Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky

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This is an improved version of the earlier Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky. The original one will remain online but will no longer be updated. Please update your links, if you're so inclined.

The many links which used to fill a single web page are now divided into Pages which you can see to your left under Content.

What was said of the old version is still true of the new: This website is not owned, operated or sanctioned by Mr. Berry, whose disapproval of computer technology is well-documented.

The one person responsible for all of this is me, Br. Tom Murphy (btwb@brtom.org). All opinions expressed within posts— outside of quoted content—are also only mine. I am not a personal friend or employee of Mr. Berry and am thus not able to arrange interviews or appearances by him or to contact him in any way beyond the ordinary U. S. mail.

Most entries posted here also find their way to "Wendell Berry" at Facebook, which I do not moderate.

Consider joining the conversation at Wendell Berry's Work, an email discussion group.

WB cited: a broken connection

Broken Connections | Front Porch Republic.

“We live on the far side of a broken connection” Wendell Berry has written. One of the greatest obstacles resulting from our current circumstance is our inability to make the necessary connections between various “problems,” seeing them as discrete and separate and attacking symptoms while not only ignoring, but persisting in deep ignorance, about underlying pathologies. READ MORE ...

Epigraphical WB: these animals

Against Pets | Front Porch Republic.

The tractors came. The horses

Stood in the fields, keepsakes,

grew old, and died. Or were sold

as dogmeat. Our minds received

the revolution of engines, our will

stretched toward the numb endurance

of metal. And that old speech

by which we magnified

our flesh in other flesh

fell dead in our mouths.

 – Wendell Berry

JEFFERSON COUNTY, KANSAS. John Schwenkler threw me this bone, so I’ll gnaw on it awhile. He is responding to Noah Millman’s question: “Can one eat one’s pet?”

John’s answer is fine, insofar as it goes, but I say it does not go far enough. “Pets” as a category are a symptom of the deeper rot and sickness of conspicuous consumption in American culture and life. Eat your pets? One may as well ask if it is morally acceptable for one to eat his new sports car or eat his country club membership. Which is to say, the question is a non sequitur which will inspire suspicious backwards glances at the questioner, as if dealing with some kind of sociopath. READ MORE ...

What goes around comes around

Wendell Berry on Christianity and Creation « The Website of Unknowing.

The following quotation landed in my email inbox this morning from my good friend and co-conspirator Phil Foster, who in turn found it on Facebook… I traced it back to a wonderful website run by a Zen Quaker organic farmer in Virginia. The farm is called White Flint Farm and you can visit the website here. The quotation actually comes from an essay by Wendell Berry called “Christianity and The Survival of Creation” which can be found in his book Sex, Economy, Freedom, Community: Eight Essays.

WB on science & art

Thomas Paine's Corner: Crafting a New Praxis:.

Wendell Berry, a prolific author, essayist, and critic wrote in an article for the May 2008 issue of Harper’s Magazine on the topic of peak oil:

To deal with problems, which are after all inescapable, of living with limited intelligence in a limited world, I suggest that we may have to remove some of the emphasis we have lately placed on science and technology and have a new look at the arts. For an art does not propose to enlarge itself by limitless extension but rather to enrich itself within bounds that are accepted prior to the work. It is the artists, not the scientists, who have dealt unremittingly with the problem of limits.

Berry’s expatiation on art is parallel to defining craft, through which engaged, craft respects its natural limits in order to “enrich” not “extend.”  READ MORE ...

WB's most important sentences

Postmodern Conservative — A First Things Blog.

Well, it would seem to me the most important sentences in Wendell Berry are the following: 1) “The destruction of the community begins when its economy is made—not dependent (for no community has ever been entirely independent)–but subject to a larger external economy.” 2) “…if you are dependent on people who do not know you, who control the value of your necessities, you are not free, and you are not safe.” (Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, pp. 126-128)

...

Either you Porchers have a conceivable game plan, even a very long-term one, for creating a nation of Berryvilles, or, you don’t.  And if you don’t, so that according to Berry’s own terms most communities will remain basically subject to the market even in the wildest scenarios of Porcher victory, you cannot seriously talk of getting beyond Lockean liberalism, nor talk so critically of it that it appears “getting beyond” is an option. READ MORE ...

These snippets are just two Berry-explicit bits of a much more extensive conversation by and/or about perspectives of The Front Porch Republic and Postmodern Conservative (as far as I can tell).

Blog Watch: Christian sins

Renaissance Garden: A Few Words from Mr. Wendell Berry.

Wendell Berry is one of those people that you find yourself nodding to and thinking "that's exactly what I wanted to say" when you read his essays but you know you could never put it so succinctly or eloquently. That said, below is an except from one of his essays that makes me nod my head:

"Despite its protests to the contrary, modern Christianity has become willy-nilly the religion of the state and the economic status quo. Because it has been so exclusively dedicated to incanting anemic souls into heaven, it has, by a kind of ignorance, been made the tool of much earthly villainy. It has, for the most part, stood silently by, while a predatory economy has ravaged the world, destroyed its natural beauty and health, divided and plundered its human communities and households ..." READ MORE ...

Blog Watch: Reflections on WB and eating

Pleasures of Eating. Wendell Berry. apologies? Dr. Ayala? - Arthur James - Open Salon.

Wendell Berry mentions politics, esthetics, and the ethics of food. But to speak of the 'Pleasures of Eating' is to go beyond these categories. Eating with the fulness pleasure-pleasure, that is that does not depend on ignorance-is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection to the world.

In this pleasure we experience and Celebrate our Dependence. Our Gratitude. We are living from Mystery. Creatures. Creatures that we did not make, and powers that we humans cannot comprehend.

Wendell Berry writes:`When I think of the meaning of food, I always remember:`William Carlos Williams. [the above poem] READ MORE ...

Blog Watch: WB on submission

the front porch: Someone Else's Thoughts on America.

"We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all— by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians— be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us." -Wendell Berry

READ MORE ...

WB is not alone

Pediatrician sees three-year-old on cell phone | Energy Bulletin.

The critique of soulless machines implicit in this article echoes a tradition reaching back more than a century that includes British novelist D.H. Lawrence, German-speaking poet Rilke, German-American psychologist Erich Fromm, American gardeners Scott and Helen Nearing, and French sociologist Jacques Ellul. Contemporary American advocates of this tradition include psychotherapist Chellis Glendinning (“When Technology Wounds”), public relations expert Jerry Mander (“In the Absence of the Sacred”), and farmer Wendell Berry (“In the Presence of Fear.”)

The three-year-old witnessed by the pediatrician was being conditioned for an adult life of consumption with an early onset cell phone addiction. Instead of speeding up to follow the commands of goal-oriented machines such as cell phones, we humans could benefit from slowing down to nature’s meandering pace, especially here in the gorgeous Redwood Empire. READ MORE ...

Blog Watch: WB on earthliness

The Gift of Good Land | Fragments from Floyd

Title for this post is the title of one of the first books I ever read by Wendell Berry, who therein said among so many other things that grabbed my attention:

"I want to deal directly at last with my own long held belief that Christianity, as usually presented by its organizations, in not earthly enough . . . I want to see if there is not at least implicit in the Judeo-Christian heritage a doctrine such as that the Buddhists call ‘right livelihood’ or ‘right occupation.’

Being there on that gentle Grayson County pastureside with a camera, a good story of good Earth to be told and a beautiful October afternoon seemed very like “right occupation.” Still does. READ MORE ...