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.
  • And his film was very pastoral.
    — Matt Thompson, SPIN, 4 May 2026
  • There’s a big connection, pastoral kind of scenes.
    — Steven J. Horowitz, Variety, 8 Dec. 2025
  • The pastoral grounds are an ideal place to unwind after a busy day.
    — Perri Ormont Blumberg, Southern Living, 5 Oct. 2023
  • Hodges’ son Michael has also been through a pastoral restoration process.
    — Anna Claire Vollers | [email protected], al, 10 July 2023
  • Then came the movies, and over a few short years its pastoral landscape was transformed completely.
    — Vulture, 12 Sep. 2022
  • Sure sounds like the Tap are having a dig at pastoral English songs like the one above.
    — Brett Milano, Boston Herald, 5 Apr. 2026
  • The pastoral views feel far removed from the bustling cities that dominate much of Texas.
    — Jessica Safavimehr, Southern Living, 23 June 2026
  • The open floor plan is accented by large windows, casting in views of its pastoral setting.
    — Rachel Chang, Condé Nast Traveler, 20 Mar. 2025
  • Yet the grasslands and many other pastoral areas turned into solar farms are not sandy deserts.
    — Sanggay Tashi, The Conversation, 11 June 2026
  • But, at midday comes a disturbance in this pastoral scene — the notes of a marching band warming up.
    — Freep.com, 10 June 2022
  • His relationship with grief — his own and the pain others share with him — is almost pastoral.
    — Clayton Davis, Variety, 11 Dec. 2025
  • Jean Kennedy Smith and her husband Stephen owned a pastoral estate there.
    — Time, 29 Oct. 2022
  • Orkney was having one of its rapt pastoral hours, the afternoon sun fashioning a world of pure green and blue.
    — Alex Ross, New Yorker, 24 Nov. 2025
  • Rowland wrote these tunes surrounded by that pastoral beauty.
    — Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone, 12 Sep. 2025
  • Frost’s pastoral landscapes are haunted by loss and shadowed by anxiety, doubt and dread.
    — A.o. Scott, New York Times, 27 Aug. 2025
  • There is something almost pastoral about watching modern show jumping on grass.
    — Tilly Berendt, New York Times, 11 June 2026
  • The third movement supplied pastoral effects with oboe and harmonic flute stops.
    — Dallas News, 15 Feb. 2023
  • The archbishop knocks on the door with a pastoral staff and humbly requests admission to the cathedral.
    — Encyclopedia Britannica, 25 Mar. 2026
  • The vineyard offers a pastoral peace and calm that renders the guest decompressed and relaxed.
    — Jillian Dara, Forbes, 18 Aug. 2022
  • The ban has made the atmosphere at Timber Creek both more pastoral and more carceral.
    — Natasha Singer, New York Times, 31 Oct. 2023
  • Pedal up and down gentle slopes with changing scenes; lush green trees transition to sweeping pastoral views.
    — Sarah Miller, Midwest Living, 29 Apr. 2026
  • That pastoral landscape now looks more like the Pacific Ocean in many areas.
    — Evan Bush, NBC News, 2 Apr. 2023
  • These are not pretty, chintzy designs referencing a pastoral idyll.
    — Literary Hub, 11 May 2026
  • 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
  • The Lodge currently does not have staff or programs geared to pastoral restoration, Hodges said.
    — Greg Garrison | , al, 14 July 2023
  • And dozens of Palestinian pastoral communities have been wiped off the map.
    — Isaac Chotiner, New Yorker, 16 Oct. 2025
  • The vice president’s daughter said pastoral care is needed to address those who deny there is a crisis.
    — The Salt Lake Tribune, 19 May 2022

pastoral

2 of 2 noun
  • Science emerges as a version of the pastoral, with the physicist as swain.
    — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 28 Oct. 2024
  • The paintings on the wall showed off autumnal pastorals and hunting scenes.
    — Lizz Schumer, Peoplemag, 12 June 2024
  • The broken family opens into a kind of broken pastoral, but there’s more than that.
    — Craig Morgan Teicher, Literary Hub, 1 June 2026
  • For those who make the trek, the week will be filled with events ranging from the pastoral to the glamourous to the overtly highbrow.
    — Daniel Cassady, ARTnews.com, 25 July 2024
  • 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
  • Who would not raise a glass to the memory of so vexed a merrymaker, under whose spell the city is transformed into an exotic pastoral?
    — Anthony Lane, New Yorker, 13 Oct. 2025
  • Watkins is a necessary writer for a changing American pastoral.
    — Hillary Kelly, Vulture, 15 Dec. 2021
  • The work is not a simple illustration but melds the personal with the fantastical, the pastoral with the profane.
    — Dallas News, 13 Jan. 2022
  • The pastoral was required reading in military academies.
    — Gerard F. Powers, The Conversation, 11 Feb. 2026
  • Debate has persisted on where to draw the line regarding churches with women serving in assistant pastoral or preaching roles.
    — ABC News, 10 June 2026
  • But the unprovoked military invasion of the Russian army destroyed this pastoral.
    — Yuriy Zaliznyak, ABC News, 7 Mar. 2023
  • Her writing is an unabashed celebration of place, a home for motherhood, matrilineal struggle, kink, and the pastoral.
    — Literary Hub, Literary Hub, 15 Apr. 2026
  • 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
  • Debate has persisted regarding churches with women serving in assistant pastoral or preaching roles.
    — Peter Smith, Los Angeles Times, 11 June 2026
  • Perhaps too good for his own good, Lucas moves among jangling psychedelia, heartsick pastorals, and radio-ready rock, as if forever searching for a way out of his attic studio or his parents’ spare bedroom.
    — Grayson Haver Currin, Pitchfork, 23 May 2026
  • 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 blend of the pastoral and the religious made the Senegal River feel like an archaic vision of paradise, a strip of vivid life in an otherwise unforgiving environment.
    — J.r. Patterson, Condé Nast Traveler, 11 Dec. 2023
  • The pastoral, yet bittersweet lament has turned into something of an emotionally restorative California wildfire reflection.
    — Marcus K. Dowling, Nashville Tennessean, 11 Sep. 2025
  • If nature is made secondary to human will, as in classical and Enlightenment times, then a care for nature expresses itself in bucolics and pastorals—nature as a setting for human amorousness or agriculture.
    — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 20 Feb. 2023
  • Instead of an invasion, the archaeological evidence revealed a gradual evolution from a pastoral to an agricultural society.
    — Pamela Weintraub, Discover Magazine, 1 Oct. 2015
  • 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
  • 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.

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