Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Wendell Berry and Higher Education
WORK NOTES: with Jack R. Baker
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Jackson
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.arbor.edu/faculty/jeff-bilbro/ * https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffrey-bilbro-4b1a5338/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in WA.
EDUCATION:George Fox University, B.A. (summa cum laude), 2007; Baylor University, Ph.D., 2012.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Spring Arbor University, Spring Arbor, MI, 2012—, began as assistant professor, became associate professor of English.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Ecological Awareness of Early Scribes of Nature, edited by Steven Petersheim and Madison Jones IV, Lexington Books, 2015. Contributor to journals, including Christianity and Literature, Early American Literature, Journal of Ecocriticism, Milton Quarterly, and South Atlantic Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Jeffrey Bilbro is an English professor whose research focuses on theology and environmental ethics in American literature. He is the author of essays on a wide range of topics, including food, baseball, national parks, J.R.R. Tolkien, beauty, work, poetry in an iPhone culture, and place.
Loving God's Wilderness
In his first book, Loving God’s Wildness: The Christian Roots of Ecological Ethics in American Literature, Bilbro examines the environmental roots of America’s Puritan heritage. “The Puritans were religious and they were capitalist (or proto-capitalist) colonists,” Bilbro noted in an interview with Mark T. Edwards for the Religion in American History website, adding: “So they were torn between a desire to serve God, and a desire to make a lot of money. That tension pretty much sums up the history of how Americans relate to nature.”
Bilbo explains in Loving God’s Wildness that when the Puritans arrived in the New World, they believed they were mandated by God to colonize America. However, the American wilderness presented a dilemma. Their theological beliefs included the belief that nature was God’s temple and should be glorified in honor of God. On the other hand, they also saw America as the devil’s territory that needed to be brought into God’s kingdom. As a result, this brought about an ambivalence concerning the land and peoples’ relation to it.
In Loving God’s Wildness, Bilbro examines the dualistic Christian view of nature as a temple and as a source of marketable commodities. He does so via the writings of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Willa Cather, and Wendell Berry. In the process, he presents his case that these writers helped reshape the Puritan dualism into a theology that would take into consideration that nature is God’s land and deserves an ecological stewardship that demands the end of selfish use of the land. Bilbro “investigates the often-overlooked religious roots of environmental literature,” noted S. Petersheim in Choice. Andrew J. Spencer, writing for the Thermilios website, noted: “Bilbro’s work … makes a compelling case for the relationship between Christianity and American environmentalism.”
Wendell Berry and Higher Education
With Jack R. Baker, Bilbro wrote Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place. Although Berry, a farmer, ecologist, and cultural critic, is known for thoughts and writings about agrarianism and environmentalism, he has also written extensively about education. Bilbro and Baker draw from Berry’s essays, fiction, and poetry to examine Berry’s vision for higher education. The authors point out that Berry has written about his belief that American education has played a primary role in America’s cultural obsession with restless mobility that encompasses both moving on and moving up, which Berry believes damages not only the land but also the character of communities.
Beginning each chapter with a fictional narrative by Berry, Bilbro and Baker then go on to discuss how the passages present new approaches to thinking about the mission of higher education. A major issue addressed by Bilbro and Baker is the difference between educating students to be fragmented into specializations that determine their careers and the need to foster imagination and context. Education, according to Bilbro and Baker, should include of all kinds of people and ideas so that graduates go on to work with the idea of being part of a community. They also discuss the importance of physical work in relation to intellectual development.
The authors “do a fine job pointing out the ways in which imagination, work, and language can become portals for learning the art of caring for our places,” wrote Spirituality and Practice website contributors Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat. A Publishers Weekly contributor commented that Bilbro and Baker “present an enlightening interpretation of Wendell Berry’s philosophy for the pursuit of a holistic higher education.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, March, 2016, S. Petersheim, review of Loving God’s Wildness: The Christian Roots of Ecological Ethics in American Literature, p. 1019.
Chronicle of Higher Education, May 26, 2017, Peter Monaghan, “College as the ‘Gateway Drug’ to Rootlessness,” review of Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place, p. A33.
Publishers Weekly, April 24, 2017, review of Wendell Berry and Higher Education, p. 85.
ONLINE
Christ and Pop Culture, https://christandpopculture.com/ (January 9, 2017), Jeffrey Bilbro, “The Taste of Strawberries: Tolkien’s Imagination of the Good.”
Jeff Bilbro Website, http://jeffbilbro.com (January 9, 2017).
