“Much of the charm and persuasion of [Wendell] Berry’s work lies in the simplicity with which he reads the world. Yet if we are going to read him through the lens of Christian confession, at times we need to make use of somewhat technical language and concepts to clarify the tensions present not just in his work, but in any earnest struggle with the narrative of creation, fall, and redemption. The ‘given creation’ is good and worthy of our care, Berry argues, yet it is also fallen, diseased, unhealthy, and thus longing for redemption. Berry shows that we need not sit by passively, waiting for redemption to happen. To probe his thinking further, here we will introduce the language of structure and direction. . . .

“Berry’s vision is often expressed in the language of gift and givenness. Structure is the boundedness that is built into creation, boundaries that call not for lament but humility and proportionality. But structure is also God’s gift to us, his love embodied, and calls for our gratitude. Controlling, overcoming, superseding all these are destructive impulses toward violating structural limits. Structure is the fundamental ‘given thing,’ given not as a blueprint but as a call and response. It requires human negotiation for its fulfillment, for fruitfulness and health — Genesis 2:15 can, in fact, be read as a trope for ‘farming.’ It is always necessary for human beings to work at the creational structure’s unfolding; humans can’t avoid guiding creation, because all of our actions are directional. We either foster life or foment disease, or most likely do some measure of both, whenever we act in this fallen world. Human actions always take place within the context of a creation that is open; creation may be thought of as fully healthy not when empty from humans but when appropriately stewarded and nurtured by people. Berry’s work consistently points out that we always have an effect upon the rest of creation, often at multiple levels, just by virtue of being humans. His concern is primarily the danger of denying that we have an impact, but he also warns against the claim that we need not recognize natural limits just because we have the apparent power to supersede them.

“Berry recognizes a responsibility that does not end, a faithful stewarding that is ongoing between the given and the gifted. This negotiation with limits is at the heart of his understanding of farming, of household, of community, and of patriotism. Direction has to do with faithfully directing creation in light of the conditions and choices that come out of Genesis 3 — the fall is always present, alongside creation’s goodness. Before the fall, there was only one direction chosen — faithfulness. But the fall has damaged our ability to respond to the structures of creation. Our vision is clouded, and hence the attraction of the ‘quick fix’ that would seem to solve our dilemmas immediately. The curse of disobedience is manifested in the struggle associated with our work to bring forth life. This situation does not call for despair or nostalgia, whether for ‘idyllic childhood’ or for Eden, nor for escape into a world of fantasy. Instead, the faithful path is one of oft-frustrated hopefulness, a sensibility that can wed grief with joy. This long journey, this life’s work, is what Berry seeks to embody in his own and his characters’ commitment to place and people.”

— from J. Matthew Bonzo and Michael R. Stevens, Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader’s Guide (Brazos Press, 2008)

