Everyday Liturgy: How did you first learn of Wendell Berry and what are some of his poetry and other writing that have impacted you?

Troy: I first heard of Berry from my preaching professor, Anna Carter Florence.  And then that same year had great conversations about him with friends in Emergent: Brian McLaren and Laci Scott to name a few.  Since then I'll run into a book of poetry or essays or a quote on line and end up digging back into him.  When you asked me about this interview I grabbed the books I had and realized that more than half of my Wendell Berry collection I had given away to someone along life's journey.  Fidelity, I gave to a friend who lost her mother.  Sabbath Poems, to a young woman on the "Invisible Children of Sudan" tour.  And Given Poems I have lent to my friend, Mark Scandrett, from across the US in SanFrancisco and twice he has brought it with him cross-country to return and yet he ends up keeping it.  I love the way Berry can reach to most any person's spiritual core without being evasive or forceful. 

The first poem I ever read by Berry, perhaps his most popular was, "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front."  Its worth the whole interview if the reader would just read this aloud (the whole poem is here). Poetry is meant to be read aloud. ... more

About a year ago, a group of friends and I began a journey that we have since called community and named, The Netzer Co-Op. It was merely an experiment and yet it was also a daunting rethinking of what it means to be church in this time in place. When a community starts with a clean slate, everything is up for grabs and you have to decide what from your past will you carry into the future. Many of us grew up in the Lutheran tribe and other liturgical traditions. With out much deliberative dialog, we began to use the Revised Common Lectionary to guide our worship reflections on The Word. What began as instinct was soon understood as a rhythm of life and spirituality. The lectionary is not so much valuable in its shared liturgical unity across denominations and faith traditions, but rather the lectionary teaches what the Psalmist so eloquent announces, “You have made the moon to mark the seasons; the sun knows its time for setting.”[1]

Using the lectionary in community formation is about teaching a way of life that indeed knows the seasons and knows of the rhythm of the sun - a time for rising and a time for resting. The very nature of the seasons, the design of earth, has been created to teach us to live into a spirituality of rhythm and interdependence on creation around us. ... more

Christian community is not an ideal we have to realize but rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

It goes without saying that community is one of the major subjects taken up in Wendell Berry's vast collection of novels, poems, and essays.  Throughout his body of work one will regularly find references to community: failed, imperfect, hopeful, Christian, non-Christian, modern, ancient, rural, urban.  Within the topic of community one can also find a good amount of sub-topics explored in more detail: sex, economics, ecology, Christianity, family, and identity would be only a starting point for an index.  For the purposes of this essay I will focus on one of Berry's most important topics in his discussion of community: the Gathered Community.  Although I take this to be a central theme, one could argue that it is also quite marginalized.  There is no essay about the gathered community, there is no novel devoted to the idea, and there are few poems that reflect this idea directly.  This is because the Gathered Community serves as a backdrop for all of Berry's work, quietly driving Berry's vision and imagination into a coherent and unified whole. ... more

By Todd Edmondson

In a world marked by an ever-increasing sense of alienation and the corresponding desire for true friendship, Christian theologians, pastors, and church members have taken up the theme of community with a new urgency. Fortunately, the best among their discussions arrive at a definition of community that moves beyond the church carnival or ice cream social toward something far more radical-the sharing of life with one another, in all its messy glory. More than simply opening one's parlor to entertain company and perhaps sharing a freshly baked bundt cake, Christian hospitality, as defined more and more frequently, involves the opening of our lives and the sharing of our struggles with those whom God has given us as neighbors. ... more

by Dana Nichols

A region so often described as Christ-haunted and guilt-chastened has regularly produced writers and intellectuals who are concerned with more than sentimental portrayals of the South or chauvinistic myth-making.[1] Many literary figures of the South have looked, over the years with eyes clear of fear and nostalgia, regarding their region's past and future. They have sought to illuminate pressing issues that trouble the region, not only violence and racial prejudice but also pollution and the exploitation of the natural world. Leading the way is Kentuckian Wendell Berry who has struggled with issues of land, race, and poverty, the South's endemic and enduring qualities, and in commencement speeches, he encourages the new generation to take up the fight. ... more

The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
Wendell Berry
ISBN: 0-87156-877-2
Sierra Club Books
$13.95

Book reviews are usually done for relatively new books, yet this book has aged like a locally grown, organic, and small, family run farm wine.  So, thirty-one years later, this book is being included for review because of both its impact on the agrarian movement and all of its branches as well as the theme of this issue.

For a reviewer who is part of the first generation to fully feel the effects of the unsettling described in this prophetic book, and to review a book written to an audience who were my parent's age (and written before I was born), the immediacy of the book is still not lost.

The prophetic outcry and call-to-arms issued in this book are not lost so many years later because the agricultural problems and cultural devolution outlined in this book are far worse, and what Berry said would happen has unfortunately happened beyond his most mad and liberated farming dreams. ... more

Monk Habits for Everyday People
Benedictine Spirituality for Protestants
by Dennis Okholm
ISBN 978-1-58743-185-2
$12.99

Dennis Okholm, professor of Theology at Azusa Pacific University and Presbyterian minister, offers his contribution to a growing genre of literature written about monasticism for laity.  Part memoir, part reflection, the book recounts the author's own introduction to and developing relationship with Benedictine practice and spirituality and, in so doing, offers an invitation and apologia to his Protestant brethren who have been bred to be wary of such religious communities.  Okholm's under-lying thesis is that Evangelicals are plagued with a spiritual shallowness because they neglect the insights of historical Christian spiritual experience. ... more

by Christopher D. Rodkey

The Heidelberg Catechism: A New Translation for the 20^th Century
Trans. Lee Barrett 
ISBN 978-0-8298-1762-1
Pilgrim
$6.50.

Who would have thought that The Heidelberg Catechism would again become controversial in 2008, nearly 450 years after it was written by Zacharius Ursinus and Caspar Olevianus?  Just earlier this year, in 2008, the Presbyterian USA denomination recognized that their translation of this historic text needed to be re-translated, after noticing that translators actually added a specific condemnation of homosexuality into the text when it was last translated in the 1960s-while the original texts actually had no mention of homosexuality at all.  While I find this discovery astounding, how many of us are surprised by these kinds of "mistakes of translation" from mainline churches anymore? ... more

Finding Our Way Again: The Return of the Ancient Practices
Brian McLaren
ISBN: 0849901146
Thomas Nelson
$17.99

The premise of McLaren's newest book is this: the Abrahamic religions have been carrying on religious practice in the same modes and ways since Abraham first began to practice them.  Over 6,000 years of history in each of the great monotheistic religions has to amount to some value, inspiration, devotion, and usability.  So why are so many American Christians simply not using them?  Or worse, think they are heretical, too Catholic, or Satanic? ... more