Fire and Knowledge

Christianity Today has an article about Wendell Berry entitled “Imagining a Different Way to Live” by Ragan Sutterfield. It’s an excellent introduction to Wendell Berry and his thinking. I hope it will get many CT readers interested in Berry and conservation.

Both the stratification and the mobility are based upon notions of prestige, which are in turn based upon these reliquary social fashions. Thus doctors are given higher status than farmers, not because they are more necessary, more useful, more able, more talented, or more virtuous, but because they are thought to be “better”—one assumes because they talk a learned jargon, wear good clothes all the time, and make a lot of money. And this is true generally of “office people” as opposed to those who work with their hands. Thus an industrial worker does not aspire to become a master craftsman, but rather a foreman or manager. Thus a farmer’s son does not usually think to “better” himself by becoming a better farmer than his father, but by becoming, professionally, a better kind of man than his father.

–Wendell Berry, “Jefferson, Morrill, and the Upper Crust” in The Unsettling of America (1972), p. 159

I was a fundamentalist Christian once. It lasted a summer.

–Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality (2003), p. 79

The human drama is about trying to determine what is and is not significant in a finite life.

–Joseph Epstein, Friendship (2006), p. 42

[F]riendship is affection, variously based on common interests, a common past, common values, and, alas, sometimes common enemies, in each case leading to delight and contentment in one another’s company.

–Joseph Epstein, Friendship (2006), p. 21

The way is thus opened to run a university as a business, the main purpose of which is to sell diplomas—after a complicated but undemanding four-year ritual—and thereby give employment to professors.

–Wendell Berry, “Jefferson, Morrill, and the Upper Crust” in The Unsettling of America (1972), p. 149

Everyone shuns to see a man born, everyone runs to see him die.

–Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), “On Some Verses of Virgil” in The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate (1994), p. 95

I sometimes felt I was the perfect customer for a much needed but never produced Hallmark card that would read “We’ve been friends for a very long time,” followed on the inside by “What do you say we stop?”

–Joseph Epstein, Friendship (2006), p. 17