One of the biggest challenges the environmental movement faces is to figure out what to do with people.
Christian Leaders reflect on Wendell Berry’s essay
Flourish was pleased to republish, in its entirety, Wendell Berry’s seminal stewardship essay “The Gift of Good Land” on its 30th anniversary.
Read the original essay, and then consider the reflections of the following Christian leaders as they mark the anniversary with a fresh reading.
We depend upon others. That includes creation.
A long life of faith and stewardship is rocked and disturbed by Wendell Berry’s admonitions in “The Gift of Good Land.”
Today’s response to Wendell Berry’s essay “The Gift of Good Land” comes from Christian Buckley, author of the forthcoming book Humanitarian Jesus: Social Justice and the Cross. “The Gift of Good Land,” was published 30 years ago, and we reprinted it in the Fall 2009 issue of Flourish Magazine to celebrate Mr. Berry’s work, but [...]
Stop wishing for the perfection of Eden! Turning our perspective instead toward the Promised Land helps us understand how to function in this creation as the messed up folks we are.
Think “saving the earth” is overwhelming? You’re right. We live in neighborhoods and, Wendell Berry argues, must nurture those small parcels of earth before we can think any bigger.
Wendell Berry is right to remind us of our responsibility of stewardship. Is he right to tell us what stewardship looks like?
Living and acting in faith, gratitude, and humility helps heal the diseases that plague both land and people.
“Berry has reminded me that true heroism is far more dependent on a life that tenaciously makes consistent, long term, and righteous choices than one that pursues the notoriety of being an advocate for reformation.”
Ashley Woodiwiss’s bittersweet meditation on reading Wendell Berry then and now.
Down to earth. According to author and architect Michael Abbaté, that’s where Wendell Berry brings the values that guide us as Christians, keeping us from being “so heavenly minded that we are no earthly good.”
Berry rightly calls hubris the great ecological sin and reminds us that the temporary use of the Lord’s creation is a gift, not an excuse for exploitation.
In the prairie–worthless by conventional economic measures–writer Cindy Crosby find the invaluable.
“We cannot set out to make our living, if we are to be neighborly, by depriving and destroying our commonwealth—our common gift of good land.”
