Tag

Wendell Berry

Blog

Reforming the Southern Man

I am not from where I live, yet I have a deep fear that where I live won’t be where I live for very much longer. The god of progress bears down on our town like cavalry upon the steppes. There is not a whole lot one can do outside of seeking divine intervention, much like a Magyar farmer in…
Rev. Benjamin Glaser
February 5, 2021
Blog

Jayber Crow

Not long after I moved my family to Bangkok, Thailand — where we lived for three years — I happened to be walking through a park with an environmental specialist for the U.S. Department of State. I noticed an interesting black bird hopping around nearby. “What’s the name of that curious bird?” I asked my friend. “Hell if I know,”…
Casey Chalk
September 23, 2020
Review Posts

The Bard of Kentucky

A review of Wendell Berry: Port William Novels and Stories (Library of America, 2018), Jack Shoemaker, ed. The long shelf of fiction by Wendell Berry—overshadowed by the colossal green canopy of his poetry and agrarian essays—has been brought into the light by the Library of America. Wendell Berry: Port William Novels and Stories, the first of two volumes that will…
Rafael Alvarez
October 15, 2019
Review Posts

Taking Root

A review of Taking Root: The Nature Writing of William and Adam Summer of Pomaria by James Kibler (editor) and Wendell Berry (Foreword) (University of South Carolina Press, 2017). Perhaps land is more important to the Southern tradition than any other aspect of the region’s experience. Historians continue to grapple with questions that ask how Southerners understood land and nature.…
Alan Harrelson
October 16, 2018
Review Posts

What Are People For?

A review of What Are People For? by Wendell Berry (North Point Press, 1990) "We should love life," Dostoyevski once said, "more than the idea of life." It is this concreteness, this rootedness, that seemingly inspirits the life and writings of Wendell Berry, whose most recent collection of essays, What Are People For?, further establishes him as one of the…
Tom Rash
August 14, 2018
Blog

Wendell Berry: More Than a Southern Thoreau

It was pure brag on young Henry Thoreau's part to say that he had gone to Walden Pond in order "to front only the essential facts of life," to take a Spartanlike stance against its demands on us, to cut a broad swath and shave close. In point of fact, Thoreau went to Walden to write the book later published…
Thomas McDonnell
May 1, 2017
Blog

Pope Francis and the Southern Tradition

Recent attempts made by the left and the right to make Pope Francis one of “their” own has sparked considerable debate among the political class and their voices in the mainstream media.  Pope Francis’s speech before Congress was nothing more than a continuation of themes he has publically endorsed throughout his time as pontiff, namely support for the environment and opposition…
Brion McClanahan
October 1, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

Sayings By or For Southerners, Part XVI

Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals can believe them.   --Orwell I believe you love me---God knows why?     --Yates Snowden Even if the GOP can’t see the light they can feel the heat. “We’ve got to protect our phoney-baloney jobs!”     --James Fulford For all practical purposes, today’s press is an arm of government.   --Fred Reed The instinct for Power…
Clyde Wilson
August 5, 2015