Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life PDF Download

Author: J. Matthew Bonzo
Publisher: Brazos Press
ISBN: 1587431955
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Gives readers a concise introduction to the cultural and spiritual themes in the writings of Wendell Berry.

Author: Jack R. Baker
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813169046
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Why the university should focus on community: “An enlightening interpretation of Wendell Berry’s philosophy for the pursuit of a holistic higher education.” —Publishers Weekly Prominent author and cultural critic Wendell Berry is well known for his contributions to agrarianism and environmentalism, but his commentary on education has received comparatively little attention. Yet Berry has been eloquently unmasking America’s cultural obsession with restless mobility for decades, arguing that it causes damage to both the land and the character of our communities. The education system, he maintains, plays a central role in this obsession, inculcating in students’ minds the American dream of moving up and moving on. Drawing on Berry’s essays, fiction, and poetry, Jack R. Baker and Jeffrey Bilbro illuminate the influential thinker’s vision for higher education in this path-breaking study. Each chapter begins with an examination of one of Berry’s fictional narratives and then goes on to consider how the passage inspires new ways of thinking about the university’s mission. Throughout, Baker and Bilbro argue that instead of training students to live in their careers, universities should educate students to inhabit and serve their places. The authors also offer practical suggestions for how students, teachers, and administrators might begin implementing these ideas. Baker and Bilbro conclude that institutions guided by Berry’s vision might cultivate citizens who can begin the work of healing their communities—graduates who have been educated for responsible membership in a family, a community, or a polity.

Author: Wendell Berry
Publisher: Turtleback Books
ISBN: 9781417629510
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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A critical inquiry into the ways Americans have exploited and continue to exploit the land that sustains them, tracing attitudes toward and methods of farming from the eighteenth century to the present

Author: Wendell Berry
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640090290
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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The most comprehensive―and only author-authorized―Wendell Berry reader, "America's greatest philosopher on sustainable life and living" (Chicago Tribune). In a time when our relationship to the natural world is ruled by the violence and greed of unbridled consumerism, Wendell Berry speaks out in these prescient essays, drawn from his fifty-year campaign on behalf of American lands and communities. The writings gathered in The World-Ending Fire are the unique product of a life spent farming the fields of rural Kentucky with mules and horses, and of the rich, intimate knowledge of the land cultivated by this work. These are essays written in defiance of the false call to progress and in defense of local landscapes, essays that celebrate our cultural heritage, our history, and our home. With grace and conviction, Wendell Berry shows that we simply cannot afford to succumb to the mass-produced madness that drives our global economy―the natural world will not allow it. Yet he also shares with us a vision of consolation and of hope. We may be locked in an uneven struggle, but we can and must begin to treat our land, our neighbors, and ourselves with respect and care. As Berry urges, we must abandon arrogance and stand in awe.

Author: Joseph R. Wiebe
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781481303866
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Wendell Berry teaches us to love our places--to pay careful attention to where we are, to look beyond and within, and to live in ways that are not captive to the mastery of cultural, social, or economic assumptions about our life in these places. Creation has its own integrity and demands that we confront it. In The Place of Imagination, Joseph R. Wiebe argues that this confrontation is precisely what shapes our moral capacity to respond to people and to places. Wiebe contends that Berry manifests this moral imagination most acutely in his fiction. Berry's fiction, however, does not portray an average community or even an ideal one. Instead, he depicts broken communities in broken places--sites and relations scarred by the routines of racial wounds and ecological harm. Yet, in the tracing of Berry's characters with place-based identities, Wiebe demonstrates the way in which Berry's fiction comes to embody Berry's own moral imagination. By joining these ambassadors of Berry's moral imagination in their fictive journeys, readers, too, can allow imagination to transform their affection, thereby restoring place as a facilitator of identity as well as hope for healed and whole communities. Loving place translates into loving people, which in turn transforms broken human narratives into restored lives rooted and ordered by their places.

