Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Thursday, September 23, 2021

Index - EcoTheology: Caring for the Land




Index to Caring for the Land



To cherish what remains of the Earth
and to foster its renewal
is our only legitimate hope of survival.

- Wendell Berry


There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

—Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by George Gordon Byron






Commentary - Wendell Berry

Sep 21, 2021

Sep 21, 2021

Sep 21, 2021


Sep 9, 2021







Aug 20, 2020







"The earth has music for those who listen"
- William Shakespeare


"And I dream of the vast deserts, the forests,
and all of the wilderness of our continent,
wild places that we should protect
as a precious heritage for our children
and for our children's children.
We must never forget that it is our duty
to protect this environment."

- Nelson Mandela



Conservation & Ecology


Monday, May 2, 2022



May 4, 2021







"As we progress into the twenty-first century,
anyone who considers themselves a realist
will have to make the environment a top priority."

- Leonardo DiCaprio


“To waste, to destroy our natural resources,
to skin and exhaust the land
instead of using it so as to increase
its usefulness,
will result in undermining
in the days of our children
the very prosperity which we ought
by right to hand down to them
[have] amplified and developed.”

- Theodore Roosevelt



Ecological Civilizations







Nov 17, 2020




























Tuesday, September 21, 2021

Wendell Berry - Seed Will Sprout in the Scar



PRESENTED BY
THE SEATTLE SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY

SEED WILL SPROUT IN THE SCAR:
WENDELL BERRY ON HIGHER EDUCATION


August 13, 2008


At some point in our lives, all of us have been students and have felt the vague malevolence of that monster we know as educational policy. Some teachers begin their careers thinking they will become the reformers of these educational forces only to realize that they not only have failed to vanquish the monster, but that they haven’t even discovered its lair. The more sophisticated critics of higher education may generate analyses of the monsters’ habits and whereabouts, but many of these critiques are predicated on shaky notions of reality. Education commentators worry that we’re falling behind economically because we haven’t shored up math and science, because our children don’t study enough compared to Chinese children, and so on, yet this line of reasoning veils the real problem with our educational system. In fact, such thinking reinforces the real problem: academia is overly concerned with what is “relevant.” Relevance has an attraction and immediacy to it that woos administrators, parents, and students. But the hard shell of relevance makes the monster so slippery that it can’t be cornered. Although the notion of a relevant education may sell seats, it comes at the price of disease and dislocation as the monster still rules the arena.

Wendell Berry has been critiquing society’s unhealthy practices for forty years, but some of his most harrowing critiques are directed at this monster of higher education. Indeed, after Berry decided to “quit” from the University of Kentucky to farm his land full-time, he insisted on that verb, emphatically asserting that he did not “retire” or “move on”—his point was that he could no longer identify himself with a large state university that, as he argues in Life is a Miracle, fosters an “academic Darwinism [that] inflicts severe penalties both upon those who survive and those who perish. Both must submit to an economic system which values their lives strictly according to their productivity.”1 Berry offers an even harsher assessment when he states in “Higher Education and Home Defense” that the purpose of higher education has now devolved into training for “entrance into a class of professional vandals.”2 Ouch!

For those of us who love Berry’s ideas but make our living in higher education, his essays are a bit uncomfortable. But all is not lost, even under the stern gaze of Berry’s sharp farmer’s eyes; his work provides hope for what could happen to higher education if colleges and universities became true to their original purposes (that’s a huge “if” for Berry, but an “if” is better than a never). So in his essay “The Loss of the University”—that title really sets the mood—Berry fights through the clouds to glimpse a far-away goal: “If the proper work of the university is only to equip people to fulfill private ambitions, then how do we justify public support? If it is only to prepare citizens to fulfill public responsibilities, then how do we justify the teaching of arts and sciences? The common denominator has to be larger than either career preparation or preparation for citizenship. Underlying the idea of a university—the bringing together, the combining into one, of all the disciplines—is the idea that good work and good citizenship are the inevitable by-products of the making of a good—that is, a fully developed—human being. This, as I understand it, is the definition of the name university.”3

In some ways this is an old idea (Cardinal Newman was already beginning to lament the undermining of such purposes 150 years ago in his The Idea of the University), but Berry’s sharp questions indicate just how novel and even fantastical it seems in our current milieu. Indeed, the broader message of “The Loss of the University” is that until the fiercely guarded boundaries of academic specialization are broken down, until each department, division, and discipline ceases to create its own narrow silos of knowledge over against the others, there will be no possibility of wholeness for the student. And anyone who has endured the rancor of a faculty meeting understands how distant such a goal now seems.