Religion in American History, http://usreligion.blogspot.com/ (June 23, 2015), Mark T. Edwards, “Loving God’s Wildness: A Conversation with Jeffrey Bilbro.”
Spirituality and Practice, https://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/ (December 7, 2017), Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, review of Wendell Berry and Higher Education.
Spring Arbor University Website, https://www.arbor.edu/ (January 9, 2017), faculty profile.
Themelios from the Gospel Coalition, http://themelios.thegospelcoalition.org/ (December 7, 2017), Andrew J. Spencer, review of Loving God’s Wilderness.
Jeffrey Bilbro, assistant professor of English at Spring Arbor University, is the author of Loving God's Wildness: The Christian Roots of Ecological Ethics in American Literature.
Jeff Bilbro
Associate Professor of English in the Department of English
Contact Info
Email: jbilbro@arbor.edu
Phone: (517) 750-6485
Office Location: Sayre-Decan Hall 205B
Education
Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from Baylor University, 2012
B.A. in Writing/Literature from George Fox University, 2007
Associate Professor of English
Jeff is originally from Washington (the state, not the city), but he’s enjoyed acclimating to Michigan’s more extreme seasons and figuring out what plants will grow in his garden. His research interests focus on theology and environmental ethics in American literature, and the University of Alabama Press published his book on this subject, Loving God’s Wildness: The Christian Roots of Ecological Ethics in American Literature. He and Jack Baker have co-written a book titled Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place published by the University Press of Kentucky. He’s recently written essays on food, baseball, National Parks, Tolkien, beauty, work, poetry in an iPhone culture, and place, and he also tweets.
CV: https://2yskz12ufu7l2va2ns2tirdn75i-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/CV-2016.pdf
Jeffrey Bilbro is an Assistant Professor of English at Spring Arbor University in southern Michigan. His book, Loving God’s Wildness: The Christian Roots of Ecological Ethics in American Literature, is forthcoming from the University of Alabama Press.
My name is Jeff Bilbro. I’m an Associate Professor of English at Spring Arbor University. I write and teach on a variety of topics. Feel free to contact me by email: jeff at arbor.edu. I’m also on Twitter.
Posted by Mark T. Edwards June 23, 2015
LOVING GOD'S WILDNESS: A CONVERSATION WITH JEFFREY BILBRO
The following is an interview with my friend and colleague Jeffrey Bilbro. Jeff is an Assistant Professor of English at Spring Arbor University. He is a prolific blogger, the author of numerous articles, and co-author with Jack Baker of An Agrarian Hope for Higher Education: Wendell Berry and the University (forthcoming from the University Press of Kentucky). Our conversation below concern’s Jeff’s first book, Loving God's Wildness: The Christian Roots of Ecological Ethics in American Literature (University of Alabama Press, 2015).
What stimulated your interest in environmentalism (if you would call it that)?
It’s hard to pinpoint an origin, but one formative experience for me was spending a year in the remote community of Stehekin when I was eleven. Stehekin is surrounded by the North Cascades National Park and is inaccessible by car; to get there you have to take a boat or plane. Only about 100 people live there year-round. It’s a spectacularly beautiful place, and we took lots of hikes in the surrounding mountains.
Even more than the glamorous scenery, however, what drew my attention were the resourceful, creative, difficult ways in which the residents made a living in this remote place. Their pragmatic efforts to survive here inevitably came into conflict with various National Park Service policies. Because these policies were determined in some centralized bureaucracy, they often didn’t fit the local reality. So while I learned to value the beauty of seemingly untouched, pristine wilderness, I also came to see the ways in which wilderness preservation and land use can clash, which as I learned in my research for this book is one of America’s enduring conflicts.
To circle back to your question, I avoid using the term “environmentalism” because it simply means “surroundings.” Wendell Berry points out that when we use this term, we imply that humans and other organisms can be separated from their surroundings, but in fact, humans can’t survive if we’re severed from other life forms. Furthermore, “environmentalism” seems to lead to efforts to preserve “wild” places in some other state or country, to save particular species, or to keep humans from messing up their surroundings.
The more important and difficult question, however, is how do we live with the other members of our places in ways that enable us all—human and non-human—to flourish? Thus questions about proper land use are historically much more important and difficult—and interesting—than merely setting aside sections of an apparently untainted environment. The word that suggests the scope of these questions best is “ecology,” which comes from the Greek word oikos that simply means “household.” We derive both “economy” and “diocese” from this same root, and these related words indicate both the practical and religious implications wrapped up in how we live with the other members of our biological household.
