I am also grateful to say that WB’s ideas hit me early enough to help form the way I have lived my life since then. Well, at least a little bit.

WB has a tendency to make the reader—perhaps most of all, the suburban reader—feel guilty. I’ve always been adept at guilt, and perhaps that is why I’ve read so much of WB. But recently, the world of opinion has caught up with him. We now realize that we consume too much and live too little. Sustainable living, urban gardening, solar heating, alternative energy, hybrid cars—these are water-cooler conversations, today. Back in the 60s and 70s when WB first began arguing for such things, he was more easily dismissed. Not now.

In the world of Christian ideas—of which WB has always been at least on the outskirts, liberal, peace/justice-oriented magazines like Sojourners have embraced him for decades. But even the evangelical Christianity Today featured him a couple of years ago. WB is a lifetime Baptist, attends church regularly, and—as any of his readers will know—reads his Bible carefully.

Three or four years after I began reading WB, in the spring of 1987, I recruited three college friends to join me on a pilgrimage to his farm near Port Royal, Kentucky. You see, all of his writing—the novels, poems, essays—stems from his commitments to that place, to that piece of land. He is a farmer, small town citizen, husband, and oh yes, a writer, too.

We left Chicago early in the morning and arrived in Kentucky late in the day, after a brief visit to Thomas Merton’s former abbey in nearby Bardstown. (WB and Merton were friends.) We used a photo from a dust jacket as our indicator of which family farm was his, and we found it without much trouble.

We stopped our car in front of the farmhouse and got out. Four of us milled around in the road for a quarter of an hour before I gathered the courage to walk up to the front door. Is this just horribly rude? I was wondering to myself. Can’t be any ruder than mingling unannounced in the front yard! I knocked gently. Wendell’s wife, Tanya, answered, opening the door more generously (I thought) than perhaps was warranted to a group of loitering gypsy college kids from up north. We chatted for a minute and, as it turned out, her husband was in Chicago for a poetry reading.

WB is perhaps best known today as the man who said, “Eating is an agricultural act.” Or who coined the phrase, “cheap at any price.” Or “To have everything but money is to have much.” Best of all—summarizing his worldview in nine words—are these two lines from one of his finest poems: “What I stand for / is what I stand on.” Perhaps you are beginning to see why his work appealed so strongly to an idealist college student. But WB’s ideas are for all of us, and never more necessary than they are, now.

The first I read, out of sheer silliness (having played the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game myself), was this, from MSNBC: "Microsoft study confirms 'Kevin Bacon' theory." The gist of the article by Peter Whoriskey is that,

With records of 30 billion electronic conversations among 180 million people from around the world, researchers have concluded that any two people on average are distanced by just 6.6 degrees of separation, meaning that they could be linked by a string of seven or fewer acquaintances. [2 August 2008]

The second article, linked to the first, was "Rampage Attributed to Hatred of Liberalism."

KNOXVILLE, Tenn., July 28 -- An out-of-work truck driver accused of opening fire and killing two people at a Unitarian Universalist church apparently targeted the congregation out of hatred for its support of liberal social policies, including its acceptance of gays, police said Monday. [Mansfield. Associated Press. 29 July 2008]

I wanted simply to juxtapose these articles by putting them together in one place and present one thought: the man who committed this atrocity was not nearly so separate from the people he shot as he might have assumed.

That the shootings took place in a church his wife once attended suggests that his connection to the people he injured and killed is probably even closer than six or seven degrees. You can hate a "movement," or even simply distrust it, as Wendell Berry did, but the movement is not the people.

The people are your neighbors, your community--you are connected to them no matter where they live, or what church they attend, or what movement you subscribe them to.

This is the first of a series of columns I intend to write on “the next conservatism.” In them, I will lay out where I think conservatism needs to go after the end of President George W. Bush’s second term.

Some people may wonder about the theme, “the next conservatism.” Isn’t conservatism always the same? Don’t we call ourselves conservatives because we believe in what Russell Kirk called “the permanent things,” truths that hold for all time?

Of course we do. We believe that truth comes from God, who does not change. We hold certain beliefs, such as the impossibility of perfecting man or human society, that define conservatism in any period. In fundamentals, what was true for Russell Kirk was also true for Edmund Burke. We are not relativists. We do not hold that there is or can be a different “truth” for each time, place or person, depending on what is “true for them.”