Berry hasn’t left us without direction, and we have his granddaughter to thank for that. Indeed, it was a surprise to hear that a man who is much more likely to speak at a cattleman’s convention or a protest against strip-mining than in an academic context agreed to do a commencement address as he has did recently at Bellarmine University and Duke Divinity School. We admit a brief flush of envy—the one time we dared to write Berry and ask him to come to Cornerstone University, he wrote back telling us he was trying to stay home more. The Bellarmine University address was given in Louisville, which is pretty close to home for him, both geographically and in the case of the class of 2007,4 familially, with his granddaughter among the graduates. And perhaps some heartstring was tugged, because Berry’s tone, if not glowing with optimism, was at least open to the thought that students at small colleges might still have a chance: “A school the size of this one still can function as a community of teachers and students, with responsible community life as its unifying aim.”

Yet the strong current, the unceasing riptide of the unholy quadrumvirate that Berry identifies as “STEM: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics,” will pull each student to become “an unconscious expert with Jesus Christ Munitions Incorporated, or Cleanstream Water Polluters, or the Henry Thoreau Noise Factory, or the John Muir Forest Reduction Corporation, or the Promised Land Mountain Removal Service.” According to Berry’s assessment, this path of death and ruin is masked as a glowing opportunity, or perhaps as our only means of retaining primacy in the global marketplace. The universities are buying it, parents are buying it, students are buying it, economists are buying it—but ultimately, Berry tells us that we need not shop for a tasteless education sold in six packs. There is a path out, a path of resistance and recovery that will lead us to fresh waters.

Thus, Berry calls the Bellarmine graduates to resist—to resist “technological determinism,” to resist “conventional greed and thoughtless individualism,” to resist “the global corporate empire and its economic totalitarianism.” In so doing, Berry suggests that graduates will enter into an alternate stream in our culture, a stream of people “who are already resisting—those who believe, in spite of the obstacles and the odds, that a reasonable measure of self-determination, for persons and communities, is both desirable and necessary.” To ask the hard questions and make the hard decisions involved in such resistance will be the work of a lifetime—Berry notes for the graduates that it will “involve you endlessly in out-of-school learning”—but it will be a lifetime of richness beyond the bounds of earning capacity and financial acuity. Ultimately, Berry calls for a set of choices, a constant reasserting of the basic choice that the right sort of college curriculum will have initiated; in his winsome terms, he affirms that “You will have to avoid thinking of yourselves as employable minds equipped with a few digits useful for pushing buttons. You will have to recover for yourselves the old understanding that you are whole beings inextricably and mysteriously compounded of minds and bodies.”

Whole beings—not fragmented, not dislocated, not splintering into a thousand pieces and directions based on social and economic necessity, not dying slowly under a facade of activity and prosperity. How might we be agents of this wholeness? How might we be teachers of the Berryian modes of resistance?5 We have determined at least three layers of mentoring wherein we can instill patterns of wholeness to help students learn what it means to be placed and at home.

At the first level, we seek to show dislocated and distressed students the nature of their condition (of our whole cultural condition!) in the context of an invitational learning community. OK, OK, easier said than done. Students coming from broken homes, troubled and troubling churches, hypersexualized high schools, and the mass chaos of a popular-culture-as-guide-to-life philosophy do not need to be convinced something has gone awry. Guiding students into worldview crises, shaking up their idolatries, revealing ourselves as co-strugglers yet hopeful models—these are grueling labors. But the learning community at a Christian liberal arts college could be one of the healthiest settings for such struggles, because these questions can be ruminated upon with faculty who most likely experience similar struggles and who seek not to demolish or demean students’ ill-formed notions so much as to redirect, to relocate them near life-giving waters.

