Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader's Guide - Paperback

by Matthew J. Bonzo (Author), Michael R. Stevens (Author)

Wendell Berry's poetry, fiction, and essays persistently ask the question: How can we live meaningful lives in a consumer-driven, fragmented age? His honest search for health in the midst of disease has garnered attention and discussion in both conservative and progressive circles.

Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life thoroughly examines Berry's main themes of community, place, and conservation. It offers an apology for the power of Berry's vision and the ways in which his account of the world resonates with the biblical narrative. Pastors, students, professors, and laity will discover in this book how to flesh out Berry's worldview and foster a culture of life in their neighborhoods, churches, and schools.

Back Jacket

Matthew Bonzo and Michael Stevens here provide us with the clearest and most cordially inclined, but still clear-eyed, overview of Berry that I have seen to date. As the green-theology/neo-agrarian movement grows, this kind of careful reconsideration and assessment of its saints, forerunners, and older protagonists becomes increasingly pertinent and, indeed, even necessary.--Phyllis Tickle, author, The Great Emergence

"Over the past fifty years Wendell Berry has given witness to a vision of our life together that is proving to be indispensable and prophetic. Bonzo and Stevens have gleaned a rich harvest from this vision, showing that Berry's voice is one today's church cannot ignore. Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life is an excellent introduction and guide for those seeking a better, healthier, saner world."--Norman Wirzba, Duke Divinity School

"I have long ranked Wendell Berry among my most trustworthy guides as I have picked my way through the distorting and corrupting seductions of American culture. For forty years, in a succession of novels and poems and essays he has been reordering my Christian imagination to cultivate totalities, to live life as a spiritually organic whole."--Eugene Peterson, Regent College

"Once one is exposed to the comprehensive wit of Wendell Berry, there is no going back. The question 'What Would Wendell Berry Do?' comes to inform all manner of decisions in our buying, selling, and doing. In a treatment that is both wide ranging and robustly evangelical, Bonzo and Stevens bring Berry's witness to bear on one dim-witted economy after another with an invigorating account of Berry's more magnanimous economic vision. In a constant call to look harder at the world we're in, creation is imagined not as a resource for endless plundering but rather as the place where God's kingdom, the great economy, comes, offering the hospitality that sustains, our only home and our only hope."--David Dark, author, The Gospel According to America

Author Biography

J. Matthew Bonzo (PhD, Free University of Amsterdam) is professor of philosophy and Michael R. Stevens (PhD, University of Dallas) is professor of English at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.