Yet it is also true that conservatism changes over time. Sometimes, that is because ideologies that are not really conservative try to disguise themselves with the conservative label (real conservatism is not an ideology at all). But more often, it is because new events face conservatives with new challenges. While our basic beliefs do not change, the circumstances to which we must apply those beliefs do. Burke and Churchill were both conservatives, but in the face of the French Revolution Burke stressed the importance of hierarchy and order, while under the threat of Nazism Churchill spoke of defending liberty. Their views were not contradictory, but the situations they faced were different. - Paul M. Weyrich, 18 July 2005

Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation's Next Conservatism web-page, replete with articles dedicated to topics ranging from "Country Life" to "Conservative New Urbanism" to "A Post-Literate Culture", absolutely fascinates me. As Weyrich posits in the excerpt above, the Next Conservatism is no-thing more (or less!) than the immutable, non-ideological conservatism of Kirk's permanent things; it's also, in a manner of speaking, an ideology, as conservatism must become in the political ring; not just an ideology, though, particularly not that of modern main-stream conservatism, the Next Conservatism embraces the crunchiness of Rod's conservatism, the protectionist sentiments of M'r Buchanan, Wendell Berry's agrarianism, a paleo-conservative/Old Rightist skepticism toward foreign intervention, and just about every other scrap of belief espoused by the diverse traditionalist conservative veins for which I am possessed of any affinity. From some ideas Weyrich presents, I deviate, but, by and large, I endorse the platform of the Next Conservatism. Expect, in the next couple of days, some commentary on specific essays, expressly those on New Urbanism (He defends sprawl, and I wish to suggest that, for the worse, he confounds sprawl with what can be a perfectly healthy sub-urban alternative to city life.) and agrarianism.

Last Sunday I read a piece in the Globe called Eat Republican, an article detailing the intersections between the organic food movement and American conservatism. Then yesterday I was reminded of that article when I read this article in The Sun Magazine. Fearnside interviews the respected writer, farmer, and social critic Wendell Berry, who, despite his popularity among liberals for his extremely pro-environmental stance, is someone who avoids modern technology (Berry does not own a computer, and still tills his farm using horses instead of machines) and who unabashedly sprinkles his writing with moral and religious language.

These two articles are really interesting in that they both highlight this underlying idea, which is that there have always been people who have seen beyond the "innovations" in the agriculture and food industries. There have always been people who have questioned these industries' products and their ability to preserve our health and our land. The people who question these industries have formed and broken off into different camps, each with a separate solution of how to sustain every link in the food production chain, whether it's through sustainable agriculture, organic agriculture, biodynamic farming, local/regional agricultural movements, community food security, food co-ops, or otherwise. In the face of Mad Cow Disease, books like Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dilemma, rising gas prices, food riots, flooded croplands and poisonous tomatoes, this all seems so...modern. Issues that have only recently come to the surface. Yet, they aren't recent issues at all. Think about it; the survival of any society relies on whether or not it can sustain healthy soil (and thus food supply) for as long as possible. It's an extremely basic and Jeffersonian question which brings to mind the virtuous farmer tending to his fields of wheat in some rural hamlet, far away from the city, "the cesspool of corrpution." Such a traditional "American" image gives us a glimpse of "the way things used to be", while embodying typically American ideals. So, it's really interesting to me that this issue has been adopted by people in the exact opposite political camp. It makes me feel like often times, liberals and conservatives are not two groups at opposite ends of the spectrum, but merely two groups with similar ideals and differing ways of achieving them.

I'm pretty liberal, politically, but I have recently been very attracted to the traditional foods movement for a lot of the same reasons that I think a lot of people are. I realized that 95% of things in this world are just different manifestations of the same thing. There is no such thing as true diversity anymore; everything from food to technology to textile manufacturing is controlled by a small number of extremely large and extremely profitable companies who could ultimately care less about the consumer, as long as they get theirs at the end of the day. Behind every product is a fundamental business model that has "flattened" both culture and economy with a plethora of devastating effects, and I have no interest in supporting any of that. Not only because I disagree with it and am sickened by it, but mainly because I have always been attracted to the challenge of making something from nothing, and am interested in truly living without the prepackaged help of Monsanto, Bayer, Galaxo Smith-Kline, Johnson& Johnson, Proctor & Gamble, Target, Wal-Mart, McDonalds, Starbucks, or any of the other thousands of enterprises that sell me five thousand versions of the same toxic, health-destroying, lying products. And I think there have always been people who had their feet under the carpet, so to speak, people who saw past the enticements and said "hey, wait a minute, this looks/tastes like the same shit that X store/restaurant/boutique sells." Isn't that what this country was founded on anyways? What happened to our communal sense? Our regional specialties? Where did we go wrong?

Everyone lives life through the stories we tell ourselves. Part of Paul's genius with the book of Romans is that he frames the lives of Christian converts through a new narrative – Israel's story retold. This is seen throughout chapters 5-8. Christians are no longer Adam's people. They are people of the new exodus who are being brought through the wilderness into their new glorious inheritance. This narrative gives us a new identity and baptism is the means by which our stories are brought into the fold of God's narrative for us (Rom. 6.1-14).

Stories matter. The stories that we tell ourselves matter. The stories that we read about in literature and watch on TV matter. If we're not careful the stories that we passively watch and read about can begin to shape our lives for the worse.

Stories that I see framed in the media are stories where success matters and success is defined in very narrow terms – power, control, money and fame. Ask anyone (especially the young and naïve) what their dreams are and you will find their stories are framed by success. And what do you expect? The average person watches four and a half hours of TV a day. We're not created to be isolated monads. Who and what we associate with matters because we tend to adopt their values (1 Cor. 15.33; Proverbs 13.20; 22.24-5). And it's important to note that these voices do not typically extol the virtues of being committed to family (maybe friends but not family).

