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Wendell Berry’s creative nonfiction has been chiefly inspired by the author’s longstanding relation to his home place in Kentucky. It embodies his religious conviction that land should be understood not as commodity but as divine gift and sacrament, and that human community is organically wedded to the rest of nature’s ecological household. Confronting the problem of theodicy raised by the apparent cruelty and waste of Creation, Annie Dillard endeavors to combine traditional practice of meditation on the creatures with spiritual understanding gleaned from modern science. John Cheever, in his final work of fiction, produced a scathing critique of the pastoralism fancied to persist in suburban America—yet affirmed that this world we inhabit can indeed be revered as a marvelous and holy “paradise.” By contrast, Marilynne Robinson’s novelistic tale of a mountain-rimmed lake in the Pacific Northwest images not paradise, but the holy terror of the abyss inspired by untamed nature.

This chapter discusses Wendell Berry, a poet who includes agricultural themes in his poems. He is described as a writer of many parts, and as an essayist, Berry can be a polemicist of rather frightening skill. As a poet, Berry is forced to be brief, but his genius can distill the truth of an entire book into one ingenious poem like Farming: A Hand Book's “A Standing Ground”. The discussion also indicates the similarities between Berry and the author, and includes some excerpts from Berry's works.

Unlike most environmental prose, present-day “ecopoetry” centers its imaginative attention on praise rather than protest, love of earth rather than rage. It reflects newfound awareness of nature’s violence, as seen in Mary Oliver’s poems; or of what science discloses about nature’s unseen and unfathomable intricacy, as seen in Pattiann Rogers’s poetry. Surprisingly, though, the meditative temper of contemporary ecopoetry often sustains a religious impulse of wonder concerning humanity’s relation to the nonhuman world. Varied forms of this earth-centered religious disposition can be witnessed in Wendell Berry’s Sabbath Poems, Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End, and Denise Levertov’s late series of meditations on the near-presence of Mount Rainier in Seattle.

This chapter shows how the roots of Wendell Berry's ideas may lie in his learning the discipline of the teamster. It highlights the centrality of practices, particulars, and virtues to Berry's thinking, connecting these terms to a host of matters in his essays. It begins by investigating a way of entering Berry's world through a language of practices, particulars, and virtues. It uses Alasdair MacIntyre's analysis of practices as a way to clarify the concept and focus particularly on Berry's understanding of farming as a practice. It then covers the virtues Berry espouses in both his nonfiction and his fiction. It includes prudence, courage, justice, equity, friendship, and the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love or charity, along with humility and patience. It examines three additional matters related to his decisions to return to Kentucky from New York in 1964. It also looks at his decision to use draft animals—horses, not mules—in the early 1970s. Finally, it develops the idea that even Berry's religious understanding may have its roots in his earliest experiences with Grandfather Berry's mules.

Contrary to the popular view, the first chapters of Genesis do not attempt to instruct us about the process by which the species came into being ("the origin of species"), but rather about the relations that obtain, or should obtain, among them. In the context of reading Genesis after Darwin, it is noteworthy that the theme of eating is central in Genesis 1 and 3, for an important part of Darwin's legacy is the understanding that food chains are the means whereby all creatures are bound together with one another and with the earth itself. Further, we learn from Darwin that, for each species, survival is a matter of propriety. That is, it depends upon behavior that observes the limits of a particular place within the larger web of life. This chapter focuses on what the opening chapters of the Bible suggest about the divine provision of food for all creatures, the intended role of humans, and the tendency of the human species to violate the limits. Contributions to the exegetical conversation come from contemporary agrarian writers (e.g., Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, Norman Wirzba), who argue compellingly that industrial agriculture represents an unsustainable disruption of the food chains that sustain humans and numberless other creatures.

This chapter deals with Wendell Berry's political and economic thought, broadly construed. Berry has been particularly perceptive in analyzing the ways of increasingly “total economy” undermines community life, the private–public distinction, and the institution of marriage. To counter this detrimental influence, he reasserts the importance of household and local economies. The chapter also concentrates on Berry's case for community as the indispensable source of virtues necessary to keep the private and public spheres in a proper relationship. It then turns to Berry's constructive account of an alternative to the “total economy”. Moreover, it deals with Berry's writing as a citizen and patriot since September 11, 2001. Berry has sharply criticized American policy since 9/11, arguing especially that the provisions for preemptive strikes contained in the National Security Strategy are inconsistent with democracy.

This chapter takes as its starting point a question once posed by one of the author's students: is Wendell Berry's work dependent on Christianity? The chapter first addresses Berry's consistent criticism of forms of Christianity he regards to be life-denying; far too devoted to the language of individual salvation; and too easily co-opted by the projects of nation, economy, and technology. It also emphasizes the way some of Berry's work, especially in his earliest volumes, stresses the fidelity of poets over Christianity, understood as a system of belief that undermines the sanctity or holiness of the natural world and everyday life. It then highlights Berry's counterargument to White and his claims that the Bible and Christian tradition point toward the need for loving and sustainable use of the land. Discussions that concentrate, respectively, on the importance of Berry's Christianity look at two closely related terms, “body” and “mystery”. Finally, it is suggested that Berry's understanding of the land throughout has a biblical dimension.