What do you see as the Puritan contribution to American thinking about nature?
The Puritans were religious and they were capitalist (or proto-capitalist) colonists. So they were torn between a desire to serve God, and a desire to make a lot of money. That tension pretty much sums up the history of how Americans relate to nature.
In the introduction I relate a story that Cotton Mather tells about a Puritan minister who was trying to convince a new group of settlers to take their faith more seriously. One of them apparently stood up in the middle of the sermon and tells the preacher he’s got the wrong group: these settlers came to the colonies to catch fish, not to found some religious city on the hill. The irony is that Mather goes on to point to this group’s financial failure as evidence that God judged them. So Mather sees financial success as a mark of divine favor. This belief ends up validating all kinds of ecological damage in the name of monetary gain; as another Puritan historian puts it, the Lord’s favor is revealed by the Puritan colonists’ success in turning the wilderness into “a mart for Merchants.”
At the same time, however, Mather and other Puritans sensed a religious value in creation. Mather writes a whole book about natural philosophy in which he calls creation “a Temple of God” in which humans are responsible to fulfill the role of priest. This understanding implies a much more extensive ecological ethic than the view that creation is a set of raw materials we can manipulate to enrich ourselves. These same dualistic views of nature run throughout America’s history.
Why Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Willa Cather, and Wendell Berry, and how did they together “reshape Puritan dualism?”
There are certainly other writers who could helpfully expand the narrative I relate in this book—Aldo Leopold, Annie Dillard, and Barbara Kingsolver, to name three. I chose the four authors I did because they each recognize the dualism that has plagued American attitudes toward nature and propose different imaginative responses, ones tuned to their particular moments in history. Thoreau and Muir focus more on preserving wild areas, and Cather and Berry focus more on ethical land use, but all four make room for a continuum of ecological relationships.
One key point of agreement that all four authors share is the inadequacy of money as an economic—and ecological—standard. Thoreau devotes the longest chapter in Walden to the subject of “Economy,” and Berry writes at great length about the “two economies,” the industrial, cash economy vs. the “Kingdom of God,” which is an economy that “includes everything.” All these authors recognize that if people are going to treat the natural world differently, they must first value it differently—value it as God values it and not for how it can be useful to them. Their writings, then, work to expand the ways we assign value. Their hope would be that eventually, maybe, we can learn to judge the success or failure of our lives not just by how many fish we catch or how much money is in our bank account but by the flourishing of the ecological communities in which we live.
You conclude that “like priests who serve the Eucharist, humans can never be the source of ecological redemption but can only hope to serve God’s redemptive work. . . . God remains wild, and the wild economy of which we are a part remains beyond human knowing” (p. 182). Isn’t that to return to the kind of fatalism that the Puritans specialized in? Why is it important to stress god’s “wildness?”
I hope not; I hope it’s humility, not fatalism. The tension that I see running through all these authors—the tension the Puritans failed to adequately acknowledge—is that wild ecosystems follow complex yet mysterious patterns. By studying these carefully, humans can learn to participate in them more responsibly, but we’ll never be able to fully predict or control the order inherent in the household of creation.
One of the biblical stories that these authors return to for guidance on this question is the Garden of Gethsemane. If Eden is the garden where humans got it wrong, Gethsemane is the garden where Jesus models the right approach. And what Jesus models is an active submission to a plan he either doesn’t fully understand, or doesn’t really want to follow. The human role as members of God’s household or oikos, then, entails a more humble, obedient mode of ecological participation than Americans have practiced thus far.
To paraphrase my conclusion, I think the real question is whether Americans can avoid the Scylla of thinking money is the only standard of value and that it justifies any ecological degradation, while also avoiding the Charybdis of thinking that any use of natural resources is sinful and the only real standard of value is untouched wilderness. Can Americans see themselves neither as the elect who are entitled to boundless material prosperity, nor as the hopelessly fallen who are in need of untainted wild creation to redeem them? I’m not sure, but these authors at least help to clarify these twin pitfalls.
Why should scholars of American religion read this book?
Following the publication of Lynn White’s essay “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” the narrative that religion, and Christianity in particular, leads people to devalue their environment became standard. This is an odd historical irony for two reasons. The first is that White’s history of religion has been thoroughly contested by subsequent scholars, but the second is that White himself claimed that American culture needed a religious solution to the religious roots of ecological degradation. So I think it’s time that historians and other scholars consider the ways theology has shaped American ecological attitudes and practices. Fortunately, there’s some great work on this being done now. Mark Stoll’s new book, Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism, came out last month, and his narrative offers a complementary perspective to the one I tell in my book.
Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place
264.17 (Apr. 24, 2017): p85.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place
Jack R. Baker and Jeffrey Bilbro. Univ. of
Kentucky, $50 (268p) ISBN 978-0-8131-6902-6
Two literary critics take the writings and speeches of Wendell Berry as a touchstone for a critique of higher education. Each chapter follows a tight structure: an analysis of Berry's fiction; discussion of how the themes of his fiction apply to higher-education reform; practical suggestions for students, instructors, and administrators; and an excerpt from Berry's poetry that brings each chapter to a close. The book's first three chapters, which together encompass the book's first part, titled "Rooting Universities," possess both charm and utility. They describe a new vision for higher education, one in which imagination and context trump specialization and fragmentation, attention is given to logical language that eschews jargon and is inclusive of all types of people and ideas, and the benefits of physical work contribute to intellectual development. As the book moves into its second part, "Cultivating Virtues of Place," its conceit is more cumbersome. The connection between Berry's work and the concepts of tradition, hierarchy, geography, and community--such as how Burley Coulter's infidelity relates to the need "for educational institutions to be faithful members of their places"--requires pages of explanation, so much so as to undermine earlier arguments. Aside from these shortcomings, the authors present an enlightening interpretation of Wendell Berry's philosophy for the pursuit of a holistic higher education. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place." Publishers Weekly, 24 Apr. 2017, p. 85. General OneFile, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491250876/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0d2755d0. Accessed 7 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491250876
College as the 'gateway drug' to rootlessness
Peter Monaghan
63.37 (May 26, 2017): pA33.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc.
http://chronicle.com/section/About-the-Chronicle/83
One of American higher education's greatest failings, contend Jack R. Baker and Jeffrey Bilbro in Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place (University Press of Kentucky, 2017) is that it inculcates in the young a corrosive "restless mobility."
Even though about 80 percent of American college freshmen attend institutions in their home states, the messages that lead them to colleges a few hours from home, and to more-distant places, and that are reinforced there, make the campuses the first step away from responsibility to any home community, says Mr. Bilbro, an assistant professor of English at Spring Arbor University. in Michigan. "So often, college is a sort of gateway drug."
The book examines how Mr. Berry, a poet, novelist, and agrarian environmentalist who lives on his farm in Kentucky, suggests a new vision for higher education in his fiction and nonfiction. Mr. Berry has for decades expressed skepticism of modern, technological society's consumption-driven social instability and ecological destructiveness, and education's general failure to temper such harms.
College lures students to a rootless cosmopolitanism that makes them thirst for maximum income at the expense of sustaining family ties and other community-building values, say Mr. Bilbro and Mr. Baker, an associate professor in his department.
It may seem ironic that they dedicate their book to the hometowns they left, "the places that taught us how to be neighbors, how to work through trouble, how to lead simple lives," as Mr. Bilbro describes them. But he and Mr. Baker don't claim that going home is possible for all students, any more than it has proved to be for them. Indeed, they say, they both struggled before finding in Spring Arbor, Mich., a place where they could create, with their families, a new sense of home.
Says Mr. Baker: "I went through a real crisis, trying to make sense of the town I grew up in"--Shelby, a "dying" rural Michigan village, by his estimation. He says that as a young man he wanted nothing to do with it; but reading the works of Wendell Berry led him to think about how he could ground himself in a place like it.
That made him a natural writing partner for Mr. Bilbro, a fellow Berry devotee who grew up in Seattle after spending part of his childhood in Stehekin, an idyllic mountain-lake location in Washington State. To become an academic, Mr. Bilbro had to go to a place where an exhaustive job search led him.
While Spring Arbor is a Christian institution, both authors say the values they espouse in their book are not specifically religious; rather, they are grounded in Mr. Berry's vision of a responsible life.
Mr. Bilbro says Mr. Berry has a broad readership in part because his "overlap of moral virtue and ecological virtue" speaks to Americans whose "relationships with their places are deeply broken."
Mr. Baker says his and Mr. Bilbro's hope is that American higher education would stop contributing to deracination, by saying to students: "It's OK to go home, or to put down roots somewhere, and to be committed to a place, even if it's not the most glamorous or exciting place that you could be."