What is needed then are resources to combat the voices that speak to us from culture. If we don't actively fight this we'll end up passively adopting them.

This is where Wendell Berry fits in.

Berry is most well known for his essays bemoaning the advent of the industrialization that came with modernity. He is an advocate for an older order of things - rugged families who provide for themselves – lovers of land and community; agrarians. He's become an advocate for farmers, a critic of the American war machine, and a committed environmentalist, all the while farming the same plot of land he's owned in Kentucky for 50 years.

The great thing about Berry is that he also writes fiction and poetry. And this is where Berry is a resource. His fiction (I've read Hannah Coutler and Andy Catlett) revolves around the fictional town of Port William. The narrative that frames the characters in his works don't struggle with status anxiety; they don't clamor after the latest fashions and trends. They are simple and contended people. Their lives revolve around their families. Everyone works – everyone does the same sort of work and everyone does it together. There's no corporate ladder to climb. The church matters but there's no frenetic activity. There are no small groups, youth groups or conferences. Everything happens organically.

Port William isn't perfect and neither is Berry. But he's a hell of a lot better voice to listen to than this fall's line up of sitcoms

Eating locally raised food is a growing trend. But who has time to get to the farmer’s market, let alone plant a garden?

That is where Trevor Paque comes in. For a fee, Mr. Paque, who lives in San Francisco, will build an organic garden in your backyard, weed it weekly and even harvest the bounty, gently placing a box of vegetables on the back porch when he leaves.

Call them the lazy locavores — city dwellers who insist on eating food grown close to home but have no inclination to get their hands dirty.

A Locally Grown Diet With Fuss but No Muss

These people are clearly unfamiliar with the real goals of the local food movement: to "know" our food better; to build community by building a local economy; to reduce fossil fuel usage; to support small farmers and fight unsustainable farming practices promoted by agribusiness; to become "native to this place" (Wes Jackson); to connect our consumption to our work by gardening or knowing and purchasing from those who do; to conform our lives to the natural rhythm of the seasons; to eat healthier and more tasty food. There are other reasons, I'm sure, but becoming fashionable by taking up a boutique cause is not one of them. And locavores were certainly never meant to continue their same consumptive lifestyles while others did the hard work for them.

But, then, we should have known something like this would happen. As Wendell Berry wrote in his essay "In Distrust of Movements": "The movements which deal with single issues or single solutions are bound to fail because they cannot control effects while leaving causes in place." (Whoever transcribed this essay made some errors, particularly in the upcoming blockquote.) Movements rarely address the fundamental issues. In the case of the local food movement the issues are quite complex. Everything from the transportation system and its basis in cheap fossil fuel to our attitude toward work to corporate ad campaigns to several dozen more factors. What the people in the linked article are doing is taking part in a movement while remaining oblivious to their contribution to the problems the movement is trying to address. They think buying food locally - or, rather, having it bought for them - is all they have to do. They never ask why they do it. Or if they do, their reasons all have to do with someone else.

Berry anticipated a common objection here:

I am not suggesting, of course, that everybody ought to be a farmer or a forester. I am suggesting that most people now are living on the far side of a broken connection, and that this is potentially catastrophic. Most people are now fed, clothed and sheltered from sources toward which they feel no gratitude and exercise no responsibility. ... The proper business of a human economy is to make one whole thing of ourselves and this world. To make in to a practical wholeness with the land under our feet is may be not altogether possible – how would we know? – but, as a goal, it at least carries us beyond hubris, beyond the utterly groundless assumption that we can subdivide our present great failure into a thousand separate problems that can be fixed by a thousand task forces of academic and bureaucratic specialists. That program has been given more than a fair chance to prove itself, and we ought to know by now that it won’t work.

Now that is getting closer to the heart of the problem. And that is not a problem easily addressed by movements. (Notice how close we are to talking about sin and the Fall here: we are "living on the far side of a broken connection.")

Though movements often fail to address the fundamental issues, Berry says he will participate on three conditions. First, "this movement should begin by giving up all hope and belief in piecemeal, one-shot solutions. ... Even now, after centuries of reductionist propaganda, the world is still intricate and vast, as dark as it is light, a place of mystery, where we can not do one thing without doing many thing, or put two things together without putting many things together." Give up on easy answers.

Second, "the people in this movement should take full responsibility for themselves as members of the economy." We must recognize that we are as much a part of the problem as anyone else. It's not just the government or the corporations or the political parties. We are all guilty and we all must share in the solution, however small our part may be. "In seeking to change our economic use of the world, we are seeking inescapably to change our lives."

