Surely no sane and thoughtful person can imagine any government of our time sitting comfortably at the feet of Jesus while he is saying “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you.”
– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace: Christianity and the Survival of Creation p. 319
Because (modern Christianity) has been so exclusively dedicated to incanting anemic souls into Heaven, it has been made the tool of much earthly villainy. It has, for the most part, stood silently by while a predatory economy has ravaged the world, destroyed its natural beauty and health, divided and plundered its human communities and households. It has flown the flag and chanted the slogans of empire. It has assumed with the economist that “economic forces” automatically work for the good and has assumed with the industrialists and militarists that technology determines history. It has assumed with almost everybody that “progress” is good, that it is good to be modern and up with the times. It has admired Caeser and comforted him in his depredations and defaults. But in its de facto alliance with Caeser, Christianity connives directly in the murder of Creation.
– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace: Christianity and the Survival of Creation p.319
(W)ork can be worship.
– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace: Christianity and the Survival of Creation p.318
(E)very man who is not a mere idler or parasite is necessarily some special kind of artist.
– Ananda Coomaraswamy quote by Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace: Christianity and the Survival of Creation p.316
Good human work honors God’s work. Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love. It honors nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty. To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God.
– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace: Christianity and the Survival of Creation p.312
(The Bible) is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better.
– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace: Christianity and the Survival of Creation p.311
Throughout the five hundred years since Colombus’s first landfall in the Bahamas, the evangelist has walked beside the conqueror and the merchant, too often blandly assuming that their causes were the same.
– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace: Christianity and the Survival of Creation p.305
Turkey Alwan Travels