Caption: Jeffrey Bilbro (left) and Jack Baker, authors of "Wendell Berry and Higher Education"
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Monaghan, Peter. "College as the 'gateway drug' to rootlessness." The Chronicle of Higher Education, 26 May 2017, p. A33. General OneFile, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A496567311/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ada55811. Accessed 7 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A496567311
Bilbro, Jeffrey. Loving God's wildness: the Christian roots of ecological ethics in American literature
S. Petersheim
53.7 (Mar. 2016): p1019.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Bilbro, Jeffrey. Loving God's wildness: the Christian roots of ecological ethics in American literature. Alabama, 2015. 231 p bibl index afp ISBN 9780817318574 cloth, $54.95; ISBN 9780817388010 ebook, $54.95
(cc) 53-2965
PS169
CIP
In this study of US writing from the time of the Puritans until the present day, Bilbro (Spring Arbor Univ.) investigates the often-overlooked religious roots of environmental literature in the US. Pointing to Cotton Mather, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Willa Cather, and Wendell Berry as influential American authors who drew on Christian theology to develop their sense of ecology, Bilbro uses their writings to trace how environmental thinking and religious thinking have developed together over four centuries. He also compellingly argues that these writers were concerned that economic considerations would drown out religious concern for the environment and lead to abuse rather than stewardship of the Earth. Looking at authors across the entire expanse of the US--from New England to the American Southwest--the author takes the reader on a geographical tour of the continental US and a journey through the eras of American literature. Though he concludes by acknowledging that many US writers have turned to religious thinking outside the Christian tradition in search of more ecologically attuned thinking, Bilbro is most concerned with how Christianity in particular has influenced the development of an environmental ethos in US literature. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.--S. Petersheim, Indiana University East
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Petersheim, S. "Bilbro, Jeffrey. Loving God's wildness: the Christian roots of ecological ethics in American literature." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Mar. 2016, p. 1019. General OneFile, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A445735385/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ab125e0c. Accessed 7 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A445735385
Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader's Guide
Jeffrey Bilbro
60.3 (Spring 2011): p498+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 Sage Publications, Inc.
http://www.sagepub.com
Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader's Guide. By J. Matthew Bonzo and Michael R. Stevens. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2008. ISBN 978-1-58743-195-1. Pp. 206. $22.00.
In nearly fifty years of writing, Wendell Berry has produced a body of thought that defies easy summation, making Bonzo and Stevens' efforts to provide an over view of Berry's vision a daunting task. What makes their project even bolder is that while Berry positions himself as a marginal Christian outside any institutional church, this book attempts to interpret Berry's thought from an evangelical and particularly Reformed perspective. Bonzo and Stevens do not intend, then, to provide a scholarly analysis of Berry's writing but rather to make his contrarian thought understandable to an evangelical audience and to encourage them to apply his insights in order to bring healing to the diseased culture in which they live. By focusing on the theme of health, this book holds together remarkably well given its scope, as the authors place Berry within the broader cultural conversation, outline his critique of modernity and his prescription for healing, and explore this theme in his fiction. In the final two chapters, which are perhaps the most interesting, the authors provocatively extend Berry's ideas and suggest ways to mend the two institutions Berry has criticized most vehemently--the church and the university.
The book's attempt to reach an evangelical audience is both its major strength and a weakness. While many Christians already read Berry, Bonzo and Stevens provide an important service in making his writing more accessible to those who might be put off by Berry's environmentalism or apparent nostalgia for an agrarian way of life. By highlighting the theological foundation for Berry's argument that Christians have a responsibility to care for creation (22-25), and by demonstrating Berry's clear-sighted rejection of nostalgia (16-18, 52), they make space for evangelicals to learn from Berry. In several places, the authors translate Berry's ideas into Reformed language (29, 166, 180), and while this can be helpful for some readers, their attempt to interpret Berry's thought through the theoretical framework of Al Wolters, a Reformed philosopher, seems a bit forced (74-76).
