Here's one of the greatest ever Wendell Berry couplets: "The Rational Mind is motivated by the fear of being misled, of being wrong. Its purpose is to exclud...

Imagine for a moment that in 1908, when the first Model T's rolled off Henry Ford's assembly line in Detroit, the cars had no brakes. Imagine they were stil...

The big news of the month was the Conservative party smashing whatever hope remained that something decent could be saved from this Brexit debacle, along wit...

If we assume that the inescapable goal of the farmer, especially in the present economy, must be to reduce costs, and, further, that costs are reduced by loc...

Despite my crusade to place Wendell Berry’s work and thought in the largest possible context, the stubborn truth is that he’s an agrarian fighting for small ...

People who love Wendell Berry like I do, must wish, like I do, that more people really loved him. What a world this could be. What a better society we could...

This letter is adapted from Wendell Berry’s 2000 essay “Going To Work,” published in Citizenship Papers (2003). Dear Facebook Programmer: To live, we must go...

Wendell Berry published Thoughts in the Presence of Fear shortly after 9/11. The second piece in Citizenship Papers, it’s a tabulation of 27 short exhortati...

What gave the president of the United States the right to shut down my government? There was something really weird about the shutdown, now finally over afte...

There’s a story in The Big Short, Michael Lewis’ chronicle of the recent U.S. housing bubble, about a guy named Michael Burry. Burry, the Christian Bale cha...

To mark the two-year anniversary of WWW, I want to say more directly something I’ve mostly just implied in these monthly posts. If we want to change how thi...

Sometimes I have to work pretty hard to tie the laces between a Wendell Berry essay and the news of the day. But that wasn’t going to be a problem with the ...

How many times a week do I hear someone declare that “communication” or “education” is the silver bullet that, if only done better, would cure whatever parti...

My wife loves to arrange flowers. In her next job, she says, she’ll stay home and arrange flowers and just the thought lifts her up, especially at the end o...

I’m not quite sure what’s been blocking my writing the last several weeks, but I have few theories. One is that Imagination in Place, my current Berry read,...

We live in a time of gathering losses. I’m thinking about job losses, the loss of national pride, and, all across this country, rampant loss of life in high ...

I’m writing from Sedona, Arizona this month, where I’ve been lucky enough to escape to for a few days. This landscape is one of those places that you know ev...

My mother always liked to say “big things come in small packages” – which popped to mind after reading two petite and consecutive pieces in Imagination in Pl...

In graduate school in the late 1990’s, I fell hard for Christopher Alexander. Fell as hard as a person can fall, short of falling in love. I must have been...

One might surmise that a fiction writer wouldn’t get very far in his craft without a healthy imagination. Wendell Berry has been spinning tales about make-b...