Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky

Wendell Berry cited on life ethic

This is why I would argue that protecting the environment—the very source of our life—is a pro-life concern. If we continue as we are, our children and grandchildren will live in a degraded landscape, exhausted by abuse and neglect, ruined by speculation and ignorance. We will only be able to change this if we look not to Washington, nor to technology, but to our own values and commitments.

No one has argued this case more eloquently than the farmer, poet, novelist, and essayist Wendell Berry. He is one of the few who has made a connection between abortion, war, and environmental abuse. In his 2003 essay “The Failure of War,” Berry argues against the “hopeless paradox of making peace by making war.”

via uscatholic.org

Wendell Berry cited on soil loss

A few days before Tropical Storm Irene roared through Vermont, Ryan came across this passage from Wendell Berry: "Soil is not usually lost in slabs or heaps of magnificent tonnage. It is lost a little at a time over millions of acres by careless acts of millions of people. It cannot be solved by heroic feats of gigantic technology, but only by millions of small acts and restraints."

If Mr. Berry had visited our farm during Irene, he would have had the rare opportunity to see soil being lost in "heaps of magnificent tonnage." We watched in disbelief as the Mill River topped its banks and cut a new permanent riverbed through our fields, ripping away our crops, our equipment, our land, and our livelihood.

via Vermont Public Radio

Wendell Berry inspires reflection on local basketball team

But is it only a game? I don't think so. At least, for me, it isn't only about the game itself.

Wendell Berry is a farmer and writer from Kentucky, a state that knows a thing or two about basketball.

Through essays, novels and poetry, he focuses on the importance of local community and laments the loss of local memory. His voice has been in the back of my mind while traveling to and from games this year.

In his important essay "The Work of Local Culture," Berry makes a keen observation: "When a community loses its memory, its members no longer know each other. How can they know each other if they have forgotten or have never learned each other's stories? If they do not know each other's stories, how can they know whether or not to trust each other? People who do not trust each other do not help each other, and moreover they fear each other."

I don't want to understate the complexity of our time or the complicated nature of the problems facing our communities, but I think Mr. Berry is pointing us in a good direction.

Read more HERE.

Wendell Berry cited at Hawai'i Event

Wendell Berry once said, “To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.”

Environmental attorney Andrew Kimbrell shared Berry’s quotation with a standing room only crowd on the final evening of the Hawai‘i SEED Tour event featuring Dr. Vandana Shiva Thursday at the Kaua‘i War Memorial Auditorium (see Saturday’s online edition for a full story about Shiva’s presentation).

Berry’s quotation resonated the most during the evening, with Dr. Shiva also paraphrasing it before announcing that she would return to Kaua‘i, “only when you have driven those criminals off this island.”

via thegardenisland.com

Supportive response to Wendell Berry's marriage statement

The thing about Berry’s most recent jeremiad on the subject of same-sex marriage is that it’s wholly of a piece with everything else the man has written and argued and defended. The anger, the earthy humor, the Baptist individualism constrained by commitment to community, place and neighbor. None of that is out of character. Nor is it surprising.

He’s said all of this before about farming and about the land and about community, and economy, and fidelity. So he’s been saying this about marriage all along.

via patheos.com

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"Wendell Berry on Marriage Equality" (Claude J. Summers)

A calmer critique of Wendell Berry on same-sex marriage

But I write in the past tense because Berry’s recent remarks make a definitional move that this older essay didn’t foresee, and doesn’t even seem to permit. They put a question mark after many of his earlier statements. He has retroactively obfuscated his point about limits and definitions. Here’s what I mean:

In his recent remarks, Berry mocks the idea that “homosexual marriage is opposed to and a threat to heterosexual marriage, as if the marriage market is about to be cornered and monopolized by homosexuals.” He goes on to make the excellent point, which is exactly in line with his decades-long argument, that infidelity, divorce, and promiscuity without any regard for marriage are the real problem. Marriage as an institution is breaking down around us because it’s being done so badly.  ”Heterosexual marriage does not need defending… It only needs to be practiced, which is pretty hard to do just now.” He has a good point, perhaps even the main point, and we’ll hardly catch Wendell Berry cheerleading for the culture of sexual self-expression and self-fulfillment.

But he does apparently move to include homosexual relationships in the category of marriage (I assume he is thinking of that status of permanent, lifelong commitments between homosexual partners). That is hard to square with the language and the direction of his “Use of Old Forms” essay.

via patheos.com

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"Wendell Berry on God, same sex marriage and surface mining" (James Bruggers)

A Critical Response to Wendell Berry on Same-Sex Marriage

I write this post with deep disappointment.  I appreciate Wendell Berry’s literary artistry, and I appreciate his spiritual insights.  But he indulged in an epic rant against gay marriage opponents to a gathering of Baptist ministers on January 11th in Kentucky.  His comments were relayed by Bob Allen of the Associated Baptist Press.  While Berry repeats uncritically a slew of bumper-sticker arguments and engages in some serious straw-man pyromania, the people in the comments box nonetheless marvel at his genius.  This deserves a response.

via patheos.com

The Twitterverse tweets about Wendell Berry on Same-Sex Marriage

Here is a selection of snaps from Twitter in response to Mr. Berry's statements on gay marriage ... in nor particular order.

I was expecting more critical responses, but so far it all seems fairly positive.

 

Wendell Berry quoted in photographer profile

Wendell Berry, a poetic and philosophical critic who writes of nature and of simplicity, once said, "I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods." This appreciation for the simple, reverent interaction of hand and soil, the pursuit of domestic simplicity, shoots through much of Berry's writing and has since inspired a generation of young farmers, poets and American home-dwellers. And that mentality infuses the photography of Columbia resident Rachel Keren Nelson, who strives to capture the most intricate, glowing details of contemporary Midwestern hearth, home and heather.

via www.columbiatribune.com

Wendell Berry cited in "Toward an economy of Earth"

Like Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau idealized an agricultural society that was close to nature. Thoreau was a staunch defender of agrarian anarchy, and he focused even more closely on the individual than did Jefferson: “That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.” To my knowledge, no state governments believe we’ve yet reached that point.

Fast forward to the late twentieth century, and we find several other philosophers defending agrarian anarchy. Perhaps the best known examples are Wendell Berry, Noam Chomsky, and Howard Zinn, but the clearest voice for agrarian anarchy came from Edward Abbey in the years before he died in 1989: (1) “Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners”; (2) “Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others”; and (3) “A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”

via guymcpherson.com