J. Matthew Bonzo and Michael R. Stevens discussed this book on Volume 95 of the Journal.

Related reading and listening

  • The confident optimism in true Christian asceticism — Philosopher Étienne Gilson on the essential goodness of Creation
  • Festivity and the goodness of Creation — Drawing on Josef Pieper’s ideas, Ken Myers explains why the spirit of festivity is the spirit of worship, and that “entertainment” is ultimately an artificial, contrived, and empty effort to achieve festivity. (25 minutes)
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Productivity or thrift? — Wendell Berry contrasts an economy of productivity (which invites extravagance) and an economy of thrift (which takes care of things)
  • The destructive logic of short-term thinking — Wendell Berry on the perils of ignoring the nature of Nature
  • Farming and our primal vocation — Shawn and Beth Dougherty make a theological case for biomimicry, or fulfilling our original vocation of tending the earth by working according to the nature of Nature. (68 minutes)
  • A theology of eating —
    FROM VOL. 113
    Theologian Norman Wirzba examines the relationship between food and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Honoring the pigness of pigs —
    FROM VOL. 137
    Popular innovator and speaker on farming practices Joel Salatin talks about the challenges of caring for Creation within an agricultural and food system that pays little attention to the purposes and inclinations of Creation. (25 minutes)
  • An account of God’s relatedness to time and space — Colin Gunton on the trinitarian conception of the divine economy in St. Irenaeus
  • What does it mean to be a creature? — Canon-theologian Simon Oliver explains how and why the doctrine of Creation is cardinal and must frame all theology. (62 minutes)
  • “Reading Lewis with blinders on” — Chris Armstrong explains how C. S. Lewis’s work is grounded deeply in the Christian humanist tradition. (45 minutes)
  • Creation as beauty and gift —
    FROM VOL. 67
    David Bentley Hart describes how the Christian understanding of Creation as beauty and gift, as the outward expression of the delight the Trinity has in itself, reveals a vision of reality different from the pagan or fatalist vision of reality. (12 minutes)
  • The Life was the Light of men — In a lecture from 2018, Ken Myers contrasts the Enlightenment’s understanding of reason with the Christocentric conception of reason. (57 minutes)
  • Discerning an alternative modernity — In a lecture from 2019, Simon Oliver presents a summary of the cultural consequences of the comprehensiveness of the work of Christ. (28 minutes)
  • Lessons from Leviticus — The book of Leviticus may be assumed to be irrelevant for charting a way through the challenges of modernity. Theologian Peter J. Leithart disagrees. (22 minutes)
  • A theology of active beauty — In a 2010 lecture, George Marsden examines a few ways in which the distorting effects of Enlightenment rationalism were resisted in the work of Jonathan Edwards. (64 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Distributist & sustainable economics — Two interview from 2010: John C. Médaille summarizes how distributist economics differs from both capitalism and socialism. Then Herman Daly discusses the danger of economic theory abstracted from the actual stuff of Creation. (44 minutes)
  • Understanding the doctrine of participation —
    FROM VOL. 150
    Theologian and priest Andrew Davison believes that retrieving the historic doctrine of participation is vital to help Christians escape from the default philosophy of the age. (32 minutes)
  • On Earth as it is in Heaven —
    FROM VOL. 108
    Hans Boersma — author of Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry — explains why Christians should reject the modern separation of Heaven and Earth and recover a “sacramental ontology.” (26 minutes)
  • Lilies as analogues for farming — Fred Bahnson on the wisdom of attending to patterns of Creation
  • Making peace with the land — Fred Bahnson challenges us to consider how we might honor our created and redeemed relationship with the earth as God’s stewards. (48 minutes)
  • Learning to see the world aright — Norman Wirzba on cultivating a Christocentric vision of Creation
  • This world is now my home — Belden Lane describes several approaches to understanding how we experience the sacredness of earthly places and how we learn to see God manifest in His Creation. (48 minutes)
  • Breaking out of the immanent frame — Norman Wirzba on the true character of Creation and of our creatureliness
  • Living in a meshwork world — Theologian Norma Wirzba believes that Creation is the “material manifestation of God’s love” and that this fundamental teaching affects everything, especially our understanding of the meaning of modern environmental crises and climate change. (17 minutes)
  • For the beauty of the earth — Dietrich von Hildebrand on how the love of God deepens our love for the beauty found in Creation
  • In the house of Tom Bombadil — C. R. Wiley explores the mysterious, “allusive” figure of Tom Bombadil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. (17 minutes)
  • Sneaking past watchful dragons — Junius Johnson describes how Hans Urs von Balthasar’s understanding of Creation resonates with that of C. S. Lewis and Bonaventure, all three of whom served as mentors in his thinking about beauty. (18 minutes)
  • Faith born of wonder — Theologian Andrew Davison echoes a theme in the work of G. K. Chesterton, describing the work of apologetics as awakening a sense of wonder in the reality of Creation as a beautiful gift. (23 minutes)
  • Words as fulcrums — Wendell Berry on the mediating responsibilities of poets
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 148 — FEATURED GUESTS: Steven D. Smith, Willem Vanderburg, Jeffrey Bilbro, Emma Mason, Alison Milbank, and Timothy Larsen
  • Post-liberalism of an earlier generation — Allan C. Carlson discusses an anthology of articles from Free America, a magazine published between 1937 and 1947 whose writers believed that political democracy could only survive if coupled with decentralized economic democracy. (26 minutes)
  • Confronting modernity through farming — Jesse Straight, who nurtures the life of Whiffletree Farm in Warrenton, Virginia, talks about how he decided to pursue a vocation as a farmer in an effort to discover a way of life that worked against the characteristic fragmentation so dispiriting in modern culture. (24 minutes)
  • Lessons from quarantine: Making do with tinned fruit — In this audio reprint of “Wendell Berry and Zoom,” Front Porch Republic editor Jeffrey Bilbro reflects on two metaphors that can help put our new-found “dependency” on web-based video conferencing into perspective: tinned fruit and a prosthetic limb. (17 minutes)
  • Why “Creation” is more than “origins” — In this archive interview from Volume 121 of the Journal, Michael Hanby talks about why we shouldn’t assume that science can ever be philosophically and theologically neutral. (32 minutes)
  • Creation, natural law, and ecological concerns — Christopher Thompson discusses our need to grow in wisdom and humility, that we might flourish in this ordered cosmos in which we live. (16 minutes)
  • St. Thomas and the wisdom of Creation — Christopher Thompson offers a renewed vision of “the human person [as] an embodied, spiritual creature dwelling in a cosmos of created natures, intelligently ordered by God and capable of being intelligibly grasped by human reason.” (16 minutes)
  • Hans Boersma on For the Life of the World — Drawing from Alexander Schmemann’s book, Hans Boersma asserts that a recovered understanding of the relationship between God and Creation is essential to addressing a host of modern cultural crises. (17 minutes)
  • The inevitability of escalating public animosity — With excerpts from books and lectures by Alasdair MacIntyre, Oliver O’Donovan, and Wendell Berry, Ken Myers argues that modern political theory has guaranteed increasing levels of public conflict. (19 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 140 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Rubery, James A. Herrick, Jack Baker, Jeffrey Bilbro, Timothy Gloege, David Hollinger, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 139 — FEATURED GUESTS: W. Bradford Littlejohn, Simon Oliver, Matthew Levering, Esther Lightcap Meek, Paul Tyson, and David Fagerberg
  • What they saw in America — Sociologist James Nolan describes the perception of American culture of four distinguished foreign travelers: Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, G. K. Chesterton, and Sayyid Qutb. (5 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 137 — FEATURED GUESTS: Gilbert Meilaender, James L. Nolan, Joel Salatin, Michael Di Fuccia, Robin Leaver, and Michael Marissen
  • Simon Oliver: Creation, Modernity, & Public Theology — Simon Oliver examines the traditional understanding of the doctrine of Creation and explains how some of our modern divisions and disputes are the products of an insufficient framework for Creation that developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (71 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 129 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nicholas Carr, Robert Pogue Harrison, R. J. Snell, Norman Wirzba, Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski, and Peter Phillips
  • God’s love: originating, sustaining, restoring — Jonathan R. Wilson on the inseparability of creation and redemption
  • In Him we have our being — E. L. Mascall on the meaning of creation
  • Cultural participation in reconciliation — Jonathan Wilson on faithfully representing Creation in the culture of the Church
  • True transcendence, true immanence — D. C. Schindler on how believers can be practical atheists
Tags: