NAVIGATING WENDELL BERRY

"Wendell Berry and The Cultivation of Life: A Reader's Guide"
by J. Matthew Bonzo and Michael R. Stevens
Brazos Press, 2008

Reviewed by Stephen Morris
to be published in The Catholic Register, December 2008

I was so glad when I learned of the opportunity to review this book; for years I've heard about Wendell Berry, but when I investigated I realized that his body of work consists of fifty years worth of novels, poems and scattered essays. And though I've heard about him in relation to theology, there seemed to be no obvious starting point into my exploration—which was eventually put on hold. So imagine my delight when "Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader's Guide" was offered to me for review; it is a well-crafted consolidation of key Berryian themes in one introductory volume, and written from an explicitly theological perspective.

But to begin, its important to know a little about the man. Wendell Berry was born in 1934 in Henry County Kentucky, to a fifth generation farming family. He studied English and creative writing at Kentucky, then Stanford. He would go on to teach English and creative writing at Kentucky then NYU. But just when he seemed settled on an academic career, it all changed in 1965 when he decided to pack it in and buy a farm in rural Kentucky, where he developed a 125 acre homestead—a dramatic transition that remains the backbone of his writing and thought.

This is why his work is permeated with the sense that he straddles two contrasting worlds; the modern one that thrives on efficiency, disposability, profit, and anonymity; and the traditional one which is rooted in community, mutuality, a reverence for nature and for the miracle of life. You may see already where this is heading for Catholics; in his own way, Berry is articulating the underpinnings of what Pope John Paul II will call "The Culture of Life" and "TheCulture of Death."

But where the Pope focused on the edges of life and death, Berry is more concerned with how to live out our calling in the everyday sense; for instance, by advocating for the tradition of family farming in the age of faceless agro-business. And as consumers, he would ask us if we are supporting local farmers, their families and way of life, by buying local produce; or do we choose cheaper produce grown in China or Vietnam due to low labor costs and environmental deregulation? Reading Berry will raise our awareness of all that is at stake in such a seemingly mundane decision.

What insights does Berry offer churches? Though he is currently a practicing Baptist, his relationship with Christianity has been rocky—in the prophetic tradition of calling the Church to a deeper authenticity. The tension began as Berry took Christianity to task for its complicity in the environmental crisis. And this in the long runproved fruitful—Berry is considered a catalyst of the eco-theology movement; and we can only wonder if the Vatican would have become the world's first carbon-neutral state otherwise.

But Berry's vision of community also speaks to churches. In our modern, displaced world, Christians must ask 'How do I love my neighbors when I don't even know them?' I have a good friend who recently left the Catholic Church and one of his reasons was that despite attending Mass five times a week at a downtown parish for some two years, he met not a single person. If this can happen in our churches, it is a sad microcosm for what is happening in our world with the erosion of any meaningful sense of community.

I highly recommend this book, but it is a recommendation that comes with a warning; reading Berry will not only change the way you see the world (which is where most philosophy stops), but more importantly it will change the way you live in it. His thought comes with a radical call to transformation in ways so comprehensively mundane they cannot be dismissed simply by writing a cheque or donating a few hours of time.