Author: Wendell Berry
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1582436673
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 91

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An impassioned, thoughtful, and fearless essay on the effects of racism on the American identity by one of our country’s most humane literary voices. Acclaimed as “one of the most humane, honest, liberating works of our time” (The Village Voice), The Hidden Wound is a book-length essay about racism and the damage it has done to the identity of our country. Through Berry’s personal experience, he explains how remaining passive in the face of the struggle of racism further corrodes America’s great potential. In a quiet and observant manner, Berry opens up about how his attempt to discuss racism is rooted in the hope that someday the historical wound will begin to heal. Pulitzer prize-winning author Larry McMurtry calls this “a profound, passionate, crucial piece of writing . . . Few readers, and I think, no writers will be able to read it without a small pulse of triumph at the temples: the strange, almost communal sense of triumph one feels when someone has written truly well . . . The statement it makes is intricate and beautiful, sad but strong.” “Mr. Berry is a sophisticated, philosophical poet in the line descending from Emerson and Thoreau." ―The Baltimore Sun "[Berry’s poems] shine with the gentle wisdom of a craftsman who has thought deeply about the paradoxical strangeness and wonder of life." ―The Christian Science Monitor "Wendell Berry is one of those rare individuals who speaks to us always of responsibility, of the individual cultivation of an active and aware participation in the arts of life." ―The Bloomsbury Review “[Berry’s] poems, novels and essays . . . are probably the most sustained contemporary articulation of America’s agrarian, Jeffersonian ideal.” ―Publishers Weekly

Author: Wendell Berry
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640091696
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
The essays in The Gift of Good Land are as true today as when they were first published in 1981; the problems addressed here are still true and the solutions no nearer to hand. The insistent theme of this book is the interdependence, the wholeness, the oneness of people, land, weather, animals, and family. To touch one is to tamper with them all. We live in one functioning organism whose separate parts are artificially isolated by our culture. Here, Berry develops the compelling argument that the “gift” of good land has strings attached. We have it only on loan and only for as long as we practice good stewardship.

Author: Wendell Berry
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1619020971
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 78

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Book Description
An impassioned and rigorous appeal for reconnection to the land and human feeling by one of America’s most heartfelt and humble writers. When he accepted the invitation to deliver The Jefferson Lecture—our nation’s highest honor for distinguished intellectual achievement—Wendell Berry decided to take on the obligation of thinking again about the problems that have engaged him throughout his long career. He wanted a fresh start, not only in looking at the groundwork of the problems facing our nation and the earth itself, but in gaining hope from some examples of repair and healing even in these times of Late Capitalism and its destructive contagions. As a poet and writer he understood already that much can be gleaned from looking at the vocabulary of these problems themselves and how we describe them. And he settled on “affection” as a method of engagement and solution. The result is the greatest speech he has delivered in his six decades of public life. It All Turns on Affection will take its place alongside The Unsettling of America and The Gift of Good Land as major testaments to the power and clarity of his contribution to American thought. Also included are a small handful of other recent essays and a wonderful conversation between Mr. Berry, his wife Tanya Berry, and the head of the National Endowment of the Humanities Jim Leech, which took place just after the award was announced. The result offers a wonderful continuation of the long conversation Berry has had with his readers over many years and as well as a fine introduction to his life and work. “These powerful, challenging essays show why Berry’s vision of a sustainable, human–scaled society has proven so influential.” —Publishers Weekly “Wendell Berry is one of those rare individuals who speaks to us always of responsibility, of the individual cultivation of an active and aware participation in the arts of life.” —The Bloomsbury Review