Third, "this movement should content itself to be poor. We need to find cheap solutions, solutions within the reach of everybody, and the availability of a lot of money prevents the discovery of cheap solutions." This is why local food as a boutique cause will and must die. One of the most trenchant criticisms of "crunchy conservatism" was that it was yet another lifestyle option for bobos. It is also one of the reservations I have about the local food movement. It is a great idea. I believe the best motives of the locavores are noble. I had a peach from last week's farmers' market that nearly moved me to gastronomic poetry. The fact is, though, that it is more expensive to eat locally. I know Barbara Kingsolver tried to argue in AVM (great book, by the way) that it didn't cost that much more, but she also had an enormous garden and the resources to harvest her own chickens and turkeys. And I also know that Michael Pollan says that we should pay more and eat less. The fact remains that solutions centered on consumer choices always create niche markets with higher prices.

Though the local food movement has the weaknesses of all other movements, it is nevertheless a movement worth supporting. But don't forget the fundamental issues. Chief among them, as Wendell Berry said in another context, is our belief "that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible."

Exhibit at Lyman-Eyer Gallery, Provincetown MA

My summer show opened in Provincetown on Friday night. Seeing my new work in a different context, grouped by a different set of eyes, is its own kind of mind/body journey. But that good night was followed close upon by an early morning flight to a wedding in a Pennsylvania. The euphoria of celebrating and dancing the night away with friends may have masked any differential in arrival times of body and spirit. That much reveling feels like a blast of full body joy.

Shifting again, I spent Sunday at the 55th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, a contemporary show themed loosely (and I do mean loosely) around Is there Life on Mars? A big yes to a few of the artists whose work was included in that show---Bruce Conner, recently deceased California artist, consistently moving Vija Celmins and a young Indian artist, Ranjani Shettar.

Angel series, Bruce Conner

Conner was a highly unpredictable artist who refused to be pigeonholed into any of the isms and labeling that are so rampant in contemporary art. Some of his work in the past has moved me, some has not. But Conner's Angel series, photograms made from large sheets of light-sensitive paper exposed to a beam of light from a projector, are unforgettable. These images were created without a camera and feel apparition-like and other worldly. It was hard to not feel a bit weepy looking at these hauntingly beautiful works knowing that Conner passed away just a few weeks ago at the age of 74. Adieu to one of the brave ones.

Vija Celmins, Night Sky

Vija Celmins, whose image, Night Sky, won the Carnegie Prize, had a room full of her characteristically delicate paintings and drawings. I always find her work so insistently deep and authentic. She is one of the contemporary masters at holding tension between surface and depth.

Ranjani Shettar, Just a Bit More

Ranjani Shettar's installation held me breathless. She created an updated version of Indra's net out of a web of threads and hand-molded beeswax balls. It suggested outer space, multidimensional rabbit holes, the metaphor of a network that holds all of us in connection to one another. Exquisite.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Falling Water

The last leg of the journey was spent at Falling Water, Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece. I have been before, but I have never seen it in the context of the wild rhododendron forest of the Laurel Highlands. It is a flotilla of perfection, perched above those waterfalls and still, after all these years, an utterly compelling encounter.

Back home, most of the essential parts of me have returned with my body. Or maybe not. I'm still feeling these very distinct but powerful invitations to step out of the ordinary, whatever ordinary is, and to move in the landscape---both man made and natural---as one of its details.

DREHER: What about human society as an organism? Many people think of Wendell Berry as a man of the Left because he criticizes humankind’s unnatural exploitative relationship to agriculture and the environment, but Berry has argued on similar grounds against the individualist sexual ethic pervasive in contemporary culture. Is he on to something?

POLLAN: Berry’s on to a lot of things. He’s a very wise man. Is he Right or Left? Those categories don’t fit him. He is a fierce critic of capitalism because he sees it destroying community, destroying traditional sexual relationships, destroying family. I agree with a lot of that, but not all.

This is a blind spot in a lot of contemporary conservatism—not understanding that while capitalism can be a very constructive force, it can also be very destructive of things that conservatives value.

DREHER: It’s also a blind spot of contemporary liberalism to fail to see how pursuing a sort of autonomous individualism when it comes to social forms undermines a community in the same way that capitalism does.

POLLAN: That’s right. The Left can be blind to that possibility also.

It seems that many so-called "progressive" bloggers have seized on this as an opportunity to lambaste Berry as a "paleoconservative"--and dismiss many of his ideas as out-of-touch, and Berry himself as a "diehard, reactionary traditionalist."

It is true that Berry wrote in 1987 that he was not going to purchase a computer, so it seems to me that this backlash is perhaps happening in the wrong forum for Mr. Berry to make a reasoned response to their insults--and perhaps Berry's thoughtful, slow-reading prose might have inspired one of these authors' "general displeasure of reading some of the man's works." Or maybe it's, as White, Pollan, and others have noted, that he's just too difficult to pigeonhole into some straightforward label.

