Wendell Berry 228

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!

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.