Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky

A Design Project using Wendell Berry's Work

Please go HERE to view a student design project using a selection of Mr. Berry's writing and photos by Ansel Adams.

Blog Watch: "An afternoon with Wendell Berry"

I've written about Wendell Berry before. This past Saturday I was able to see him for the first time. There's something rather fascinating about stepping into a small town along the Ohio River, where the community has a yearly book club. Can you imagine walking to get the mail and asking your neighbor, "Have you read the book yet?" Or asking fellow parishioners, the grocery store clerk or the mailman?

So, this is the small town community I traveled to for this particular event -- a book club with the author.

Wendell Berry, with his sparkling blue eyes, incredible wisdom concerning the reality of our world and his dose of hope amidst the craziness of modernity addressed us all in the public library. (If they had more people than the room could hold, arrangements had already been made for all present to walk a few feet to the church, which could accommodate more.) And with his 77 years of experience of living, Mr. Berry proceeded to share some thoughts, many instigated by questions from the audience.

 

via unshakeablehope.blogspot.com

Click the via link to read more and several comments by Mr. Berry from this occasion.

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, technology, and community

I asked Berry about his ideas concerning community and societal progression. Many of his stories take place in one small fictional town called Port William, where people often live their entire lives. I asked him what we should be wary of in a transient and technological generation, where people such as myself have a tendency to move without regard.

"Something seriously has happened to a community when people quit telling the local stories and start talking about what they see on television," Berry said. "The life of the community has flickered out, and that got started a long time ago."

While describing a point, Berry told writes [sic] of how, even just 75 years ago, entertainment was more collaborative. Now it's all shifted to consumption.

via blog.al.com

Wendell Berry poem featured in The Writer's Almanac

In Art Rowanberry’s Barn

by Wendell Berry

In Art Rowanberry's barn, when Art's death
had become quietly a fact among
the other facts, Andy Catlett found
a jacket made of the top half
of a pair of coveralls after
the legs wore out, for Art
never wasted anything.

...

via writersalmanac.publicradio.org

On reading Wendell Berry's Andy Catlett

Berry is interesting to me because he is so simple. He doesn't spend a thousand pages developing his characters like Dostoevsky. He doesn't overflow with witty banter like Austen and Wilde. He doesn't weave intricate, sometimes surprising plots like the Bronte sisters or Dickens. He doesn't create fantastical worlds like Tolkien, Lewis, or, more recently, Wilson.

And yet his simplicity is every bit a piece of perfection.

via thoughtsaftergod.blogspot.com

from "Wendell Berry on the Necessity of Limits"

I have taken the opportunity this weekend before and on my way to the retreat to read some of what Wendell Berry has said about the necessity of limits.  I’ve been meaning to do so for awhile, but this weekend I stumbled upon this fabulous essay that Berry wrote in 2008 for Harpers Magazine — Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits.  This is a short essay and well worth reading.

Berry gets to the heart of the issue:

The problem with us is not only prodigal extravagance but also an assumed limitlessness. We have obscured the issue by refusing to see that limitlessness is a godly trait. We have insistently, and with relief, defined ourselves as animals or as “higher animals.” But to define ourselves as animals, given our specifically human powers and desires, is to define ourselves as limitless animals—which of course is a contradiction in terms. Any definition is a limit, which is why the God of Exodus refuses to define Himself: “I am that I am.”

via www.patheos.com

from "Google Privacy and a Wendell Berry Poem"

So, what to do? Wendell Berry knew, way before Google existed:

So, friends, every day do something that won't compute.  Love the Lord.  Love the world.  Work for nothing.  Take all you have and be poor.  Love someone who does not deserve it.  Denounce the government and embrace the flag.  Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands.

And he has some advice for us about how to know what is right in a world with so many questions:

Expect the end of the world.  Laugh.  Laughter is immeasurable.  Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.  So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men.  Ask youself:  Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child?  Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth?

via www.nodepression.com

from "About Civil Disobedience by Wendell Berry"

Civil disobedience is also plenty scary. At least to me it is. I have never felt one bit brave even in thinking about it. It involves a strange and risky paradox: You and your friends will be exploiting your obvious powerlessness to recover to your cause, and to your own citizenship, a just measure of power. But your acknowledged condition is powerlessness. Your commitment to nonviolence makes you vulnerable to violence. You can get hurt, or worse. It is fearful also to make yourself available to be treated with contempt. And you are, in effect, volunteering to go to jail.

via beyondrevolution.wordpress.com

Wendell Berry considered in Joanna Campbell's "Find out what you're staying for"

We Americans are a people both fascinated and horrified by the notion of commitment. Note the most common sitcom plots, the predictable trajectories of our celebrity marriages, even the myth of the American hero striking out, away from the familiar, toward an unknown future. What is it about commitment that is so frightening, yet so compelling? Commitment scares us because the truth does. At least Wendell Berry suggests something like that:

“Because the condition of marriage is worldly and its meaning communal, no one party to it can be solely in charge. What you alone think it ought to be, it is not going to be. Where you alone think you want it to go, it is not going to go. It is going where the two of you -- and marriage, time, life, history, and the world -- will take it. You do not know the road; you have committed your life to a way.

via www.faithandleadership.com