If these bloggers had read the July 2008 interview with Berry in The Sun magazine, they might realize that Berry is not so diehard as all that. He responds, when asked by interviewer Jeff Fearnside, about the apparent contradiction of Berry "rely[ing] on the machinery of the corporate world to get [his] message out," that:

There are contradictions in it, no doubt about that. There’s an absolutely lethal contradiction in my driving and flying around to talk about conservation and local economies. But you have to live in the world the way it is. You can’t declare yourself too good for it and move away. You have to carry the effort wherever you can take it.

You don't have to go for all Berry's ideas to know he's got a lot of good ones, and that his voice is incredibly valuable and amazingly accessible even though he's not personally online.

One of the most obnoxious mud-balls I've seen slung over and over at Berry is that his wife is a slave to him, and that she, and wives in general in Berry's view, exist only to "haul water and make babies" (I tried to locate this precise comment again and couldn't).

This was one of the accusations made when Berry wrote, in the aforementioned essay, that his wife types and edits his manuscripts, and he responded that while a defense of personal life is hardly ever entirely successful, the prosecution obviously had not taken into account that she might enjoy this work and receive some compensation for it.

I have read some, not all, of Berry's work, and I do not find his ideas on marriage as partnership as well as social contract reprehensible. I think that if a couple can create a life together wherein they support each other's endeavors, that is a positive thing. Not all couples can do this, of course, but to force a couple to work separately and both outside the home so they can "have their own lives" and fulfill some PC "feminist" modern dictum of how couples ought to behave is ridiculous.

Too--Berry's writings explore positive aspects of traditional ways of life that may not be entirely possible in this age, but can certainly be emulated and fit into our modern way of living. Berry's not telling us to give up our computers, he's explaining why he chose not to buy one, and if his reasoning makes sense to you, then maybe you should follow suit, or figure out some other way to cut back on your dependence on finite resources, the extraction of which destroys our environment.

Progressivism does not need to scrap every traditional idea in order to enter a "brave, new world." And the ideas of our best thinkers, Berry included, may not all be palatable to every one of us. But if Berry's words can inspire thoughtful nods and assent on both the right and the left, and in the middle as well, that seems like a good thing to me.

It is a meager and mean thing for the so-called "progressives," on seeing Berry's name in a conservative magazine, to give Berry and his ideas over to the "other side." Berry and his words do not belong to any side other than his own perspective, and it is an immensely valuable one.

As I looked up from my reading to see a young boy from the youth group drop an entire tomato into the dirt and proceed to toss it in the trash bag because it was "dirty," I thought about the fact that this very tomato was born in the dirt. The large disconnect that exists between the food we eat and the dirt it came from contributes to the "profound failure of imagination" that Wendell Berry describes in his essay "In Distrust of Movements":

"We are involved now in a profound failure of imagination. Most of us cannot imagine the wheat beyond the bread, or the farmer beyond the wheat, or the farm beyond the farmer, or the history (human or natural) beyond the farm. Most people cannot imagine the forest and the forest economy that produced their houses and furniture and paper; or the landscapes, the streams, and the weather that fill their pitchers and bathtubs and swimming pools with water. Most people appear to assume that when they have paid their money for these things they have entirely met their obligations. And that is, in fact, the conventional economic assumption. . .

Money does not bring forth food."

I know that my imagination has often failed in this way without even realizing it.

This past spring I helped out at a wonderful organization called Joshua Farm in Harrisburg, PA. When Kirsten, the woman who runs it, informed us that part of her mission for the urban farm was to educate kids living in the city that the food they eat comes from the ground and not the grocery store shelf, I chuckled. Everyone knows that food doesn't come from the grocery store... but maybe subconsciously we don't. Our general concern is that we have the money needed to acquire our food, and we don't concern ourselves nearly as much with the health of the land and the weather conditions that are the real reasons we have food. As I worked at Joshua Farm each week, I discovered that I was the urban child that this farm was educating.

Jesus for President (my most quoted book of the summer) poses the question,

"How can we fully love the Creator when we've grown so far from the creation?"

I've spent much of my summer marveling at the first garden I've ever had. My dad and I work on it together, and our neighbors generously let us grow it in their yard. I can't believe how different the experience is to collect my food from the ground that I've watched and cared for all summer.

It's making my imagination fail a little less.

For us, the possibility of kindly use is weighted with problems. In the first place, this is not ultimately an organizational or institutional solution. Institutional solutions tend to narrow and simplify as they approach action. A large number of people can act together only by defining the point or the line on which their various interests converge. Organizations tend to move toward single objectives – a ruling, a vote, a law – and they find it relatively simple to cohere under acronyms and slogans.

But kindly use is a concept that of necessity broadens, becoming more complex and diverse, as it approaches action. The land is too various in its kinds, climates, conditions, declivities, aspects, and histories to conform to any generalized understanding or to prosper under generalized treatment. The use of land cannot be both general and kindly – just as the forms of good manners, generally applied (applied, that is, without consideration of differences), are experienced as indifference, bad manners. To treat every field, or every field, with the same consideration is not farming but industry. Kindly use depends upon intimate knowledge, the most sensitive responsiveness and responsibility. As knowledge (hence, use) is generalized, essential values are destroyed. As the householder evolves into a consumer, the farm evolves into a factory – with results that are potentially calamitous for both.

The understanding of kindly use in agriculture must encompass both farm and household, for the mutuality of influence between them is profound. Once, of course, the idea of a farm included the idea of a household: an integral and major part of a farm's economy was the economy of its own household; the family that owned and worked the farm lived from it. But the farm also helped to feed other households in towns and cities. These households were dependent on the farms, but not passively so, for their dependence was limited in two ways. For one thing, the town or city household was itself often a producer of food: at one time town and city lots routinely included garden space and often included pens and buildings to accommodate milk cows, fattening hogs, and flocks of poultry. For another thing, the urban household carefully selected and prepared the food that it bought; the neighborhood shops were suppliers of kitchen raw materials to local households, of whose needs and tastes the shopkeepers had personal knowledge. The shopkeepers were under the direct influence and discipline of their customers' wants, which they had to supply honestly if they hoped to prosper. The household was therefore not merely a unit in the economy of food production; its members practiced essential productive skills. The consumers of food were also producers or processors of food, or both.

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, Avon: 1978, pp. 30-31.

Shortly after I read these paragraphs I was listening to an audio recording of Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Thankfully it looks like some of what Berry lamented as lost is returning in the form of farmers' markets and the local food movement. Another point of comparison is Berry's warning that organizational or governmental solutions do not work and Kingsolver warning that the USDA's organic certification does not necessarily mean anything.

The best and only defense for both growers and the consumers who care is a commitment to more local food economies. It may not be possible to prevent the corruption of codified organic standards when they are so broadly applied. A process as complex as sustainable agriculture can't be fully mandated or controlled. The government might as well try to legislate happy marriage. Corporate growers, if their only motive is profit, will find ways to follow the letter of organic regulations while violating their spirit. But "locally grown" is a denomination whose meaning is incorruptible. Sparing the transportation fuel, packaging, and unhealthy additives is a compelling part of the story, but the plot goes well beyond that. Local food is a handshake deal in a community gathering place. It involves farmers with first names who show up week after week. It means an open-door policy on the fields, where neighborhood buyers are welcome to come have a look and pick their own food from the vine. Local is farmers growing trust.

Transcribed from an audio recording of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, end of chapter eight.

Reading Paulo's story also reminded me, of course, how small a matter it is that my (pregnant) wife and I have started to leave 10 minutes earlier in order to walk about a half mile to church each week. We are happy to see several other walking couples in our ward, including several with infants and toddlers. But we walkers are a very small minority in my ward and stake. (We are in a BYU married stake with nine wards that meet in the same building; our apartment is probably the average distance from the meetinghouse.)

Certainly it would not be a difficult thing for more in our stake to walk. It could hardly even be called a sacrifice for most. Rather, it would be a chance to have a nice stroll with your family and other ward members, as well as enjoy God's creations. It would simply take a commitment to plan ahead to do so. Certainly the same can be said for many, many church members around the world (you know who you are).

This can also be an excellent thing to do if you, I don't know, happen to be one of those people who are worried about gas prices. The gas savings might be small, but they will add up. Perhaps more importantly, you will be doing the best thing that you can do to lower gas prices -- using less gas. The more responsive Americans are to rising gas prices -- by using less gas -- the less likely and quickly they will rise and more likely and quickly they will fall. Really, you never would guess there is a gas price problem when you see all the people who drive half a block to church!

Are we really that addicted to our cars? The fact that so many of us are driving tiny distances to church when gas costs $4 a gallon reveals that we are. We would be wise to hear what Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer, poet, and essayist, has to say about things like oil addiction. In his 1991 essay "The Problem of Tobacco," Berry argues that many people are (rightfully) opposed to addictive substances like tobacco but are so distracted that they fail to see that they themselves are addicted to a lifestyle (like oil addiction) that is quite harmful to themselves, others, and the environment. These people, says Berry,

will sit in their large automobiles, spewing a miasma of toxic gas into the atmosphere, and they will thank you for not smoking a cigarette.

Berry goes on,

I'm against addiction to all things that are damaging and unnecessary.... Speed, comfort, violence, usury.... Legal drugs, too. And then there are some damaging things that are only necessary because we are addicted to them.... Petroleum. Most poisons. Automobiles....

We are an addictive society ... our people are rushing from one expensive and dangerous fix to another, from drugs to war to useless merchandise to various commercial thrills, and ... our corporate pushers are addicted to our addictions.

Berry is not saying that we should never drive. This of course is impossible in today's world. But he is pointing out the dangers of being addicted to driving. And he's making the provocative argument that it's not only harmful to our wallets, our waists, and the environment -- it's harmful to our souls. It cuts us off from the world around us and chains us to a life of unnecessary convenience. Moreover, it lulls us away from our local communities. In his 1991 essay "Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse," Berry explains,

Global thinking can only do to the globe what a space satellite does to it: reduce it, make a bauble of it. Look at one of those photographs of half the earth taken from outer space, and see if you recognize your neighborhood. If you want to see where you are, you will have to get out of your spaceship, out of your car, off your horse, and walk over the ground. On foot you will find that the earth is satisfyingly large and full of beguiling nooks and crannies.

