“How Wendell Berry Saved my Life.” There have been numerous essays on Wendell Berry this week, and FPR will continue to run tributes for the next few days. I’ll link to a few additional ones here. First, Patrick Deneen writes about how reading Berry led him to join with some others to found Front Porch Republic and to look for a job outside the Washington, DC area. He also articulates very well the fruitful tension Berry sought to articulate between vibrant local community and a healthy political economy: “While it may be self-indulgent for me to speak of Berry through the prism of my own experience, it is, in fact, a very Berryean engagement. Much of the appeal of his writing lay in the challenge of living up to his example. I suspect that my own experience of Berry’s influence may be representative. His writing played an immense role in choices made by me and my wife that improved our family and communal life. But those improvements have taken place in a world that — at least, by Berry’s standards — has considerably darkened, a world worming its way to catastrophe.”
“In Memory: Wendell Berry.” Gracy Olmstead honors Berry with an elegy: “Well, you’ve gone along ahead— / We shouldn’t be surprised (but we are).” She also reflects more on what it meant to her to have Berry’s support and encouragement.
“Wendell Berry’s Eternal Story.” Paul Kingsnorth testifies to how “a boy from the English suburbs with no knowledge of farming” found a kindred soul through Berry’s writings: “Wendell Berry’s beautiful poems, questing novels, and steadily passionate essays offer us all a legacy we can engage with. Those of us who are more flawed as human beings than he undoubtedly was, or less able to practice what we preach, can find a way in through the many doorways he built with words, backed up by decades of energetic practice.”
“Wendell Berry, Son of Kentucky.” Jake Meador writes about Berry’s example of public fidelity: “Berry was a man of faith. He went through enough, as we all will, to kill him. But he lived in such a way that the sound of his life is doubtless contained in the sound I heard just now as I poured out a glass of his state’s finest export to toast the man’s life and work.”
“Wendell Berry’s Vision of a Sacred World.” Norman Wirzba describes how meeting Berry changed his life and his thinking: “Little did I know that I had just met the most gracious, insightful, and funny person I would ever know. In the phone calls, meals, and family visits that followed, I became convinced that agrarian sympathies and skills are crucial for the healing of our communities and world. Agrarianism has the power to correct and redirect the fundamental philosophical and theological categories by which we live. It has no better teacher than Wendell.”
“Beware: Wendell Berry Will Change You.” I try to articulate why it might be that encountering Berry’s writings led people to change their lives: “Berry sought to imagine how the death and resurrection of the incarnate God changes literally everything, from the cosmic to the quotidian. And then he tried, as a fallible, limited human in a fallen world, to live accordingly.”
“Remembering My Friend, Wendell Berry.” Bill Lueders remembers Berry most of all as a friend: “Wendell set an example of steadfastness and moral clarity to which we can all aspire. And he was, in my experience, a true friend.”
“Wendell Berry and the Calling of All Creatures.” James Matthew Wilson traces his history as a reader of Berry and tries to assess his literary and imaginative achievements: “I will hazard a somewhat wild prediction, however: As Willa Cather slowly emerges as one of the greatest American novelists, and as the reputations of Faulkner and other modernists continue to decline, Berry’s fiction will come to appear as less of an outlier than it did during his lifetime. We will all come to love them more.”
“Wendell Berry, Prophet.” Will Brown tries to name Berry’s wide appeal and prophetic voice: “It is a credit to Berry’s skill as a writer, and to the subtlety of his vision, that his work has found such a wide and varied audience. America (for he was essentially an American, and indeed a Southern writer) has heard and misheard him as a Luddite, a scold, a saint, a conservative, or a radical; and occasionally even as what he was: a man bearing relentless witness to the fact that a people who will not care for their land or their neighbors, who refuse to see the dignity of labor, can remain neither free nor sane.”
“The Case for Tending Our Dead at Home.” Holly Stockley reviews Joseph Orso’s On the Threshold of Worlds, the newest title from FPR Books: “Orso asks what we might gain, should we choose to take the work of caring for the bodies of our dead back from the funeral industry and rebuild the ritual around such work at home. What do we owe the soul of our departed, and how do we honor the body that once housed it?”
“The Return of the Common Good.” James Wood has a wonderfully clarifying review of Stefan Borg’s The Return of the Common Good: The Postliberal Project Left and Right. If you want a geneology of postliberalism and a map of its different branches, Wood’s review is a reliable guide: “Too often, postliberal political theory is treated as little more than an opportunistic response to American populism or an attempt to capitalize on the ascent of President Trump. Meanwhile, postliberal discourse in the United States has taken on a more statist, tribalistic, and narrowly particularistic tone, intensifying uncertainty about its relationship to nationalism. Is Christian nationalism properly postliberal? Is postliberalism simply the political theology on display at National Conservatism conferences? In the absence of careful distinctions, critics—especially in academic and media contexts—have been quick to dismiss the entire discourse as intellectually reckless or socially dangerous for daring to challenge liberalism at a fundamental level.” (Recommended by Paul Perrault.)
“Classical Education Has a Machiavelli Problem.” Benjamin V. Beier discusses the pedagogical value of human exempla, figures who despite their flaws we can set as models for students, and asks whether Machiavelli should be such a model: “Can Machiavelli serve as an exemplum for classical education today? Is he, like King, a man who embodied good ideals imperfectly, or is he a man who embodied or articulated imperfect or even deficient ideals?”
“You Probably Own This 7-Eleven (and That’s Why It Looks So Sad).” Joseph Lawler shows how US property and tax law incentivizes absentee landowners to hold real estate in a retirement account without even knowing what bits of property they purportedly own: “The U.S. has separated landowners from neighborhoods through regulations and tax laws meant to make real estate markets accessible and liquid — that is, easily bought and sold among investors. These rules and regulations have worked for their intended purposes. They have successfully turned much of the built environment into commodities, which are easy for buyers and sellers to understand, price, and transact. They have made it possible for teachers in Ontario, policemen in Los Angeles, sheikhs in Dubai, and millions of others to finance the convenience stores, houses, hospitals, hotels, malls, and offices that Americans frequent every day.”
“Resist the Technocrats.” Jan Eijking wants to defend legitimate expertise from the pretense of non-political technocracy they often invoke: “To save expertise, we need to resist technocracy. In the case of international organisations, this requires that we demythologise their origins, that we acknowledge they have never been independent from politics, and that we refrain from technocratic wishful thinking.” (Recommended by Dominic Garzonio.)
“Why the Flock Backlash Has Gotten So Intense.” David Graham tries to identify why everyone is realizing Flock cameras are a bad idea: “the Flock backlash fits into a broader moment of anger—at corporations in general, and at tech companies and artificial intelligence in particular.”
“The Threat of AI Takeover Is Real.” John-Clark Levin articulates the dangers that new AI models pose: “Not one human at OpenAI fully understands how ChatGPT works in the way Ford engineers understand how an F-150 works. Rather, AI training is more like gain-of-function research on viruses in a laboratory—biologists know how to set up the right conditions to grow deadly pathogens, but they don’t fully control the process.”
“Paid Phones.” Daniel Kolitz tells a depressing story about losing his depressing job to AI and then wading through a morass of depressing online payday loan apps: “Having lived for two years now at the vanguard of AI displacement, and having witnessed, throughout my lifetime, any rogue hope for change metronomically squashed, all I’m really inclined to picture is a world of steadily diminished opportunity in which, instead of anything like a robust social safety net, state governments follow the money and start building out high-interest payday apps of their own.”