Berry really is quite far from being a Reformed thinker himself, and perhaps because of the "rough edges" that Bonzo and Stevens note, he remains on the margins of the Christian discourse (51). Indeed, the authors have a difficult time placing him in any intellectual tradition. For instance, while they follow Stanley Hauerwas in comparing Berry with John Howard Yoder and his pacifism, they conclude that "Berry follows a branch of a more fundamental stem" and position him closer to John Paul II (36). This claim overlooks Berry's belief that centralized power, whether political or ecclesiological, is not likely to bring justice, thus his pacifism and turn to local, communal ways of seeking justice. In addition, their attempts to find agreement between Berry and thinkers like Levinas and Derrida rely on rather superficial readings of these philosophers and so fail to really articulate the points of coherence and dissonance between them and Berry (43-48, 128-29, 142-43). While the authors do well to position Berry as an inheritor of classic conservatives, such as Russell Kirk, and a leading member of the New Agrarians (38-43, 128-30), they do not mention the Southern Agrarians and scholarship such as Kimberly Smith's Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition: A Common Grace (2003); a more complete awareness of Berry's agrarian roots would help fill out these comparisons.
When they begin summarizing Berry's cultural critique, Bonzo and Stevens hit their stride. They correctly pinpoint Berry's diagnosis that "the root cause of disease [in contemporary American culture] is shown in the dislocation from particular people in particular places" (31). They note that while our culture often values an abstract, disembodied idea of progress, Berry's vision demonstrates that this ideal overlooks fundamental human limits and so results in fragmentation and destruction. This contemporary disease affects our pursuit of knowledge, our relations with each other, and our individual ability to be at home (56). Although Berry is doubtful about the possibility of ultimately healing these damages in a fallen world, Bonzo and Stevens find his emphasis on the need to work toward such healing in the present time and place an important reminder for Christians who often harbor a latent dualism. Instead of either abstracting redemption to an eschatological, spiritual realm or insisting on a triumphalist vision of the Kingdom of God redeeming the world now, the authors agree with Berry that God's healing can begin when humble, hopeful followers repent and work toward health in their local places (83-86, 166, 170). As the authors point out, Berry's insight here is of utmost importance for Christians as they consider how to work toward the redemption of their culture.
In portraying what this healing work looks like, Bonzo and Stevens "trace a set of creational boundaries that, when acknowledged with gratitude, allow for the construction of communities of healing" (89). They begin, as Berry does, with the mysterious wild order that undergirds all life, most obviously in the topsoil beneath our feet (90). Berry calls humans to participate humbly in this wilderness, and Bonzo and Stevens interpret Berry's emphasis on the Sabbath as a way of recognizing that all human work ultimately depends on a prior gift of life and fertility (93-94). Humans must always be contributing either to disease or health (76-77), and the authors follow Berry in focusing on soil cultivation and food production and consumption as loci in which to examine human culture. When human agriculture respects the wild life on which it depends and works within natural limits, it tends toward health, but when people view food as simply another processed commodity, it leads to an agriculture that relies on technology to overcome any creational limits (94-102). Berry's application of these principles to human bodies, then, leads to his rejection of dualism and insistence on sexual and relational limits (103-107). Thus his valuation of marriage as a cultural form that fosters health by upholding these needed boundaries, and his vision of placed, local communities built around such healthy households (107-115).
Applying this vision to the twin threats of "consumer-driven autonomous individuals" and "radical globalization" (127), Bonzo and Stevens argue that Berry encourages us to make local, humble, responsible choices guided by a genuine valuation of people and all of creation. Efforts to satiate selfish, individual desires lead to attempts to leap across any spatial boundaries in order to procure the objects of desire, so as the authors point out, these two aspects of contemporary disease are entwined (128). By disciplining desire and respecting the creaturely finitude essential for human love and community, we can practice what Berry terms "membership," a bond that recognizes both our dependence and responsibility, or as Bonzo and Stevens put it, that "carries ... the healing tension of gift and obligation" (137). And they agree with Berry that a culture built around such human relations cultivates health.
Bonzo and Stevens accurately represent the type of local culture Berry envisions, but perhaps because they overlook such seminal Berry essays as "Standing by Words" and "Poetry and Place" they claim that Berry's emphasis on the local "underplays [the] significance" of "religious influences, economics, and political forces" on communal identity (116). While they offer this only as a minor critique, it leads them to claim that "issues of piety and inquiry and justice are underdeveloped in Berry's work" a proposition that seems untenable for anyone who has read him as carefully as Bonzo and Stevens have (116). Indeed, perhaps no other author has probed as extensively the ways that religious, economic, and political forces have furthered injustice in twentieth-century American communities. Berry's insights stem from refusing to treat these various forces in isolation and rather, as he explains in "Standing by Words" seeing them as layered and interdependent forces at work on each particular place.