Have you ever walked along a street that you often drive on and been amazed at what you notice? The people you see that might need your help? The problems you discover that might need your assistance? The creations of God that deserve your wonder? In essence, the community that you somehow have whizzed past? I certainly have, and these experiences remind me "that it is not needful ... to be moving swiftly upon the waters, whilst the inhabitants on either side are perishing" (Doctrine & Covenants 61:3). They remind me, in the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, that

Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes.

Or gets out of his car.

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I'm consistently amazed by Berry's knack for finding parallels to the crises we find ourselves in today in the canon of world literature; in this case, he compares our burning passion for preserving the AWOL (my term for "American Way Of Life") at all costs with the desire for unlimited power and knowledge of Faust. We the people are Faust; Mephistopheles is the guardian of the AWOL; and concerning Hell,

When Faustus asks, “How comes it then that thou art out of hell?” Mephistophilis replies, “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.” And a few pages later he explains:

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place, but where we [the damned] are is hell,
And where hell is must we ever be.

For those who reject heaven, hell is everywhere, and thus is limitless. For them, even the thought of heaven is hell.

I leave it to you to finish the analogy.

A conversation with Norman Mailer about Iraq, Israel, the perils of technology and why he is a Left-Conservative.

On a crystalline day in October, Taki, Kara Hopkins, and Scott McConnell met at Logan Airport and drove up the Cape to Norman Mailer’s home in Provincetown, Mass. Taki is an old friend of Mailer’s; McConnell and Hopkins knew his writing well but had never met the man.

The vagaries of literary reputation are not the main beat of The American Conservative, but we were struck by how many people told us how important Mailer was at a certain time of life and how invariably that time was young adulthood—somewhere between 18 and 21. Perhaps that is the moment in life when readers are most receptive to a certain kind of bold writing.

What follows is a conversation about what most interested the four of us on that day, as well as an addendum Mailer wrote later. We spoke of the present and future more than the past: a mixture of politics (Iraq, the imperial urge, styles of conservatism) and more typically Maileresque themes (the problem of technology). After several hours of talk and the gracious hospitality of Norris Church Mailer we made our way back to normal life, not doubting that we had spent an extraordinary afternoon with the greatest living American writer.

I happened upon this interview a few years after its publication, after I had read Mailer's The Armies of the Night: History As A Novel, The Novel as History in Steven Affeldt's Political and Constitutional Theory, a required course in my beloved Program of Liberal Studies, and had become incredibly intrigued by what he called his left-conservatism. Now, in 1999, the editors at ISI, with the assistance of various consultants, compiled lists of the fifty worst and best books of the twentieth century; amongst the former, they list Armies, commenting, "Fact or fiction? Not even Mailer knew for sure." I have no interest in debating the wisdom of this decision; their pithy remark, I think, has some validity. Nevertheless, I disbelieve that we should discount what merits this book possesses. Specifically, I wish to draw attention to a passage, which I many times have re-read, that has profoundly affected me since I first experienced this work in the fall of 2004 (I think!).

The cold war may be over, but a cold wind is blowing into our churches. Dear brothers and sisters of the elect, we must stand firm against this subtle infiltration of the work of the antichrist. There is a new hair raising rising of neo-socialists and these Marxists want to turn our churches into centres of social help, urging Christians to reach out to the widows, orphans and poor. These Red Letter Christians even use the Scriptures to validate their Bolshevistic march on the elect.

The church's purpose is to serve the elect, keep them comfortably separate from the world and pass judgement on the non-elect. Those not part of the elect is condemned anyway, so why worry if they are hungry, thirsty, naked, sick or in prison?

Let us not soften our hearts to the calls of the non-elect lesser fortunate, but let us push forward with narrow vision on our purpose to use the Truth as a weapon and bring down every high and lofty thought of these emergent Socialists.

Will Farel XV
Running from for the Truth

P.S. If your name appears in the Tags, know that you have been "marked".

I am definitely for the city. I really enjoy living in the pulse of the city--the community, the culture, the crud. It is enlivening and alarming, a reminder that heaven has not yet quite become earth! It's also a great opportunity to participate in renewing and redeeming the brokenness of the city. As pastor Austin City Life, I get to redemptively engage the peoples and cultures of Austin with a missionally-minded community. Yet, in all of this urban living, working, redeeming, and playing, I sense a certain city-olatry, the worship of the city. People love their cities, even to a fault. Certain evangelicals have become so city-focused that concern for rural areas is falling to the wayside. Some have even argued that the expansion of urban slums is a positive economic development (and maybe it is), but in all this urbanolatry we do well to pause and learn from the rural, from the culture of the country.