Author: Wendell Berry
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1582439575
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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A poetic novel of despair, hope, and the redemptive power of work deepens an award–winning author’s grand Port Williams literary project. After losing his hand in an accident, Andy Catlett confronts an agronomist whose surreal vision can see only industrial farming. This vision is powerfully contrasted with that of modest Amish farmers content to live outside the pressures brought by capitalist postindustrial progress, and by working the land to keep away the three great evils of boredom, vice, and need. As Andy’s perspective filters through his anger over his loss and the harsh city of San Francisco surrounding him, he begins to remember: the people and places that wait 2,000 miles away in his Kentucky home, the comfort he knew as a farmer, and his symbiotic relationship to the soil. Andy laments the modern shift away from the love of the land, even as he begins to accept his own changed relationship to the world. Wendell Berry’s continued fascination with the power of memory continues in this treasured novel set in 1976. “[Berry’s] poems, novels and essays . . . are probably the most sustained contemporary articulation of America’s agrarian, Jeffersonian ideal.” —Publishers Weekly “Wendell Berry is one of those rare individuals who speaks to us always of responsibility, of the individual cultivation of an active and aware participation in the arts of life.” —The Bloomsbury Review

Author: Lord Northbourne
Publisher: Sophia Perennis
ISBN: 9781597310185
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
'Without vision the people perish.' So wrote the poet William Blake. Lord Northbourne (1896-1982) was a man of exceptional and comprehensive vision, who diagnosed the sickness of modern society as stemming from the severance of its organic links with the wholeness of life. But like his better-known younger contemporary E. F. Schumacher (author of Small is Beautiful), whose work developed along very similar lines, Northbourne's occupation as a practicing organic farmer (he coined the term) was joined to a deep conviction that humanity does not live by bread alone, and that the fullness of life properly integral to human nature demands obedience to sacred law. Thus his vision of life came to embrace the interrelationship of God, humanity, and the soil as a unity presupposing a way of life in stark contrast to that of the myopic, mechanististic world he saw encroaching on all sides. And so, as it becomes increasingly evident that such a way of life stands to emperil our very future and that of the delicate ecosystem on which all life depends, it is time to re-examine the work of this pioneering thinker. In an age of specialization and fragmentation, we have much to learn from Northbourne, whose vision of what is required by a truly meaningful and sustainable society embraced religion, farming, the arts, the rural crafts, monetary form, and traditional metaphysics. Northbourne's later works, Religion in the Modern World and Looking Back on Progress, present his wider reflections on the Divine and human society, but always with the sensibility of a man who knows the soil, recalling in many ways the writings of Wendell Berry. He corresponded with Thomas Merton, as well as mountaineer and Tibetan Buddhist Marco Pallis (The Way and the Mountain), who introduced him to the school of perennialist writers. Northbourne translated René Guénon's The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, described by Huston Smith as one of the truly seminal books of the twentieth century, as well as Frithjof Schuon's Light on Ancient Worlds and Titus Burckhardt's Sacred Art in East and West. He was also an accomplished flower gardener and watercolorist, and a frequent contributor to the British periodical Studies in Comparative Religion, described by Schumacher as one of the two most important journals to read. Sophia Perennis is republishing all three of Northbourne's works, a fourth volume of uncollected essays spanning agriculture and metaphysics, as well as the 23-volume Collected Writings of René Guénon, including The Reign of Quantity. Lord Northbourne (1896-1982) was a man of exceptional vision, who already in the 1940s diagnosed in detail the sickness of modern society as stemming from the severance of its organic links with the wholeness of life. A leading figure in the early organic farming movement, his writings profoundly affected such other pioneers as Sir Albert Howard, Rolf Gardiner, Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, and H. J. Massingham. His path led him on to a profound study of comparative religion, traditional metaphysics, and the science of symbols, which he employed in incisive observations on the character of modern society. His later writings exercised considerable influence on his younger contemporaries E. F. Schumacher and Thomas Merton, and in many ways anticipate the essays of Wendell Berry. The republication of this milestone ecological text will be followed by three volumes of Northbourne's later metaphysical and cultural writings. "A major text in the organic canon, too long out-of-print" - Philip Conford, The Origins of the Organic Movement "We have tried to conquer nature by force and by intellect. It now remains for us to try the way of love." - From the book (possibly for front cover, if not too long?)