Tag: Wendell Berry

When Transformation Transforms the Transformers

Published on by D. G. Hart33 Comments

In arguably his most important book, The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry writes the following about the Amish (in ways that neo-Calvinists might find instructive and inspirational):

First, the Amish communities are, at their center, religious. They are bound together not just by various worldly necessities, but by spiritual authority. . . Whereas most contemporary sects of Christianity have tended to specialize in the interests of the spirit, leaving aside the issues of the use of the world, the Amish have not secularized their earthly life. . . .

Second, the Amish have severely restricted the growth of institutions among themselves, and so they are not victimized, as we so frequently are, by organizations set up ostensibly to “serve” them. Though they pay the required deferences to our institutions, they accept few of the benefits, and so remain, in perhaps the most important respects, free of them. They do not become dependent on them and so maintain their integrity. As far as I know, the only institutions in our sense that the Amish have started are their schools — and his, by our standards, for a strange reason: to keep the responsibility for educating their children and so, in consequence to keep their children. . . .

Third, the Amish are the truest geniuses of technology, for they understand the necessity of limiting it. . . . Whereas our society tends to conceive of the community as a loose political-economic mechanism of mutually competing producers, suppliers, and consumers, the Amish think of “the community as a whole” — that is, as all of the people, or perhaps, considering the excellence both of their neighborliness and their husbandry, as all the people and their land together. If the community is whole, then it is healthy, at once earthly and holy. The wholeness or healht of the community is their standard. And by this standard they have been required to limit their technology.

Berry goes on even to violate Old Life standards by applying the word Christian to a secular enterprise — as in Christian agriculture, which is “formed upon the understanding that is is sinful for people to misuse or destroy what they did not make.”

As side from the irony from H. Richard Niebuhr categories of Christ and culture that Anabaptists may have done more to create a Christian culture than Niebuhr’s (and Kuyper’s) Calvinist transformationalists, the example of the Amish (as Berry understands them) may also be instructive for those wanting to transform out culture. Instead of infiltrating the city to redeem it, the Amish have fled the dominant culture to cultivate a Christian culture (as they understand it). In so doing, they have avoided the problem that generally afflicts the infiltrators — that they become like the culture they inhabit, that is, in the case of city transformers, they become as urban and hip as they are Christian. The Amish are also apparently free from the self-delusion that often infects the transformationalists, then one where to justify redeeming the culture the cult loses what makes it distinct (the salt is no longer salt).

This is not, by the way, an endorsement of either the Amish (whom I admire) or the project of Christian culture. I am more and more persuaded that the longing for a Christian culture is illegitimate and whets the soul’s appetite for something we cannot have in this world. But if you are going to look for examples of Christian culture, the Amish may have unwittingly outscored the neo-Calvinists. Think Free University.

Pray that Americans Will Listen to Wendell Berry

Published on by D. G. Hart16 Comments

For day three of the Old Life Prayer Vigil, a few excerpts from Wendell Berry’s Jefferson Lecture, given this past Monday night in Washington, D.C.

First, a cautionary word by implication to the W-Wists:

In my reading of the historian John Lukacs, I have been most instructed by his understanding that there is no knowledge but human knowledge, that we are therefore inescapably central to our own consciousness, and that this is “a statement not of arrogance but of humility. It is yet another recognition of the inevitable limitations of mankind.”6 We are thus isolated within our uniquely human boundaries, which we certainly cannot transcend or escape by means of technological devices. . . .

We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true. And if we offend gravely enough against what we know to be true, as by failing badly enough to deal affectionately and responsibly with our land and our neighbors, truth will retaliate with ugliness, poverty, and disease. The crisis of this line of thought is the realization that we are at once limited and unendingly responsible for what we know and do.

And then a word on behalf of economy, that is the household and the families that comprise them:

No doubt there always will be some people willing to do anything at all that is economically or technologically possible, who look upon the world and its creatures without affection and therefore as exploitable without limit. Against that limitlessness, in which we foresee assuredly our ruin, we have only our ancient effort to define ourselves as human and humane. But this ages-long, imperfect, unendable attempt, with its magnificent record, we have virtually disowned by assigning it to the ever more subordinate set of school subjects we call “arts and humanities” or, for short, “culture.” Culture, so isolated, is seen either as a dead-end academic profession or as a mainly useless acquisition to be displayed and appreciated “for its own sake.” This definition of culture as “high culture” actually debases it, as it debases also the presumably low culture that is excluded: the arts, for example, of land use, life support, healing, housekeeping, homemaking.

I don’t like to deal in categorical approvals, and certainly not of the arts. Even so, I do not concede that the “fine arts,” in general, are useless or unnecessary or even impractical. I can testify that some works of art, by the usual classification fine, have instructed, sustained, and comforted me for many years in my opposition to industrial pillage.

