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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 a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. The poems
of Wendell Berry invite us to stop, to think, to see the world
around us, and to savour what is good. Here are consoling verses of
hope and of healing; short, simple meditations on love, death,
friendship, memory and belonging; luminous hymns to the land, the
cycles of nature and the seasons as they ebb and flow. Here is the
peace of wild things.
In a culture that prizes keeping one's options open, making
commitments offers something more valuable. The consumerism and
instant gratification of "liquid modernity" feed a general
reluctance to make commitments, a refusal to be pinned down for the
long term. Consider the decline of three forms of commitment that
involve giving up options: marriage, military service, and monastic
life. Yet increasing numbers of people question whether
unprecedented freedom might be leading to less flourishing, not
more. They are dissatisfied with an atomized way of life that
offers endless choices of goods, services, and experiences but
undermines ties of solidarity and mutuality. They yearn for more
heroic virtues, more sacrificial commitments, more comprehensive
visions of the individual and common good. It turns out that the
American Founders were right: the Creator did endow us with an
unalienable right of liberty. But he has endowed us with something
else as well, a gift that is equally unalienable: desire for
unreserved commitment of all we have and are. Our liberty is given
us so that we in turn can freely dedicate ourselves to something
greater. Ultimately, to take a leap of commitment, even without
knowing where one will land, is the way to a happiness worth
everything. On this theme: - Lydia S. Dugdale asks what happened to
the Hippocratic Oath in modern medicine. - Caitrin Keiper looks at
competing vows in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. - Kelsey Osgood, an
Orthodox Jew, asks why lifestyle discipline is admired in sports
but not religion. - Wendell Berry says being on the side of love
does not allow one to have enemies. - Phil Christman spoofs the New
York Times Vows column. - Andreas Knapp tells why he chose poverty.
- Norann Voll recounts the places a vow of obedience took her. -
Carino Hodder says chastity is for everyone, not just nuns. - Dori
Moody revisits her grandparents' broken but faithful marriage. -
Randall Gauger, a Bruderhof pastor, finds that lifelong vows make
faithfulness possible. - King-Ho Leung looks at vows, oaths,
promises, and covenants in the Bible. Also in the issue: - A young
Black pastor reads Clarence Jordan today. - Activists discuss the
pro-life movement after Roe and Dobbs. - Children learn from King
Arthur, Robin Hood, and the occasional cowboy. - Original poetry by
Ned Balbo - Reviews of Montgomery and Bikle's What Your Food Ate,
Mohsin Hamid's The Last White Man, and Bonnie Kristian's
Untrustworthy - A profile of Sadhu Sundar Singh Plough Quarterly
features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to apply
their faith to the challenges we face. Each issue includes in-depth
articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art.
During the otherwise quiet course of his life as a poet, Wendell
Berry has become "mad" at what contemporary society has made of its
land, its communities, and its past. This anger reaches its peak in
the poems of the Mad Farmer, an open-ended sequence he's found
himself impelled to continue against his better instincts. These
poems can take the shape of manifestos, meditations, insults,
Whitmanic fits and ravings-these are often funny in spite of
themselves. The Mad Farmer is a character as necessary, perhaps, as
he is regrettable.
We have here gathered the individual poems from Berry's various
collections to offer the teachings and bitcheries of this amazing
American voice. After the great success of the lovely Window Poems,
Bob Baris of the Press on Scroll Road, returns to design and
produce an edition illustrated with etchings by Abigail Rover. His
hand-press pages will be off-set for our trade edition.
Ed McClanahan offers an introduction wherein he clears up the
inspiration behind the Mad Farmer himself. McClanahan also manages
to take more credit than he is clearly due. Then Berry weighs in
with an apology-and characteristic exaggeration. James Baker Hall
and William Kloefkorn offer poems here that also show how the Mad
Farmer has escaped into the work of others.
The whole is a wonderful testimony to the power of anger and humor
to bring even the most terrible consequences into a focus otherwise
impossible to obtain.
Fifty-two readings to spark weekly group discussion on putting
Jesus' most central teachings into practice. Jesus' most famous
teaching, the Sermon on the Mount, possesses an irresistible
quality. Who hasn't felt stirred and unsettled after reading these
words, which get to the root of the human condition? This follow-up
to the acclaimed collection Called to Community: The Life Jesus
Wants for His People taps an even broader array of sources,
bringing together prophetic voices from every era and a range of
traditions to consider the repercussions of these essential words.
More than a commentary or devotional, this book is designed to be
read together with others, to inspire communities of faith to
discuss what it might look like to put Jesus' teachings into
practice today.
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The Farm (Hardcover)
Wendell Berry, Carolyn Whitesel
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R494
R398
Discovery Miles 3 980
Save R96 (19%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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In 1969 Gary Snyder returned from a long residence in Japan to
northern California, to a homestead in the Sierra foothills where
he intended to build a house and settle on the land with his wife
and young sons. He had just published his first book of essays,
Earth House Hold. A few years before, after a long absence, Wendell
Berry left New York City to return to land near his grandfather's
farm in Port Royal, Kentucky, where he built a small studio and
lived there with his wife as they restored an old house on their
newly acquired homestead. In 1969 Berry had just published
Long-Legged House. These two founding members of the counterculture
and of the new environmental movement had yet to meet, but they
knew each other's work, and soon they began a correspondence.
Neither man could have imagined the impact their work would have on
American political and literary culture, nor could they have
appreciated the impact they would have on one another.Snyder had
thrown over all vestiges of Christianity in favor of becoming a
devoted Buddhist and Zen practitioner, and had lived in Japan for a
prolonged period to develop this practice. Berry's discomfort with
the Christianity of his native land caused him to become something
of a renegade Christian, troubled by the church and organized
religion, but grounded in its vocabulary and its narrative.
Religion and spirituality seemed like a natural topic for the two
men to discuss, and discuss they did.They exchanged more than 240
letters from 1973 to 2013, remarkable letters of insight and
argument. The two bring out the best in each other, as they grapple
with issues of faith and reason, discuss ideas of home and family,
worry over the disintegration of community and commonwealth, and
share the details of the lives they've chosen to live with their
wives and children. Contemporary American culture is the landscape
they reside on. Environmentalism, sustainability, global politics
and American involvement, literature, poetry and progressive
ideals, these two public intellectuals address issues as broad as
are found in any exchange in literature.No one can be unaffected by
the complexity of their relationship, the subtlety of their
arguments, and the grace of their friendship. This is a book for
the ages.
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry gathers one hundred poems
written between 1957 and 1996. Chosen by the author, these pieces
have been selected from each of nine previously published
collections. The rich work in this volume reflects the development
of Berry's poetic sensibility over four decades. Focusing on themes
that have occupied his work for years--land and nature, family and
community, tradition as the groundwork for life and culture-- The
Selected Poems of Wendell Berry celebrates the broad range of this
vital and transforming poet.
Though Easter (like Christmas) is often trivialized by the culture
at large, it is still the high point of the religious calendar for
millions of people around the world. And for most of them, there
can be no Easter without Lent, the season that leads up to it. A
time for self-denial, soul-searching, and -spiritual preparation,
Lent is traditionally observed by daily reading and reflection.
This collection will satisfy the growing hunger for meaningful and
accessible devotions. Culled from the wealth of twenty centuries,
the selections in Bread and Wine are ecumenical in scope, and
represent the best classic and contemporary Christian writers.
Includes more than seventy Lenten and Easter readings by Alexander
Stuart Baillie, Alfred Kazin, Alister E. McGrath, Amy Carmichael,
Barbara Brown Taylor, Barbara Cawthorne Crafton, Blaise Pascal,
Brennan Manning, C. S. Lewis, Christina Rossetti, Christoph
Friedrich Blumhardt, Clarence Jordan, Dag Hammarskjold, Dale
Aukerman, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothee Soelle, Dorothy Day,
Dorothy Sayers, Dylan Thomas, E. Stanley Jones, Eberhard Arnold,
Edith Stein, Edna Hong, Emil Brunner, Ernesto Cardenal, Fleming
Rutledge, Frederica Mathewes-Green, Frederick Buechner, Fyodor
Dostoevsky, G. K. Chesterton, Geoffrey Hill, George MacDonald,
Henri Nouwen, Henry Drummond, Howard Hageman, J. Heinrich Arnold,
Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Johann Christoph Arnold, John Dear, John
Donne, John Howard Yoder, John Masefield, John Stott, John Updike,
Joyce Hollyday, Jurgen Moltmann, Kahlil Gibran, Karl Barth,
Kathleen Norris, Leo Tolstoy, Madeleine L Engle, Malcolm
Muggeridge, Martin Luther, Meister Eckhart, Morton T. Kelsey,
Mother Teresa, N. T. Wright, Oscar Wilde, Oswald Chambers, Paul
Tillich, Peter Kreeft, Philip Berrigan, Philip Yancey, Romano
Guardini, Sadhu Sundar Singh, Saint Augustine, Simone Weil, Soren
Kierkegaard, Thomas a Kempis, Thomas Howard, Thomas Merton,
Toyohiko Kagawa, Walter J. Ciszek, Walter Wangerin, Watchman Nee,
Wendell Berry and William Willimon."
Berry's Sabbath poems embrace much that is elemental to human
life--beauty, death, peace, and hope.In his preface to the
collection, Berry writes about the growing audience for public
poetry readings. While he sees poetry in the public eye as a good
thing, Berry asks us to recognize the private life of the poem.
These Sabbath poems were written "in silence, in solitude, and
mainly out of doors," and tell us about "moments when heart and
mind are open and aware."Many years of writing have won Wendell
Berry the affection of a broad public. He is beloved for his quiet,
steady explorations of nature, his emphasis on finding good work to
do in the world, and his faith in the solace of family, memory, and
community. His poetry is assured and unceasingly spiritual; its
power lies in the strength of the truths revealed.
"Ignorant boys, killing each other," is just about all Nathan
Coulter would tell his wife, friends, and family about the Battle
of Okinawa in the spring of 1945. Life carried on for the community
of Port William, Kentucky, as some boys returned from the war and
the lives of others were mourned. In her seventies, Nathan's wife,
Hannah, has time now to tell of the years since the war. In Wendell
Berry's unforgettable prose, we learn of the Coulter's children, of
the Feltners and Branches, and how survivors "live right on."
'Do I wish to keep up with the times? No. My wish simply is to live
my life as fully as I can' The great American poet, novelist and
environmental activist argues for a life lived slowly. Penguin
Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the
iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a
concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here
are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman
Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson;
essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories
surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern
Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of
outer space.
Set against the turmoil of the World War II, "A World Lost" is just
one of the classic chapters in Berry's "Port William" series. The
summer of 1944 finds nine-year-old Andy Catlett in that very town
in Kentucky, occupied more with watching meadowlarks and dipping
into the nearby spring than with the weary news of the day. But
when his Uncle Andrew is murdered, Andy confronts his own sense of
culpability for the brawl that took his uncle's life. Told from
Andy's perspective some 50 years later, the novel explores the
gripping power of memory, even after decades have passed -- and
asks each of us what in our own pasts we might have remedied.
The essays in The Gift of Good Land are as true today as when they
were first published in 1981; the problems addressed here are still
with us and the solutions no nearer to hand. One of the insistent
themes of this book is the interdependence, the wholeness, the
oneness of people, the land, weather, animals, and family. To touch
one is to tamper with them all. We live in one functioning organism
whose separate parts are artificially isolated by our culture. The
twenty-four essays in this collection cover a variety of subjects,
from the author's journeys to the Peruvian Andes, to the desert of
southern Arizona, and to Amish country to study the evolution of
ancient native agricultural practices. In "Solving for Pattern,"
Mr. Berry lists fourteen critical standards for solving
agricultural problems that can just as easily be used as standards
for solving personal and family problems. In the title essay, the
author examines our Judeo-Christian heritage to discover parallels
with the Buddhist doctrine of "right livelihood" or "right
occupation." He develops the compelling argument that the "gift" of
good land has strings attached. We have it only on loan and only
for as long as we practice good stewardship.
Jayber Crow, born in Goforth, Kentucky, orphaned at age ten, began
his search as a "pre-ministerial student" at Pigeonville College.
There, freedom met with new burdens and a young man needed more
than a mirror to find himself. But the beginning of that finding
was a short conversation with "Old Grit," his profound professor of
New Testament Greek. "You have been given questions to which you
cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out perhaps a
little at a time." "And how long is that going to take?" "I don't
know. As long as you live, perhaps." "That could be a long time."
"I will tell you a further mystery," he said. "It may take
longer."Eventually, after the flood of 1937, Jayber becomes the
barber of the small community of Port William, Kentucky. From
behind that barber chair he lives out the questions that drove him
from seminary and begins to accept the gifts of community that
enclose his answers. The chair gives him a perfect perch from which
to listen, to talk, and to see, as life spends itself all around.
In this novel full of remarkable characters, he tells his story
that becomes the story of his town and its transcendent membership.
First published in 1971, The Country of Marriage is Wendell Berry's
fifth volume of poetry. What he calls an expansive metaphor is a
farmer's relationship to his land as the basic and central relation
of humanity to creation. Similarly, marriage is the basic and
central community tie; it begins and stands for the relation we
have to family and to the larger circles of human association. And
these relationships are in turn basic to, and may stand for, our
relationship to God and to the sustaining mysteries and powers of
creation.
Each of the thirty-five poems in this collection is concerned with
this metaphor. The long sequence that is itself entitled The
Country of Marriage, perhaps the finest single work in the book, is
a grave, moving, and beautifully wrought love poem. But the shorter
lyrics have an equal grace and beauty--writing that contains the
exhilarating lucidity of mountain spring water. And there are most
notably, several more poems about the Mad Farmer, who advises us
here to 'every day do something that won't compute.'
Berry has here perfected a work that is immediately accessible but
that becomes, as we read it again, always more satisfying,
reverberant with manifold meanings.
Since its publication by Sierra Club Books in 1977, The Unsettling
of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In
it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural
development and spiritual discipline. Today's agribusiness,
however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from
families. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the
land from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it.Sadly, his
arguments and observations are more relevant than ever. We continue
to suffer loss of community, the devaluation of human work, and the
destruction of nature under an economic system dedicated to the
mechanistic pursuit of products and profits. Although  this book
has not had the happy fate of being proved wrong," Berry writes,
there are good people working  to make something comely and
enduring of our life on this earth." Wendell Berry is one of those
people, writing and working, as ever, with passion, eloquence, and
conviction.
In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the
environmental movement. From the ravages of the global economy to
the great pleasures of growing a garden, Wendell Berry's powerful
essays represent a heartfelt call for humankind to mend our broken
relationship with the earth, and with each other. Over the past 75
years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become
irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world
have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place
at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through
the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these
books show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way
to a fairer, saner, greener world.
 If we fail to do what is required and if we do what is forbidden,
we exclude ourselves from the mercy of Nature; we destroy our
place, or we are exiled from it."The essays of Wendell Berry are an
extended conversation about the life he values; sustainable
agriculture, a connection to place, the miracle of life, and the
interconnectedness of all things. The existence of this life is
dependent on our devotion to preserving it, an emotional proximity
to the land that is slipping away from us.In six elegant, linked
literary essays, Berry considers the degeneration of language that
is manifest throughout our culture, from poetry to politics, from
conversation to advertising, and he shows how the ever-widening
cleft between the words and their referents mirrors the increasing
isolation of individuals and their communities from the land. With
his confident and unwavering prose, Berry assesses how the gap
between modern communities and nature grew so large, how we may
bridge it, and the role language plays in facilitating both
parts.Standing by Words joins our new series, which celebrates the
collected essays of Wendell Berry in beautiful, uniform editions.
The rhythms of this novel are the rhythms of the land. A Place on
Earth resonates with variations played on themes of change; looping
transitions from war into peace, winter into spring, browning flood
destruction into greening fields, absence into presence, lost into
found. This brings the revised 1983 edition back into print, the
next book in our program to put all of Wendell Berry's fiction into
print in revised and corrected uniform editions.
"Her great virtue as an advocate is that she is not a
reductionist. Her awareness of the complex connections among
economy and nature and culture preserves her from
oversimplification. So does her understanding of the importance of
diversity." -- Wendell Berry, from the foreword
Motivated by agricultural devastation in her home country of
India, Vandana Shiva became one of the world's most influential and
highly acclaimed environmental and antiglobalization activists. Her
groundbreaking research has exposed the destructive effects of
monocultures and commercial agriculture and revealed the links
between ecology, gender, and poverty.
In The Vandana Shiva Reader, Shiva assembles her most
influential writings, combining trenchant critiques of the
corporate monopolization of agriculture with a powerful defense of
biodiversity and food democracy. Containing up-to-date data and a
foreword by Wendell Berry, this essential collection demonstrates
the full range of Shiva's research and activism, from her
condemnation of commercial seed technology, genetically modified
organisms (GMOs), and the international agriculture industry's
dependence on fossil fuels, to her tireless documentation of the
extensive human costs of ecological deterioration.
This important volume illuminates Shiva's profound understanding
of both the perils and potential of our interconnected world and
calls on citizens of all nations to renew their commitment to love
and care for soil, seeds, and people.
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