Wendell Berry’s “The Need to Be Whole”

By |2023-08-21T18:18:51-05:00August 21st, 2023|Categories: Agrarianism, Books, Civil War, South, Southern Agrarians, Wendell Berry|

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 [...]

If Only Progressives Could Learn to Think Small

By |2020-05-23T22:55:24-05:00May 28th, 2020|Categories: Civil Society, Community, Conservatism, Government, Wendell Berry|

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 [...]

Wendell Berry’s “What Are People For?”

By |2018-08-30T21:13:19-05:00August 30th, 2018|Categories: Books, Conservation, Conservatism, Modernity, Wendell Berry|

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 [...]

Wendell Berry on the Environment, the Economy, & the Imagination

By |2017-11-12T22:14:34-06:00November 12th, 2017|Categories: Conservation, Economics, Environmentalism, Hope, Imagination, Religion, Timeless Essays, Wendell Berry|

The power of imagination is to see things whole, to see things clearly, to see things with sanctity, to see things with love… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Alan Cornett as he discusses Wendell Berry’s thoughts on environmentalism and climate change, wealth and the economy, hope and [...]

The Cultivation of Complexity: Reading Wendell Berry

By |2021-04-28T15:04:31-05:00July 13th, 2017|Categories: Aristotle, Civilization, Featured, Liberal Learning, Richard Weaver, Social Order, Southern Agrarians, Wendell Berry|

Wendell Berry’s poetry sings with the love of a man for his home, enticing the reader to embrace his vision of local agrarian economy as sufficient for the good life. “From knowledge of the forest comes/at last knowledge of forestry:/what, without permanent damage,/can be spared and carefully removed,/leaving the whole forest whole. This learning/’takes decades. [...]

Do Not Be Ashamed

By |2016-07-07T16:25:38-05:00July 10th, 2016|Categories: Poetry, Wendell Berry|

You will be walking some night in the comfortable dark of your yard and suddenly a great light will shine round about you, and behind you will be a wall you never saw before. It will be clear to you suddenly that you were about to escape, and that you are guilty: you misread the [...]

Can a Southerner Ever Escape the South?

By |2016-06-11T09:25:39-05:00June 3rd, 2016|Categories: Agrarianism, Conservatism, Featured, History, Modernity, South, Ted McAllister, Wendell Berry|

In October of 1997, I attended the Southern Historical Association’s convention in Atlanta because I wanted to hear Paul Conkin’s presidential address, “Hot, Humid, and Sad.” What I heard was largely a history of the South in which climate and geography shaped a complex skein of human choices. Mostly a dense and almost perversely analytical [...]

There is Always Hope: Wendell Berry on the Environment, the Economy, and the Imagination

By |2018-12-08T14:13:40-06:00May 24th, 2014|Categories: Environmentalism, Imagination, Religion, Wendell Berry|Tags: |

Wendell Berry addressed faith, agrarianism, and why he hates “environmentalism” in a ninety minute conversation with Centre College Professor Eric Mount. The two men sat in angled wingback chairs before a crowd of more than two hundred listeners in the sumptuous surroundings of Louisville’s Crescent Hill Baptist Church. In true professorial fashion, Mount made sure [...]

Wendell Berry: Modern Agrarian

By |2016-07-28T19:30:49-05:00November 6th, 2013|Categories: Glenn Arbery, South, Southern Agrarians, Wendell Berry, Wyoming Catholic College|Tags: |

     The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry, Mark T. Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, eds., ISI Books. A year ago, when my wife and I were waiting for a flight out of Logan Airport, a roughhewn man of about 60 was sitting a few seats away from us reading a book I would have been surprised [...]

A Review of Andy Catlett: Early Travels by Wendell Berry

By |2013-12-20T15:28:30-06:00October 25th, 2013|Categories: Books, Robert Cheeks, Wendell Berry|

Wendell Berry is a philosopher, and an important one in this postmodern era, who utilizes the essay, the poem, and, most importantly, the novel, to express his observations of concrete human beings and their life in community. It is in his novels, purposefully located in an agrarian setting, that he depicts the intrinsic interdependency of the [...]

Allen Tate, Wendell Berry, and Sewanee’s Discarded ‘The Hidden Wound’

By |2016-07-26T15:26:49-05:00October 9th, 2013|Categories: Agrarianism, Books, Wendell Berry|Tags: |

Years ago, perhaps when I was still in graduate school, I stopped at a Chattanooga used bookshop when passing through. One has a mental list of authors to check, and I happened to find an uncommon thing: a hardcover first edition of Wendell Berry’s 1970 book on race and the South, The Hidden Wound. The disappointment [...]

Hannah Coulter & The Bourgeois Family

By |2016-02-12T15:28:29-06:00February 21st, 2013|Categories: Agrarianism, Books, Christianity, Community, Culture, David L. Schindler, Robert Cheeks, Social Order, Wendell Berry|

The rise of techno-capitalism has signaled the triumph of the “bourgeois family” and the demise of the “traditional” family. Christian theologian Stanley Hauerwas said that economist Adam Smith was well aware that the “weakening of familial ties would increase the necessity of sympathy between strangers and result in cooperative forms of behavior that had not [...]

Economy of the Tao: Wendell Berry & Economic Health

By |2019-07-23T13:05:48-05:00December 30th, 2012|Categories: Agrarianism, Economics, Featured, Political Economy, Ralph Ancil, Wendell Berry, Wilhelm Roepke|

Berry’s economic program, what he calls the “little economy,” is a smaller wheel in the larger motion of the “Great Economy.” To understand the former, it is vital to grasp the latter. In the following, then, Berry’s vision of the broader drama of human action is set forth, followed by a presentation of his narrower [...]

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