As the authors acknowledge several times, Berry's emphasis on the particular and local resists theoretical generalizations and thrives in narrative forms (35, 87-88). In the book's first seven chapters, however, Berry's fiction gets short shrift and is often poorly interpreted (54-55, 112, 130, 154); for instance, the authors cite Jayber's purchase of the Port William barbershop for two hundred dollars as an example of "charitable thrift" when Jayber actually only pays one hundred dollars as a down payment for the building worth three hundred (70). While it is unclear how buying a piece of property is an example of charity, Jayber's later gift to Mattie that enables her to pay for her son's bail would have been a better instance to cite. The eighth chapter largely rectifies this neglect of Berry's fiction, however, as Bonzo and Stevens trace six forms of hospitality in several of his stories and novels. While the literary readings in this chapter do not engage any previous scholarship on Berry's fiction, they do reveal keen insight into Berry's portrayal of hospitality as a means by which a healthy community extends offers of healing to individuals both inside and outside its boundaries.
The book's final two chapters are its best as Bonzo and Stevens begin applying Berry's view of health to the church and the university, two institutions they acknowledge he has criticized harshly. They argue that by recognizing the structural flaws Berry identifies in these institutions, Christians can work toward healing the churches and universities of which they are members by following Berry's vision for healing communities. Essentially, this involves Christians taking their membership in a church or university seriously enough to find ways for these institutions to serve the particular communities in which they are located. Wisely, the authors do not offer a universally applicable formula for this but rather urge individuals to consider their neighborhood's particular problems and ecology and to find ways to meet these local needs. A church that thought in this way would participate in the holistic healing and sustenance of its community (173-77), and a university guided by this vision would educate people to serve their local places in humility and discipline (190-91).
In this book, Bonzo and Stevens certainly achieve their purpose of introducing an evangelical audience to Berry's thought. As its lack of bibliography and scant index suggest, this book does not intend to offer a serious, scholarly assessment of Berry's writing, and yet most readers of Christianity and Literature would find in the last two chapters an insightful vision of the good that their churches and universities should consider. And for those readers unfamiliar with Wendell Berry, this book can provide an overview that will encourage them to make their own foray into his writing.
Jeffrey Bilbro
Baylor University
Bilbro, Jeffrey
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bilbro, Jeffrey. "Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader's Guide." Christianity and Literature, vol. 60, no. 3, 2011, p. 498+. General OneFile, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A261452327/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8bfa5762. Accessed 7 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A261452327
Loving God’s Wilderness: The Christian Roots of Ecological Ethics in American Literature
Jeffrey Bilbro
In his recent book, Jeffrey Bilbro looks beyond typical theological sources to evaluate how literature written from a background of Christian ideas has impacted environmentalism. By bringing his expertise as an assistant professor of English at Spring Arbor University to bear through literary analysis, Bilbro adds a new perspective to the discussion of Christian influences on environmental ethics.
The volume is divided into five chapters with a conclusion following. In the first chapter, Bilbro introduces some of the history of environmentalism in America within the Christian tradition. He begins with the Puritan colonists and moves through to the early nineteenth century. Chapter 2 offers an in-depth analysis of Henry David Thoreau. Bilbro outlines the way Thoreau adapted the religious language of his era and the Puritan interest in the created order to develop an ecological ethics. In this chapter, Bilbro reaches beyond Walden into other books and articles Thoreau wrote, which expands and enriches the rather limited analysis typically done on Thoreau’s environmentalism. Muir’s modifications of the Disciples of Christ theology are the topic of the third chapter. Bilbro notes that Muir never formally renounced the faith of his youth, but he is insufficiently critical of Muir’s departures from orthodoxy. Instead of either anthropocentrism or biocentrism, Bilbro argues that Muir developed a theocentric environmental ethics (p. 73). Despite this argument, Bilbro portrays Muir as finding the summum bonum in wilderness, seeking “wild salvation,” and rejecting “organized religion” in favor of a “glacier gospel” (p. 83). Bilbro portrays Muir as post-Christian though he never states that explicitly.
Chapter 4 offers a literary analysis of the Roman Catholic Willa Cather, the author of O Pioneers! and My Ántonia. Bilbro’s analysis of Cather shows the interest in a sense of place, balance, and community within Cather’s work that offers a base for an ecological ethic. The heroes of Cather’s novels, follow the example of Mary when they “obediently submit to God’s redemptive plan” and of Jesus when “they attentively watch and pray for God to restore all the members of his household” (p. 22). In this, Bilbro sees Cather rejecting the alleged dualism of the Puritans. The fifth chapter is an analysis of Wendell Berry’s ecological ethic as it is presented in Jayber Crow. Bilbro effectively shows how the novel Jayber Crow reveals Berry’s notions of the limits of human work and celebration of rural living. Berry’s sense of place and emphasis on maintaining the balance of the farmer’s efforts with the welfare of the land is well portrayed. This chapter, however, does not seem to fit with the methodology of the others as it focuses on only one novel and goes well beyond Berry’s environmentalism into his notion of marriage, love, and economics.
