Back Essays 1993–2017

Wendell Berry: Essays 1993–2017

Life is a Miracle | “Secrecy vs. Rights” | “Imagination in Place” |“It All Turns on Affection” | Forty-four essays in all More

Edited by Jack Shoemaker

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Interviews Mary Berry: Extending Wendell Berry’s legacy is “the most hopeful work I can think of”
September 13, 2019

News Photos: Wendell Berry and friends celebrate What I Stand On
August 14, 2019

Save $15 when you buy both volumes of the Wendell Berry essays edition in a deluxe boxed set.

This second volume in the Library of America edition of Wendell Berry’s essays presents writings from the latter half of his career, including the entirety of Life Is a Miracle (2000) and forty-two essays from nine other books published from 1993 to 2017: Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community (1993), Another Turn of the Crank (1995), Citizenship Papers (2003), The Way of Ignorance (2005), What Matters? (2010), Imagination in Place (2010), It All Turns on Affection (2012), Our Only World (2015), and The Art of Loading Brush (2017).

In Life Is a Miracle, written in response to E. O. Wilson’s best-selling 1998 book, Consilience, Berry argues that science and the modern, profit-driven industrial and technological regime cannot provide answers to all of our challenges. Instead, “we must learn to think about propriety in scale and design, as determined by human and ecological health. By such changes we might again make our work an answer to despair.” Among the influential and still-provocative essays included in this volume are “In Distrust of Movements,” “Conservationist and Agrarian,” “Secrecy vs. Rights,” “Faustian Economics,” “Imagination in Place,” and his inspiring 2012 Jefferson lecture, “It All Turns on Affection.”

Jack Shoemaker, editor, is Editorial Director of Counterpoint Press, publishing the works of Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, M.F.K. Fisher, Evan S. Connell, Robert Aitken, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and James Salter, among many others. He has worked with Berry for more than forty years.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for this volume was provided by The Gould Family Foundation and Walter E. Robb.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

from SEX, ECONOMY, FREEDOM & COMMUNITY (1993)
Conservation and Local Economy
Conservation Is Good Work
Christianity and the Survival of Creation
Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community

from ANOTHER TURN OF THE CRANK (1995)
Farming and the Global Economy
Conserving Forest Communities
Health Is Membership

LIFE IS A MIRACLE: AN ESSAY AGAINST MODERN SUPERSTITION (2000)

from CITIZENSHIP PAPERS (2003)
A Citizen’s Response
Thoughts in the Presence of Fear
The Failure of War
In Distrust of Movements
The Total Economy
Two Minds
The Whole Horse
The Agrarian Standard
Conservationist and Agrarian

from THE WAY OF IGNORANCE (2005)
Secrecy vs. Rights
Contempt for Small Places
Compromise, Hell!
Charlie Fisher
The Way of Ignorance
Quantity vs. Form
Renewing Husbandry
The Burden of the Gospels

from WHAT MATTERS? (2010)
Money Versus Goods
Faustian Economics

from IMAGINATION IN PLACE (2010)
Imagination in Place
American Imagination and the Civil War
Sweetness Preserved
The Uses of Adversity
God, Science, and Imagination

from IT ALL TURNS ON AFFECTION (2012)
It All Turns on Affection
About Civil Disobedience

from OUR ONLY WORLD (2015)
Paragraphs from a Notebook
The Commerce of Violence
A Forest Conversation
Local Economies to Save the Land and the People
Caught in the Middle
Our Deserted Country
On Being Asked for “A Narrative for the Future”

from THE ART OF LOADING BRUSH (2017)
The Thought of Limits in a Prodigal Age
The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: A Long Conversation

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-608-9 859 pages

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