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Wendell Berry—farmer, author, and activist—spent his life urging us to “live according to nature’s measure.” And this week, at the age of 92, he reached the end of the years nature had measured for him.
When I was a young fact-checker at Sojourners, I noticed we hardly published an issue of our magazine that didn’t mention Berry in some way. Over the years, I’ve heard multiple colleagues read aloud his famous poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” at staff meetings. His work inspired countless other writers, ecological activists, documentaries, and, once, a humor column (an imagined conversation between Berry and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; we think Berry would have been amused—Bezos likely less so). In 2004, my colleague Rose was lucky enough to travel to Berry’s farm in Henry County, Ky., and interview him.
Reading the obituary for Berry that we published, it’s easy to see why Berry shows up so frequently here at Sojourners: His words point out the moral hollowness of a world shaped by profit and plastic—and remind us that our faith calls us to live differently. Even skeptics often became Berry fans: “Once, when I was teaching graduate students in a doctor of ministry program, they initially rebelled when I sent them outside to go read one of Wendell’s poems to a tree,” Barbara Brown Taylor told Sojourners. “When they came back to the classroom, the rebellion was over.”
Some interpreted Berry’s sharp critique of industrialization and praise of rural life as a kind of nostalgia for a more “traditional” past. But as Georgia Coley writes, Berry regularly confounded those who tried to pin him to particular political categories. And his influence extends well beyond those who resemble the small-town rural folks he wrote about. “As a transgender woman, my life experience could not be more different than Berry’s, or the characters he wrote about,” writes Coley. Yet at a moment of profound change in her life, Berry’s novels offered the words she needed to hear.
Elsewhere this week: You learn a lot about a church by how it treats people who choose to leave. One chaplain explains what it’s like to minister in a church that’s “3 feet wide and 2,200 miles long.” And film columnist Zachary Lee maps out the most anticipated upcoming films that, as he says, “ground their thrills and stories around themes of spirituality and justice.”
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