We have found Berry’s essays, poems, and especially his fiction to be a key component in this tenuous work. For instance, in the finale to our Introduction to Philosophy course, we have used Berry’s volume of essays The Way of Ignorance to suggest that in modernity’s failed wake, in the midst of the postmodern grappling for hope, Berry’s vision of local communities as places of healing offers an alternative that is both disorienting and hopeful for the miasma they have (hopefully) encountered during the semester. We’ve also forged strong connections with students in teaching a course called Home Economics that is based around Berry’s book of the same name; the class is also inspired by his short stories from That Distant Land, which offer a sort of anecdotal vision for local community that is embodied in the people and place of Port William, Kentucky (Berry’s fictive doppelganger for his own hometown of Port Royal). The students in this class not only voiced the dislocation in which they found themselves, but they also hashed out possible remedies, or at least, in the terms of Berry’s Bellarmine University address, modes of resistance.

We got a glimpse that semester of what a Christian university could be if students learned to imagine the contours of a “fully-orbed community.”6 Matt also saw something like this during his time as a graduate student at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto when, in the middle of philosophical and theological wrestling, a daily three o’clock teatime allowed senior and junior members, administration, staff, and visitors to convene for genial conversation, for a reassertion of the human element that is present in all higher learning endeavors. That repeated sense of invitation and hospitality, in the midst of and, indeed, as a part of the fray, hits just the right note in the sort of harmony we seek for our students.

At the second level is the intentionality of the university in weaving into its own broader geographical proximity, which is crucial in transforming the university from a tool of dislocation to a workshop in relocation. Indeed, town-versus-gown tensions are fairly common—the massive state school that domineers and coerces the locals with its corporate presence, the small school that condescends to the local yokels and seeks to keep aloof—and a few years ago, The Chronicle of Higher Education had a back-page article suggesting that universities and colleges ought to seek healthier, more integrative relationships with their surrounding municipalities. The article’s reasons were those of mutualism: economic partnerships, a better disseminating of theoretical notions into practical situations. But we see a much sharper imperative for the faith-based school, because of the call to hospitality and being at home.

Our own school has dwelt on the fringe of its home city for sixty plus years, but much of its time has been spent in a fortress mentality, one of suspicion toward the vices of the city (and a commensurate public image of snootiness and perhaps fanaticism). Hence, students learned little about being located while at college—indeed, if anything, the work of dislocation was furthered. A more recent ethos of service to the underprivileged of the community has created a few more connections, but it has perhaps continued to emphasize the sort of self and other duality that bears rootless fruit.

We’ve begun to ask ourselves, and the administration of our school, what it might mean to be fully located here in Grand Rapids. How might the impulse toward sustainability, which is a hallmark of our city (we have a full-time Sustainability Director in the mayor’s office and the most green buildings per capita in the United States, including a brand new art museum), be complemented by programs, majors, facilities, and other embodiments of our university? How might the notion of students living in deliberate minicommunities in various areas of need throughout the city—a practice that has already been embraced by our goodly neighbor, Calvin College—create more of a sense of wholeness, both for our students in their experience and for the community in which they live? What sorts of interstices and confluences might be discovered if our school asked the city what we might do for the people and place in which we live, if we asked how we might best use our tremendous resources of thinkers and energetic students to serve (and not just incidentally or episodically, but in sustained, clear-eyed engagement)?

We imagine, ultimately, that both teachers and students (and, OK, I guess we can toss the administrators in there too!) will be refreshingly challenged to think about practicing what we preach. One creative possibility would be to allow students the opportunity to work off some tuition or housing costs through their commitments in the community—being at home in difficult settings to provide service, but more than service, something more like co-dwelling with those struggling and marginalized. The great cost increases that now perpetually plague higher education must be addressed by universities in ways that are morally meaningful, and this might be a way to do good to students while they are also able to practice the good themselves.

The third layer is one that is more or less forgotten in faculty and learning circles, one that is usually left to the development and fundraising folk: the alumni. As crass as the training for income production might be in many of our undergraduate and graduate settings, it’s probably the treatment of alumni that most clearly reinforces the apothegm: “Show me the money.” But what if that impulse were resisted, and the university community showed interest in the thinking and thriving of alumni minds? We have long aspired to create deep connections wherein our alumni, given a glimpse of the “fully-orbed community” while under our tutelage, then go out to locate and foster communities wherever they find themselves: knowing what questions to ask, knowing how to listen well, knowing how to stay put, and, crucially, knowing that their teachers want to hear back from them, want to communicate with them, want to play a role in all of the different home economies being formed.