In his thoughtful essay on tobacco, Wendell Berry lists the benefits of tobacco production. Among them is the practice of "swapping work." Tobacco, Berry points out, is a very "sociable crop," one that calls upon the entire community for help in the setting, cutting, stripping and harvesting of tobacco. He comments:

At these times, neighbors helped each other in order to bring together the many hands that lightened work. Thus, these times of hardest work were also times of big meals and much talk, storytelling and laughter.

I was struck by what we can learn from this country culture, from tobacco harvesting outside city limits. In the city, especially among knowledge workers, when a workload increases community declines. People buckle into the cubicle or office for days, only to emerge an angry, tired mess. Berry recounts a community increase with hard work, more laughter and meals. Urban work deadlines bring about despair, less meals, less sleep, and less time at home with the family. Far from enriching community, urban work isolates individuals from co-workers and families.

It would appear that the city has much to learn from the country. Perhaps some repentance from urbanolatry is in order. A little humble pie for us urban dwellers and an opportunity to digest some rural wisdom, "work swapping" could take us a long way in cultivating community, in renewing the city.

On a tangential but positive note, I was reading in the fabulous Sun magazine, which I've mentioned on this blog before, an interview with novelist, poet, essayist, teacher, and family farmer, Wendell Berry. I've heard his name bandied about from time to time, but I've never read any of his work. This is crazy because he really epitomizes an ideology to which I struggle to subscribe. About the importance of community, communication, landscape, identity, food production, and ecology. I'm checking some of his work out of the library and going to pursue his as a subject for the next installment of the A Sense of Place series. Here's some quotes from the article of his I found meaningful:

To make yourself a passive receptacle for information, or whatever anybody wants to pour into you [advertising? my q] is a bad idea. To be informed used to be a  meaningful experience; it meant "to be informed from within." But information now is just a bunch of disconnected data or entertainment and, as such, may be worthless, perhaps harmful. As T.S. Eliot wrote a long time ago, information is different from knowledge, and it has nothing at all to do with wisdom.

Greed is a part of human nature, and greed is the root cause of these disasters. Once you have greed and the means of exploitation, the high-toned rationalizations - in other words, the excuses - folow as a matter of course. A real culture functions to limit greed. Our culture functions to increase it, because, as we are repeatedly tod, it's profitable to do so, though the majority of the profits go to only a few people.

Real reading, of course, is a kind of work. But it's lovely work. To read well, you have to respond activelyt o what the writer's saying. You can't just lie there on the couch and let it pour over you. . . . The poet John Milton understood that the best readers are rare. He prayed to his muse that he might a "fit audience find, though few."

It's awfully hard to have an idea that somebody else hasn't already had, you know. The French writer Andre Gide worried that he wasn't original enough, and then he finally consoled himself by realizing that the same things need to be said over and over again, because the times change, and the context shifts, and the language changes, and the ideas need to be expressed again in new ways, to be submitted anew to the test of sentences.

When I figured out I could be perfectly happy and not be a writer, I became a better writer. . . . The unhappiest people in the world may be the ones who think their happiness depends on artistic success of some kind.

Thank you Wendell Berry.

A Warning to My Readers- Wendell Berry

Do not think me gentle
because I speak in praise
of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace
that keeps this world. I am
a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies. That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is.

 longer know what to do,

we have come to our real work,

 and that when we no longer know which way to go,

 we have begun our real journey."

It was like the water of a river

flowing shallow over the ice.  And now

that the rising water has broken

the ice, I see that what I thought

was the light is part of the dark.

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For the time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

                                                 Wendell Berry

I go among trees and sit still.

All my stirring becomes quiet around me

like circles on water.

My tasks lie in their places where I left them

asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes

and lives a while in my sight.

What it fears in me leaves me

and the fear of me leaves it.

It sings and I hear its song.

Than what I am afraid of comes.

I live for a while in its sight.

What I fear in it leaves it

and the fear of it leaves me.

It sings and I hear its song.

The earth shakes, grinding its deep stone;
All night the cold wind heaves and pries;
Creation strains sinew and bone
Against the dark door where He lies.

The stem bent, pent in seed, grows straight
And stands. Pain breaks in song. Surprising
The merely dead, graves fill with light
Like opened eyes. He rests in rising.

Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir: Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, pg. 23

[At the] Convocation & Pastors’ School, ... we explore the idea and practice of sustainable living with author Wendell Berry, environmentalist Wes Jackson, and theologian Norman Wirzba.

Our Daily Bread 2007 by Norman Wirzba on MP3 Digital Download

Ellen David, "Introduction", MP3 audio

Wes Jackson, "When the Tree of Knowledge Becomes a Vine", MP3 audio

Janice Virtue, "Introduction: On Membership and Belonging: A Conversation", MP3 audio

Wendell Berry & L. Gregory Jones, "On Membership and Belonging, A Conversation", MP3 audio

Stanley Hauerwas, "Introduction: The Land, Our Food, and Our Responsibility", MP3 audio

Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson, "The Land, Our Food and Our Responsibility", MP3 audio