But I would insist that the economic arts are just as honorably and authentically refinable as the fine arts. And so I am nominating economy for an equal standing among the arts and humanities. I mean, not economics, but economy, the making of the human household upon the earth: the arts of adapting kindly the many human households to the earth’s many ecosystems and human neighborhoods. This is the economy that the most public and influential economists never talk about, the economy that is the primary vocation and responsibility of every one of us.

What Happens When You Mix Athanasius, Wendell Berry, and Sufjan Stevens?

Published on by D. G. Hart25 Comments

You get very confused. (Thanks to J. R. Daniel Kirk)

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Caritas in Flagrande

Published on by D. G. Hart6 Comments

Caleb Stegall over at Front Porch Republic has already asked a good question about a recent evangelical statement, “Doing the Truth in Love,” that commends the pope’s recent encyclical Caritas in Vertate to the wider evangelical world. Caleb asked, “how many evangelicals does it take to comment on an encyclical?” The answer is a whole lot more than the teamsters it takes to change a lightbulb. The answer to Caleb’s question is 68, the number of evangelicals who signed “Doing the Truth in Love.” The answer to the question about the teamsters is “10, you gotta problem with that?”

Maybe it is oldlife’s current obsession with neo-Calvinism, but we couldn’t help but notice a strong attraction of Kuyperians to Benedict’s encyclical. The Protestant statement backing the pope originally stemmed from a Center for Public Justice effort, and a number of neo-Calvinists added their signatures, among them our favorite Byzantine-rite Calvinist. The convergence of neo-Calvinists and the Roman church’s pontiff does not prove our repeated contention here that a preoccupation with worldview turns the confessional and ecclesial lobes of one’s brain into jello. But it does add to the mix of examples that show neo-Calvinists to be promiscuous in their discernment.

Meanwhile, the neo-Calvinist theological interpretation of Benedict is not reassuring. DTL states:

In Christ’s death and resurrection, God removes all that stands in the way of right relationships between God and the world, among humans, and between humanity and the rest of creation. Human development is included in this restoration of all things to right relationship.

This is the typical neo-Calvinist cosmological rendering of redemption, the license that tells Christians they need to save the world – not just the lost tribes in Africa, but also the kitchen sink. Is it really possible that Benedict is a neo-Calvinist? What would Abraham Kuyper, who thought Rome had nothing to offer the modern world, say?

We do not want to suggest that Benedict or any other pope cannot be read for insight and wisdom. In this case, oldlife has yet to read the encyclical. But would the evangelical signers of DTL also be willing to draft and sign the books by other authors who possess a lot of wisdom about the economy and globalization – say Niall Ferguson or P. J. O’Roarke?

And what about Wendell Berry? Is he chopped liver? Almost twenty years ago he wrote:

Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible. Those who have “thought globally” (and among them the most successful have been imperial governments and multinational corporations) have done so by means of simplifications too extreme and oppressive to merit the name of thought. Global thinkers have been and will be dangerous people. National thinkers tend to be dangerous also: we now have national thinkers in the northeastern United States who look on Kentucky as a garbage dump. A landfill in my county receives daily many truckloads of garbage from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. This is evidently all right with everybody but those of us who live here. (“Out of your Car, Off Your Horse,” 19)

So why no statement recommending The Unsettling of America to evangelical readers. Berry had some of us thinking about the problems of globalization a while ago. It didn’t take the Bishop of Rome to get us to do it. And we didn’t have to issue a declaration and seek signatures to call attention to our debt to Berry.

Mind you, if Benedict actually agrees with DTL when the statement says, “globalization has indeed lifted millions out of poverty, primarily by the integration of the economies of developing nations into international markets. Yet the unevenness of this integration leaves us deeply concerned about the inequality, poverty, food insecurity, unemployment, social exclusion—including the persistent social exclusion of women in many parts of the world—and materialism that continue to ravage human communities, with destructive consequences for our shared planetary habitat” – if that’s what the encyclical affirms, then maybe a Berry declaration is in order. As Stegall notes, “Take it from me, sitting in the belly of the beast, when Evangelicals ask you for a ‘serious dialogue’ about ‘new models of global governance,’ reach for your gun. Or your rosary.”

Beyond globalization, Benedict, and Berry is the cringe produced by watching low church Protestants jump on the papal bandwagon. Could it be that evangelicals get more mileage out of siding with the pope than even a popular American author? Impugning motives is always unwise, but why don’t these evangelicals worry just a little bit about coming off as Vatican groupies?

Sorry for the cynicism, but any good Protestant knows something is wrong when those who are not in fellowship with the Bishop of Rome, and who remain tarnished by the condemnations of Trent, are so eager to recommend the chief officer of the church whose jurisdiction their communions have purposefully renounced.

What Would Tim Keller Say to Wendell Berry?

Published on by D. G. Hart3 Comments

Here are some thoughts about why the conversation would be interesting.