Matt has tried to do this with his Philosophy alumni by means of wide-open communication lines and deliberate events, such as the yearly Philosophy Canoe Trip. This provides what homecomings of old might have provided: substantive human contact and conversation about the outworking of the vision gained in the college years—nothing like the elaborate depersonalized affairs that have evolved under the collective aegis of a thousand development offices.

If we could continuously ask our alumni to come back and tell current students how it is going, how the home-making is proceeding, what the pitfalls are, and what the wonderful bounty might be, perhaps the students wouldn’t feel so adrift, so betrayed upon graduation. Certainly a vigorous engagement of alumni with the student body—and conversely, getting students out to see the work that could await them when they join the resistance—would deepen the sense of why we educate in the first place.

“JOIN THE RESISTANCE!” It sounds a little melodramatic, a little Che Gueverean (if that can be an adjective), that is, until you walk into a classroom, or click into a cyberclassroom, or read an alumni fundraising letter, or sit in a Dilbertian cubicle, or work the tenth seventy-hour week in a row, or see another (and another and another) marriage break apart, another teenager plugged in behind a locked door, another eight-week-old infant tossed into a loving daycare. Suddenly, resistance is the only gesture that seems to point toward health, toward life.

We recall one of our favorite etymologies, that the word radical means not wild-eyed idealism or flipping the bird to authority, but instead rootedness (from the Latin radix, also the source of radish). We can be a part of that, we in higher education, in our own imperfect ways, as we teach what the Christian world and life vision means in all its obvious and subtle outworkings, as we give our push and then show the students where to push to try and overturn the idols of the age. And as we aspire to be a grounded and rooted school that embodies collectively the spirit of home-making we want each graduate to own. And as we try to keep the lines alive and buzzing between the campus and the multitudinous little communities of alumni, whose lives we want to hear and who we want to keep hearing from us. And so we return to Berry, our teacher of resistance, and hear him again as, at the end of the Bellarmine address, he asserts:

The logic of success insinuates that self-enlargement is your only responsibility, and that any job, any career will be satisfying if you succeed in it. But we can tell you, on the authority of much evidence, that a lot of people highly successful by that logic are painfully dissatisfied. We can tell you further that you cannot live in a career, and that satisfaction can come only from your life. To give satisfaction, your life will have to be lived in a family, a neighborhood, a community, an ecosystem, a watershed, a place, meeting your responsibilities to all those things to which you belong.

Let’s get that somewhere in our next set of learning objectives—put it on the syllabus and get to work!


Notes

1. Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle (Washington DC: Counterpoint, 2000), 62.

2. Wendell Berry, Home Economics (San Francisco: Northpoint, 1987), 51.

3. Ibid, 77.

4. All of our quotes from this address are based on the text that is found at www.bellarmine. edu/studentaffairs/Graduation/berry_address.asp. Unless otherwise noted, the remaining quotes in this essay are from this address.

5. Many of these observations are based on the ruminations in Chapter 10 of our forthcoming book Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader’s Guide (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2008).

6. Douglas Henry of Baylor University used these words when he spoke on our campus a few years ago.

About the Authors

Matt Bonzo
Matt Bonzo was born and raised in southeastern Ohio and graduated from Liberty University (BS), Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (MA), and the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto/Free University of Amsterdam (PhD). He has taught Philosophy at Cornerstone for ten years, and he is also the proprieter of Small Wonders Farm, a community-supported agriculture experiment that he runs with his wife Dorothe and his son Matthias on his land in Newaygo County. Unlike Wendell Berry, who still farms with draught horses, Bonzo has recently gone over to the dark side and purchased his first tractor.

Michael Stevens
Michael Stevens grew up in the Finger Lakes Region of upstate New York and graduated from Baptist Bible College of Pennsylvania (BS), St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland (MA), and the University of Dallas (PhD). He has taught English classes at Cornerstone for eleven years and lives on the northeast side of Grand Rapids, where he is often seen walking to campus with his nose stuck in a book. Stevens is interested in T. S. Eliot, the Civil War, and baseball.




Wendell Berry by Michael Stevens, "Knowing Your Place"



Author, Professor Michael Stevens


What can commitment to place and community mean for those not living in an agrarian countryside? Are there institutions that can serve as substitutes? The authors think so: "the flourishing of placed and peopled churches within local cultures." 