For many, the Kentucky farmer and writer Wendell Berry has provided the surest conservation voice in the United States over the past several decades, especially for his appealing agrarian visions, his attention to local foods, and his calls to live ethically on and with nature. This chapter looks critically at Berry’s writings, finding much appeal in his attention to interconnections, his admission of human limits, his affectionate bonds with nature, and his calls to sink roots and act responsibly. The deficiency it probes has to do with Berry’s resistance to collective action, particularly through governmental means; with his near-exclusive focus on change within individuals as such. Berry’s community leaders show no interest in collective or political action at the community level, much less higher. Berry’s call for love is thus not attached to any plausible mechanism for widespread change. The needed critique of today’s culture thus may need to extend to the kind of individualism that Berry embraces. Reform calls not for Berry’s form of Jacksonian democracy but for something more like civic republicanism; not for Berry’s modern Epicureanism but for an updated Stoicism that stresses civic engagement.

This chapter provides a consideration of Wendell Berry's work as a poet, a task he has understood, in traditional terms, to be one of renewing the language. It specifically explores Berry's thoughts on the unspecializing of poetry; distinguishes his work from the so-called language poetry; draws out the rich analogies he traces between poetry, on the one hand, and other disciplines of the real like marriage and farming; and concludes with a look at the Sabbath poems in his two most recent volumes. The great liberty of the Sabbath, as stated by Berry's poems, is in God's gift and command of rest. Most importantly, poetry is, for Berry, the art of the particular and thus the art through which can be learnt the goodness and grace of being here.

When Christians consider consumption, they often do so by reference to an eschatological vision of a fulfilled world. Though there is considerable diversity within Christianity regarding the fate of this world, Christian insights into God's will for the future may still inform sound consumption decisions. This chapter examines two practices, Sabbath keeping and the Eucharist, for their insights into both eschatology and Christian consumption. The work of Ched Myers, Norman Wirzba, Marva Dawn, Wendell Berry, Seventh-day Adventist scholars, and Eastern Orthodox theologian Sergei Bulgakov are featured in this chapter.

This chapter continues the discussion of Chapter 6, by examining the human significance of a number of built and natural environments, unrelated to pilgrimage practice. Again, the three models of the differentiated religious significance of place and the various accounts of the formal qualities of knowledge of place developed in earlier chapters are put to use. The chapter draws on the literature on the phenomenology of sacred space, and the work of Wendell Berry, Erazim Kohák, and Christopher Day, among others. It maintains that religiously significant knowledge of place is not to be understood in purely ‘subjective’ or in purely ‘objective’ terms, and that we should avoid an over-sharp distinction between the meaning of ‘sacred’ and of ‘profane’ space.

Wendell Berry has become a major voice in the argument for a new agrarianism. It is argued that he passes the moral test he sets for himself: nothing that he has written “countenances” the misuse, the reduction to mere means, of the people or places he treats. This book is organized by genre and topic. The first three chapters focus primarily on Berry's nonfiction. Chapters 4 through 6 consider Berry's fiction, each focusing on an individual genre. The last chapter investigates Berry's thoughts on the unspecializing of poetry.

This chapter offers a discussion of Wendell Berry's five short novels, namely Andy Catlett: Early Travels, Nathan Coulter, A World Lost, Remembering, and The Memory of Old Jack. Andy Catlett is devoted to Andy's visit to his Catlett grandparents and his stay, immediately following, with his other grandparents, the Feltners. Nathan Coulter focuses on its title character's coming of age, a process marked by the early death of his mother, a violent break with his brother, Tom, the even more violent break between his father and brother, and finally the death of his grandfather. A World Lost shows the way a child responds to the death of a beloved other through narration. Remembering tells the story of Andy's losing his own adult world and finding it again. Finally, The Memory of Old Jack is the story of one who has lost nearly everything yet gained it again by living it deeply and well.

This chapter deals with Wendell Berry's three longest novels, A Place on Earth, Hannah Coulter, and The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself. These three novels are novels of love set in time of war, one haunted by the constant possibility of what Hannah Coulter calls “absolute loss”. The kinds of peaceableness evident in these novels are unlikely to move the policy-making elites who have persuaded the readers that making peace is their purview alone: and that often the way to peace means the initiation or continuation of war.

The fifth chapter of The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is titled “Regionalisms Now.” It mobilizes the analytic categories developed in previous chapters in an examination of place-focused cultural production in several media. Examples are drawn from television, popular romance and mystery novels, and literary fiction. These works are not treated as embodiments of an ideal genre or lineal descendants of local color; the argument is that the concept of region remains relevant for contemporary culture and that narrations of place continue to project temporality. The chapter offers extended readings of the authors Ernest Hebert and Wendell Berry, and posits the parable of the global village as an emerging genre.

Movement, immigration, and pilgrimage have long been keynotes of American experience. Following the opening chapter’s attention on the spiritual inscape of home dwellings, this chapter concerns itself with the spirituality of motion, re-placement, and pilgrimage as reflected in American works of literary imagination. Lead characters in this story include travelers, explorers, and would-be pilgrims as well as resettlers—that is, those who leave their place of birth to adopt another as their own. The religious implications of these peregrinations and adoptions are considered in relation to prose texts by Carolyn Servid, Barry Lopez, John Muir, N. Scott Momaday, Gary Snyder, and others. These texts often associate their spirituality of place with reverence for what’s found in the going there rather than in the getting there. Developing the theme of localism versus globalism, this chapter concludes by assessing two versions of globally engaged localism as represented in works by Wendell Berry and David Haskell.