In the conclusion, Bilbro very briefly ties the four authors together and points toward “the way that America’s Christian tradition can continue to draw creatively on its theological resources to respond to changing cultural conditions” (p. 182). Based on his analysis, however, it is not clear that what results from that creativity will be authentically Christian.
The chief weakness of this volume is that Bilbro does not always accurately represent theological streams discussed in the book. The Puritans are a frequent victim of this inaccuracy, with Bilbro accusing them of Cartesian or Gnostic dualism, treating those forms of dualism as if they are identical (e.g., p. 5). Bilbro’s representation of the Puritans resonates with Max Weber’s interpretation of their theology, but has less to do with what the Puritans themselves wrote (p. 183n1). Additionally, the author presents the figures in the volume, particularly Thoreau and Muir, as if they were faithful Christians or had merely updated historic statements of doctrines in a manner consistent with Christian orthodoxy. Yet it is doubtful either would have claimed to be Christian. Neither Muir nor Thoreau were orthodox Christians as represented through their writing, though they both were sufficiently familiar with orthodoxy to communicate in terms that resonate with faithful Christians. The roots of ecological ethics in American literature may well be traced to the Christian tradition, but some of the figures presented in this text seem to represent a Christian orthodoxy with which they themselves had only minimal personal acquaintance.
Despite the weakness in the theological interpretation, the literary analysis is very well done. Bilbro should be commended for his work in examining the major texts of Thoreau, Muir, Cather and Berry to trace how Christian themes inspire their environmentalism. Bilbro’s analysis gives hope that a God-honoring version of environmentalism can arise within orthodox Christianity itself. Additionally, Loving God’s Wilderness does something new in the discussion of Christian environmental ethics. This is a book that deserves attention because Bilbro’s work advances the research on the topic and makes a compelling case for the relationship between Christianity and American environmentalism.
Andrew J. Spencer
Oklahoma Baptist University
Shawnee, Oklahoma, USA
Wendell Berry and Higher Education
Cultivating Virtues of Place
By Jack R. Baker, Jeffrey Bilbro
A vision of practices and virtues to re-enchant higher education.
Book Review by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
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For 50 years, Wendell Berry, a farmer, ecologist, and cultural critic, has been sharing his cogent and spiritual vision of the world in essays, poems, and fiction. There is a feisty and contrarian side to Berry's philosophical views of life. In his 1978 commencement address at Centre College, he argued that the love of virtue was the fruit of an education rooted in place and forms the basis for "a healthful economy that is at once physical and spiritual."
Jack R. Baker and Jeffrey Bilbro, associate and assistant professor of English at Spring Arbor University, probe this rural sages' books, essays, fiction and poetry in his quest to reform the shape and direction of higher education. They pose three important questions about these institutions:
"How might education lead students to practice healthy contentment with people and places?
What are appropriate ends for a university education?
In what ways can universities shape their graduates into affectionate, virtuous members of their places? "
Berry disagrees with those who view the American Dream as being about success and upward mobility. By adhering to that focus, universities train students in the flawed virtues of raw ambition, needless risk-taking, and careless transience. In lectures, Berry has used the term boomers to describe those seeking power, wealth, or personal success. Boomerism is to be found in most universities today.
Berry contrasts those greedy folk who have no reverence for place with stickers or nesters, titles used by novelist Wallace Stegner to characterize nurturers who connect with and cherish place, nature, and community. They tend to be stationary whereas boomers are obsessed with mobility. As Berry puts it, "all of us, I think, are in some manner torn between caring and not caring, staying and going."
Baker and Brilbo do a fine job pointing out the ways in which imagination, work, and language can become portals for learning the art of caring for our places. With a swift burst of energy and clarity, the authors show how Berry affirms the virtues of place through tradition (remembering our story), hierarchy (practicing gratitude and respecting limits), geography (reaping the fruits of fidelity), and community (learning to love the membership). As a special added value, the authors include one of Berry's poems at the end of each chapter.