What follows is my account of Doug’s collecting adventures, and of a life spent noticing what other people overlook. | Continue reading
We’re listening to songs about marriage this week, and limiting ourselves to songs about reasonably happy marriages, at that. Send your song suggestions to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com! | Continue reading
John Byron Kuhner describes how seven years living alone brought a slow, strange healing. | Continue reading
If healing returns the body to itself, then Berry’s vision of public health might very well be to return the community to itself. | Continue reading
Consequentialism is a way to try to replace tradition all in one go, with “rational calculation.” | Continue reading
Mr. Eliot asks: “What life have you, if you have not life together? / There is not life that is not in community.” | Continue reading
Morgan's Salt Pork and Dandelion Greens: Growing up Greenwood [is] a memoir about growing up in the mid-twentieth century in the western mountains of Maine. | Continue reading
I guess not every day of the week has a feeling to it—it’s hard to imagine doing a show on Songs About Tuesday—but Sunday certainly does. Actually, it’s got a few different feelings, and I’ll try to cover them all. Send your song suggestions to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com! | Continue reading
How did a Baptist, Kentucky farmer come to sound so much like the Magisterium of the Catholic Church? | Continue reading
Jeff Reimer’s account of life in Newton, KS, which I had the privilege of visiting this summer, opens with some advice about what to do if you encounter a train coming through town. | Continue reading
Will the new owners love that land as much as my parents? I hope so. But I know they won’t love it more. | Continue reading
Two very different crises reveal the same failure: authorities had the power to act but failed those they were meant to protect. | Continue reading
Americans have sacrificed meaningful homes and strong communities for market pressures. | Continue reading
To see silence in this way requires a certain stillness in me and a trust that silence is there to be found. | Continue reading
The rhetorical method of the book is, above all, snark. | Continue reading
This week on A Symposium of Popular Songs, we’re listening to songs about New Orleans—Dixieland and rhythm and blues, of course, but also everything else I can think of. I felt unnecessarily negative about the city in this episode; I hope people who love it will forgive me. | Continue reading
Joe Knight looks to an English folk hero who fought against enclosures to imagine how we might resist digital enclosures today. | Continue reading
We are mediated from war—largely because we are mediated from reality—now more than ever. | Continue reading
Wendell Berry speaks of death in ways few of us can express. | Continue reading
Wild yet humble, the sycomore fig is a remarkable symbol of the Christian life, beautiful in its simplicity. | Continue reading
Econoclast: Herman Daly and the Gospel of Growth is a short, earnest, and intense tribute to a tall, soft-spoken, and rather non-confrontational man. | Continue reading
Someday our children may read those shelves the way Ruth Swain read her father's—not as a catalog of books but as the story of a life, with all its detours and discoveries. | Continue reading
It’s songs about war this week on A Symposium of Popular Songs—plus, I play some listener suggestions. Send your suggestions to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com! | Continue reading
Jeffrey Polet doesn’t want a data center in his backyard. | Continue reading
"Can there be forbidden—or, as I prefer, inopportune knowledge?" | Continue reading
Wendell Berry, more than most, showed the rest of us what it's like to choose membership over celebrity. | Continue reading
For a man whose intellectual and artistic and personal focus was so concentrated, Wendell Berry’s writings contained multitudes. | Continue reading
[Your grief] is unique to you, shaped by your memories, abstracted and then made concrete in ways I am not privy to. | Continue reading
If we take care of this holy Creation, we will meet our human purpose. We will also take care of our families and our communities. | Continue reading
Art about self-destruction always reminds me of Truffaut’s Dictum: “You can’t make an anti-war film,” since putting it on screen makes it glorious somehow. We’ll try to avoid that trap today. Send your song suggestions to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com! | Continue reading
Jason Peters remembers Wendell Berry and muses on his lasting legacy. | Continue reading
The herd: it is one of the things I most fear, not just from terrorists but from my fellow citizens, even from my friends and family. | Continue reading
“Death is a sort of lens, though I used to think of it as a wall or a shut door." | Continue reading
Berry slowly gets the point across to readers: each life only looks small when viewed from far away. | Continue reading
It would be hard to imagine the existence of Front Porch Republic without Wendell Berry. FPR is a project that does not compute. | Continue reading
We’re listening to songs about rivers this week—mostly American rivers, though we do make a brief detour into the Thames. Send your song suggestions to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com! | Continue reading
I believe we have lost one of our nation’s significant voices. | Continue reading
Patrick Deneen writes about how reading Berry led him to join with some others to found Front Porch Republic and to look for a job outside the Washington, DC area. | Continue reading
Rare is the writer who changes a person’s mind; Berry is the kind of writer who changes what one pays attention to. | Continue reading
Wendell is that American thinker who, for me, represents the true wisdom of a sacred and infuriating intersection: the crossroads where Real and Ideal meet. | Continue reading
Wendell Berry was a man in love. | Continue reading
"To the faithful," John Milton writes, "Death [is] the Gate of Life." Yesterday our friend Wendell Berry walked through this gate. | Continue reading
Upstaters is not a book for upstate New Yorkers only. | Continue reading
Let whimsy back into your life. When you do, you may find that joy comes along with it. | Continue reading
Nathan Beacom considers two different accounts of the role that virtue plays in public life. | Continue reading
The arrival of new gods does not coincide with clear vision. | Continue reading
In our polarized times, people have recognized that somehow everyone seems to like Dolly Parton. | Continue reading
An education in the human arts and sciences involves a present, embodied, non-automated engagement with art, ideas, and the written word. | Continue reading