Wendell Berry 218

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

The title poem, “Home Song,” is deceptively simple in its sing-song iambic trimeter and mostly monosyllabic words. Yet the reader is pulled quickly into a dream of home, hearth, children,…

The promise of liberation from drudgery quickly becomes liberation from purpose.

This week, we’re listening to songs about young adults (let’s say 18-35) on A Symposium of Popular Songs. Think of it as a companion piece to our very first episode,…

Wading in a river and lumberjacking in the woods are at once work and play, play and work, and in this they resemble anything we might do for instrumental ends…

The former editor in chief of Christianity Today stops by to talk about his love of Port William and the AI infused world to come.

In conjunction with the most recent issue of Local Culture and with FPR’s fall conference, we’re listening to songs about work on this week’s Symposium of Popular Songs.

As Gurney’s family and friends wrestle with the loss of their friend, I hope they—or more accurately we—will lean into being lonely inside a web of love.

Smith's poem has returned to my mind several times, especially in moments, like our current one, of cultural and political turmoil.

We don’t have to ride along.

Wendell Berry has written a ninth Port William novel, and it is unlike any other in the set.

I distinctly remember on Christmas morning ...

Literacy anchors us to our surroundings and our heritage. It acquaints us with the particulars and holds us in the web of relations.

Perhaps the choice not to have a computer is more a choice not to play pretend.

We are forgetting about other ways AI may be affecting people close to us, even ourselves.

"I don't particularly call myself an environmentalist. I love the Pinchot National Forest. My specific woods, the land that my family is from..."

But the attacks on higher education are also part of a broader trend, which devalues work itself, especially work motivated by love

Within five years you could have a tiny piece of managed nature, in which more birds sing than you would have thought possible

Like the wonderful American writer Wendell Berry, Adrian Bell’s desire for a return to a more sympathetic agriculture is not born out of nostalgia

Only then can attention and passion be directed in the most life-giving ways and only then can a healthy culture emerge from a disconnected and attenuated one.

The reflection looked like a vintage motion picture, only without those stilted movements.

No question about it: For writers like me, who would like nothing more than to do our own writing and thinking with dignity and intellectual honesty, it’s becoming harder to…

One might think that after forty-four years of writing these Sabbath poems, Berry would run out of things to say. But it seems that as long as the trees continue…

To rush AI into the classroom or into daily life is to put student well-being at stake. And as Kingsnorth reminds us, refusal to accept certain forms of technology can…