Amazon Link



Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life:
A Reader's Guide Paperback – December 1, 2008
by J. Matthew Bonzo (Author), Michael R. Stevens (Contributor)

 

Wendell Berry's poetry, fiction, and essays persistently ask the question: How can we live meaningful lives in a consumer-driven, fragmented age? His honest search for health in the midst of disease has garnered attention and discussion in both conservative and progressive circles. Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life thoroughly examines Berry's main themes of community, place, and conservation. It offers an apology for the power of Berry's vision and the ways in which his account of the world resonates with the biblical narrative. Pastors, students, professors, and laity will discover in this book how to flesh out Berry's worldview and foster a culture of life in their neighborhoods, churches, and schools.
Dr. Michael Stevens believes Wendell Berry is a crucial voice for the world today, and more particularly, for Christians. His book, written with co-author Dr. Matthew Bonzo, “Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life” evaluates Wendell Berry’s writings theologically, addressing themes congruent with contemporary theological concerns while acknowledging ways Berry’s vision can be adopted and lived. It’s no secret that Bonzo and Stevens find Berry to be a profound writer who provides the church with a new vision of life. While Berry’s writing is unlike traditional theological writing, the authors affirm Hauerwas’ statement at the end of the Gifford Lectures in “The Necessity of Witness” when he “offers John Paul II, John Howard Yoder, and Wendell Berry as crucial voices exhorting the church to a properly countercultural vision of life.” Though Berry seems like a “surprising inclusion” in this list, Bonzo and Stevens argue it is because Berry “represents the fullest embodiment of telling ‘the Story’ through stories… Berry’s work is precisely the sort of ‘renarration’ that can bring healing and make visible the call to ‘practice resurrection’” (35).
*This lecture is co-sponsored by the Au Sable Fellows & Graduate Christian Fellowship.

 

Michael Stevens (Ph.D. in Literature, Institute of Philosophic Studies, University of Dallas) is an English professor at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he has taught since 1997. His original graduate work on T.S. Eliot’s socio-political ideas led him on a circuitous route to the fiction, poetry, and essays of the Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry, about whom he and colleague Matt Bonzo wrote Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life for Brazos Press in 2008. [Stevens] has also published articles and chapters on Berry’s critique of higher education, his pacifism, and his fictional universe.
A native of Harford, in rural Cortland County, New York, Stevens attended high school in Dryden and often visited his grandparents on Ellis Hollow Road in Ithaca. After college, he even worked a brief but eventful stint at Cornell University Catering! He and his wife Linda (a native of Long Island) have raised their three kids in Michigan, amidst maple trees and apple orchards that betoken the strong link to New York State of Michigan’s early settlers (yes, there is an Ithaca, Michigan, and a Dryden, etc.). Ethan (20), Julia (17), and Gabe (15) are still waiting for Dad to take them to the Moosewood Restaurant on one of these Grandma visits.


* * * * * * * *


What a Poem Looks Like | Wendell Berry's "Sycamore"
Apr 25, 2020




* * * * * * * *



Book Review by Josh Sweeden, Ph.D.


Student in Practical Theology


Matthew Bonzo and Michael Stevens believe Wendell Berry is a crucial voice for the world today, and more particularly, for Christians today. Their project is simple: to analyze and evaluate Wendell Berry’s writings theologically, addressing themes congruent with contemporary theological concerns while acknowledging ways Berry’s vision can be adopted and lived. It’s no secret that Bonzo and Stevens find Berry to be a profound writer who provides the church with a new vision of life. While Berry’s writing is unlike traditional theological writing, Bonzo and Stevens affirm Hauerwas’ statement at the end of the Gifford Lectures in “The Necessity of Witness” when he “offers John Paul II, John Howard Yoder, and Wendell Berry as crucial voices exhorting the church to a properly countercultural vision of life.” Though Berry seems like a “surprising inclusion” in this list, Bonzo and Stevens argue it is because Berry “represents the fullest embodiment of telling ‘the Story’ through stories…Berry’s work is precisely the sort of ‘renarration’ that can bring healing and make visible the call to ‘practice resurrection’” (35).

Three significant themes evident in the writings of Wendell Berry constitute the heart of this text. Bonzo and Stevens first engage Berry’s notion of healing, a constant theme in Berry’s writings referring to individuals, communities, land, home, education, and society as a whole. Berry believes that all of these suffer from disease and are in need healing. Berry maintains a “creation-centric” vision which upholds the good of God’s created order while also maintaining its ‘fallen-ness’ and need for redemption. The disease needing to be addressed is partly due of the reality of a fallen creation. More important for Berry, however, is modernity’s proliferation of disease. Against the specific ills of modernity Berry provides a new vision for life which he finds rooted in the good of creation, community, and cultivation.

A second significant theme Bonzo and Stevens engage is hospitality. Berry’s descriptions of the community and household consistently establish hospitality as its center. Permeability of boundaries is how Bonzo and Stevens describe Berry’s hospitality. While communities and households maintain certain boundaries necessary for life together, the practice of hospitality makes these boundaries fluid and flexible. Hospitality involves “temporary or provisional entry into the membership of place and relationships.” It is a form of risk. Continuing the theme of health, Bonzo and Stevens note that communities “must already have a measure of health…[and] proof of willingness to be vulnerable” (141). Exploring Berry’s various writings, Bonzo and Stevens note six categories of hospitality integrally tied to community life. Ultimately hospitality is the practice of offering healing; it “has room for the wounded (and for being wounded).” In hospitality there must “be room for everyone, with the only caveat being that love must be accepted as given; it must be received as gift” (163). When hospitality becomes understood primarily as a practice of households and communities questions regarding the true inclusivity of women and marginalized peoples must be raised. Bonzo and Stevens address this briefly by stating the importance of such questions, noting that rural communities historically have not offered sufficient “quality of life and status to women.” Furthermore, they wonder how “marginalized groups of all sorts fit Berry’s notion of local, healing community” (116). In the midst of these questions, Bonzo and Stevens are explicit in acknowledging the varied possibilities for community and household. Working a farm in rural Kentucky is not, and should not be, the only option for all, what matters is making community and home in the place where we find ourselves, to “start where we are, and we’re all somewhere” (123). This does not negate some of the unjust and oppressive patterns present in rural communities and households, but it does show that Berry’s vision is not tied to a fixed understanding of rural America, but can (and should) be dynamic and embodied differently in varying contexts.

A final significant theme of Berry’s that Bonzo and Stevens consistently note is household. “Households are not utopias, nor are the communities they ideally help to build” (113). Households carry certain structures of authority, maintain various traditions and norms, and form specific virtues and character traits. It’s not uncommon for these to be problematic; as capable as households are for establishing ‘good,’ they can be equally destructive and ill-ordered. Nevertheless, a revival of household economics is needed according to Berry. One fundamental way this is accomplished is by countering the modern ideal of separation of work and home. Berry argues that “healthy households cannot be fostered when work is utterly external to the home.” Today work is something we “just attempt to escape,” and as a result, “our home becomes merely a place of recreation.” What “Berry calls for is a return of work to the home, because this is the place where character and communal virtues are formed” (112).

In addition to the significant attention given to the three themes discussed above, Bonzo and Stevens engage Berry’s theological contributions on topics of creation, gift, place, education, and redemption. This text is undoubtedly a needed complement to Berry’s prolific writing for all who wish to engage him theologically. The writings of Wendell Berry have, and will continue to have, a widespread influence. Reading Berry with a theological lens greatly assists the church to embody the alternative and redemptive forms of life presented by Berry—arguably forms of life necessary for Christian witness.

Bonzo and Stevens’ exploration of Berry does fall short of providing in-depth critical theological evaluation. Though the text intentionally avoids placing Berry under the microscope of a theological discipline and audience to which his writings were never directly written, critical theological evaluation remains necessary before the church and theology can assert and appropriate Berry’s contributions. Bonzo and Stevens are exceptional at displaying the strengths of Berry and possible ways the church’s life and theology can be enhanced. Some issues, however, require more critical evaluation. Berry’s creation-centrism, as one example, should not be presented without significant theological discussion regarding its interplay and distinction from Christocentrism. How might Berry’s thesis shift in light of the person of Jesus Christ? How might the church adapt Berry’s contributions, but necessarily challenge his theological foundation, to more appropriately reflect the Christian emphasis on Christ as the starting point for theology?

Ultimately, Bonzo and Stevens themselves make a substantial contribution to the church and theology by exploring the implications and possibilities for the church and Christian life evident in the writings of Wendell Berry. As the authors appropriately display, Wendell Berry is “a necessary voice.” Without a text as comprehensive and articulate as this one, Berry’s voice could not be as far-reaching or as sensibly understood.