collis, EW.com, 10 July 2019
  • The pastoral of Shakespeare lies deep beneath the play’s surface, and below that are even older cultural strains.
    Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker, 19 June 2022
  • Nothing takes me back to the Midwestern pastoral of my youth quite like the smells of springtime: freshly cut grass with an edge of lawnmower fuel, the sweet ozone of an imminent thunderstorm.
    Helen Rosner, The New Yorker, 3 June 2021
  • Watkins is a necessary writer for a changing American pastoral.
    Hillary Kelly, Vulture, 15 Dec. 2021
  • In considering the relationship between Sublimity and the English pastoral, there appeared to be two schools of thought.
    Henry Wismayer, Washington Post, 8 Sep. 2021
  • This is not Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 adaptation Romeo + Juliet—with its psychedelic dystopia and doomed romanticism—but an agrarian pastoral of blues and oranges and blacks.
    Tiana Reid, The New York Review of Books, 20 June 2020
  • The result is something that is looser and more open-ended, less hard science fiction than a dreamy kind of science pastoral, albeit one populated with mutant crocodiles.
    George Pendle, Esquire, 21 Feb. 2018
  • Instead of rising to this responsibility, Gomez — L.A.'s first archbishop of Mexican descent — has shirked it by paying more attention to the political than the pastoral.
    Los Angeles Times, 2 Sep. 2022
  • Ashbery chose fractured pastoral; Rich extracted metaphors from geology, archaeology, astronomy and biology.
    Wayne Koestenbaum, New York Times, 15 July 2016

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'pastoral.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: