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.

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.

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.

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."

'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.

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.

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.

 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.

This volume of six linked stories and the novella from which the book derives its title is set in Port William from 1908 to the Second World War. Here Wendell Berry introduces two of his more indelible and poignant characters, Ptolemy Proudfoot and his wife Miss Minnie, remarkable for the comic and affectionate range that-with the mastery of this consummate storyteller working at the height of his powers-here approaches the Shakespearean. Tol Proudfoot is huge, outsized, in the tradition of the mythic. The three-hundred-pound farmer, personally imposing and unkempt, is also the most graceful of presences, reserved and gallant toward his tiny wife, the ninety-pound schoolteacher. Their contrasts are humorous, of course, and recall the tall tales of rural Americana. In the novella Watch with Me, we are given a story of such depth, breadth, and importance it earns being listed as one of the most important short stories written in the American language during the twentieth century. "Wendell Berry writes with a good husbandman's care and economy . . . His stories are filled with gentle humor." The New York Times Book Review "Berry is the master of earthy country living seen through the eyes of laconic farmers . . . He makes his stories shine with meaning and warmth." The Christian Science Monitor "A small treasure of a book . . . part of a long line that descends from Chaucer to Katherine Mansfield to William Trevor." Chicago Tribune