Wendell Berry 241

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.

“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.

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

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.

Albert Camus once wrote: “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.” I would rather imagine Icarus landing.

Our increasingly obvious failure to make anything like “progress” is part and parcel of our failure to conserve the order from which all progress comes.

The agrarian voice reveals Nolan’s most significant and disappointing departure from Homer’s epic.

In American society, computers are never required to prove their worth.

As the work wore on, my hands, feet, and knees blistered.

Both global solidarity and local subsidiarity are needed if we are to address the emerging technology of so-called AI in sane and humane ways.

Sometimes I’ll sit still for, say, an hour, and imagine all the people around the world who have embraced me, shook my hand, kissed my cheek.

The hardware store’s customers aren’t just customers. They aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet. They are its neighbors.

Throughout the epistles, the apostles in both word and deed prioritize the care of widows and summarize it as "true religion."

Hardship fades from memory with each generation. Those who lived it remember the weight of it. Those who didn’t often forget.

As one Kentuckian wondered, why would he give up the “glitz and glamour” elsewhere to come back home to farm?

My real fear is not so much that the Internet makes us bad readers, but that it makes us bad writers.

Maybe we ought to use our being and thinking not to decide what our lives should be “for” or “against,” but rather what we would like our lives to define.

You can’t have a farm divorced from community, and you can’t have community without people. A farm isn’t a farm without a farmer.

We’re starting the new year by talking about friendship, that most human of institutions. Send your song recommendations to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com!