Articles Archive

Wendell Berry speaks of death in ways few of us can express.

Wild yet humble, the sycomore fig is a remarkable symbol of the Christian life, beautiful in its simplicity.

Econoclast: Herman Daly and the Gospel of Growth is a short, earnest, and intense tribute to a tall, soft-spoken, and rather non-confrontational man.

Someday our children may read those shelves the way Ruth Swain read her father's—not as a catalog of books but as the story of a life, with all its detours…

It’s songs about war this week on A Symposium of Popular Songs—plus, I play some listener suggestions. Send your suggestions to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com!

Jeffrey Polet doesn’t want a data center in his backyard.

"Can there be forbidden—or, as I prefer, inopportune knowledge?"

Wendell Berry, more than most, showed the rest of us what it's like to choose membership over celebrity.

For a man whose intellectual and artistic and personal focus was so concentrated, Wendell Berry’s writings contained multitudes.

[Your grief] is unique to you, shaped by your memories, abstracted and then made concrete in ways I am not privy to.

If we take care of this holy Creation, we will meet our human purpose. We will also take care of our families and our communities.

Art about self-destruction always reminds me of Truffaut’s Dictum: “You can’t make an anti-war film,” since putting it on screen makes it glorious somehow. We’ll try to avoid that trap…

Jason Peters remembers Wendell Berry and muses on his lasting legacy.

The herd: it is one of the things I most fear, not just from terrorists but from my fellow citizens, even from my friends and family.

“Death is a sort of lens, though I used to think of it as a wall or a shut door."

Berry slowly gets the point across to readers: each life only looks small when viewed from far away.

It would be hard to imagine the existence of Front Porch Republic without Wendell Berry. FPR is a project that does not compute.

We’re listening to songs about rivers this week—mostly American rivers, though we do make a brief detour into the Thames. Send your song suggestions to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com!

I believe we have lost one of our nation’s significant voices.

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.

Rare is the writer who changes a person’s mind; Berry is the kind of writer who changes what one pays attention to.

Wendell is that American thinker who, for me, represents the true wisdom of a sacred and infuriating intersection: the crossroads where Real and Ideal meet.

Wendell Berry was a man in love.

"To the faithful," John Milton writes, "Death [is] the Gate of Life." Yesterday our friend Wendell Berry walked through this gate.