In the forties and fifties, Cleanth Brooks devoted himself to interpreting and popularizing the work of one of America’s greatest but most difficult novelists, his fellow Southerner William Faulkner. When I think of the state of literary criticism in the academy today, I think of a New Yorker cartoon someone has put up in the [...]
Yes, we must fight and struggle for the ideal, but in the end the ultimate answers lie in God’s atonement and love for us, and in our love and forgiveness for others who are just as implicated as we are. Wendell Berry is a bearer of that message in his books. I have a great [...]
“No society is worth ‘saving’ as such,” wrote Allen Tate (1899–1979). “What we must save is the truth of God and man, and the right society follows.”1 Such words are anathema to the secularists whose “progressive” theories have intoxicated the modern mind. Words of this kind are neither popular nor politically expedient in an age [...]
More than ever, America is split between populist nationalism and left-wing internationalism, with little room in either ideology for anything like Wendell Berry's vision of local patriotic devotion. Whatever we make of his ruminations, with respect to this subject it is obviously the culture which has changed over the past few years, not him. The [...]
No one who reads and digests “A Better Guide Than Reason” can fail to be revolutionized. We had thought that the great Southern political tradition—that of Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, John C. Calhoun, and the agrarians—was dead. Not so. A Better Guide Than Reason: Studies in the American Revolution by M.E. Bradford (241 pages, Sherwood Sugden [...]
The South, Andrew Lytle feared, had been poor and virtuous for too long and now found the temptations of industry and commerce too alluring to resist. Material prosperity weakened family, community, and tradition and deprived rural southern life of its vitality, rendering it both tumultuous and desolate. Born in Mufreesboro, Tennessee on the day after [...]
In his new book, "The Need to be Whole," Wendell Berry offers us exactly the honesty, depth, and nuance that the American conversation about race requires, and in so doing has done us all a great service. The Need to be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice, by Wendell Berry (528 pages, Shoemaker + [...]
Automated and impersonal, American society, Andrew Lytle feared, was coming to be peopled by the rootless masses ensnared in dreary, routine, unimaginative, and irrelevant occupations—a society of interchangeable parts and interchangeable men. This condition was the very antithesis of the Christian economy. I. By the 1930s, Andrew Lytle thought the signs of impending disaster everywhere [...]
Andrew Nelson Lytle—novelist, dramatist, essayist, and professor of literature—extolled the order of the family, which by the 1930s he thought all but spent, precisely because it was rooted in the very concept of divine order that the modern world had decried and rejected. As patriarchy deteriorated, as acceptance of divine supremacy vanished, the family languished, [...]
The kinship between the Nashville Agrarians and Whittaker Chambers is seen in three main ways: the farming life itself, the concept of private property, and the religious dimension of human existence. Chambers emerges as a singular figure who, more so than the Nashville group, provides a model for those who are called to live a [...]
Richard Weaver’s book “Ideas Have Consequences” presents the harmful effects of nominalism on Western civilization since it gained prominence in the Late Middle Ages. Many of our modern woes stem from the acceptance of nominalism and the rejection of philosophical realism back in the fourteenth century. By the time of his untimely death in 1963 [...]
Nostalgia for the smaller face-to-face societies of the past is common to both progressives and conservatives. There was a time, whether it was 100 years ago or 10,000, when relationships between people were more meaningful, families lived more in harmony with nature, and communities worked together to care for the young and the needy. The [...]
It may be true that Donald Davidson went too far in his concern for art’s effect on the community. Given the decadence of much popular and highbrow art in our time, perhaps other readers of Davidson’s verse find themselves in a curious predicament. Like me, they may find fault with the principles of his poetic; [...]
As one reads What Are People For?, an important underlying and unifying theme—the struggle to avoid abstraction—emerges, a theme which reveals perhaps Wendell Berry’s greatest concern about modern life... What Are People For? by Wendell Berry (224 pages, North Point Press, 1990) “We should love life,” Dostoyevski once said, “more than the idea of life.” It is [...]