Unsettling America

I am kind of cheating on this post.
I first came across it on Br. Tom Murphy's blog, "Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky."

Grant Wood’s 1930 painting of a pitchfork-wielding farm couple heralds our return to Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. How to interpret this portrait? How to interpret American Gothic, which to my mind means the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Through the lens of The Unsettling of America, an interpretation becomes clear; these farmers have disappeared, have sold their land to an agribusiness, and have longed ago moved to the city. If there is a land ethic in their faces, that has been replaced with specialists. In Chapter 2, “The Ecological Crisis as a Crisis of Character,” Berry focuses his attention on a main culprit “in an economy that is overwhelmingly destructive.”
Read the entire post here: magicfishbones.com

Christianity and The Survival of Creation

from Wendell Berry's essay "Christianity and the Survival of Creation," found in his book  Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community.

The sense of the holiness of life" is not compatible with an exploitive economy. You cannot know that life is holy if you are content to live from economic practices that daily destroy life and diminish its possibility. And many if not most Christian organizations now appear to be perfectly at peace with the military-industrialeconomy and its "scientific" destruction of life. Surely, if we are to remain free, and if we are to remain true to our religious inheritances, we must maintain a separation between church and state. But if we are to maintain any sense or coherence or meaning in our lives, we cannot tolerate the present utter disconnection between religion and economy. By "economy" I do not mean "economics," which is the study of money-making, but rather the ways of human housekeeping, the ways by which the human household is situated and maintained within the household of Nature. To be uninterested in economy is to be uninterested in the practice of religion; it is to be uninterested in culture and in character. Probably the most urgent question now faced by people who would adhere to the Bible is this: What sort of economy would be responsible to the holiness of life? What, for Christians, would be the economy, the practices and the restraints, of "right livelihood"? I do not believe that organized Christianity now has any idea. I think its idea of a Christian economy is no more or less than the industrial economy--which is an economy firmly founded upon the seven deadly sins and the breaking of all ten of the Ten Commandments. Obviously, if Christianity is going to survive as more than a respecter and comforter of profitable iniquities, then Christians, regardless of their organizations, are going to have to interest themselves in economy--which is to say, in nature and in work. They are going to have to give workable answers to those who say we cannot live without this economy that is destroying us and our world, who see the murder of Creation as the only way of life.

A second reason why the holiness of life is so obscured to modem Christians is the idea that the only holy place is the built church. This idea may be more taken for granted than taught; nevertheless, Christians are encouraged from childhood to think of the church building as "God's house," and most of them could think of their houses or farms or shops or factories as holy places only with great effort and embarrassment. It is understandably difficult for modern Americans to think of their dwellings and workplaces as holy, because most of these are, in fact, places of desecration, deeply involved in the ruin of Creation.

Read the entire essay here.

Prayer from Basil the Great, 4c C.E.

O God, enlarge within us the sense of fellowship
with all living things, are brothers the animals
to whom thou gavest the earth as their home in common with us.

We remember with shame that in the past
we have exercised the high dominion of [humankind] with ruthless cruelty.
So that the voice of the earth, which should have gone up to thee in song,
has been a groan of travail.

May we realize that they live not for us alone
But for themselves and for thee,
and that they love the sweetness of life.