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To this end, Georgetown philosopher Norman Wirzba not only conceived the conference but also compiled a new collection of Berry's essays, published in April as The Art of the Commonplace (Counterpoint). Its 21 essays make for a long book, especially coming from such a pure hedgehog as Berry. Although Wirzba divides the essays by theme, the powerful, intricate singularity of Berry's vision ensures that all of the themes bleed into one another, over and over again.

Still, it is a valuable collection, binding together essays that date from the sixties into the new millennium. Read consecutively, it is the resonance of Berry's voice, with its delicate fusing of classical, Christian, and American sensibilities, that stands out. In the course of more than four decades of writing he has formalized a full-orbed agrarian worldview, compelling us to remember and reflect upon the virtues of an older way of living, one with the weight of most of human history behind it. He recalls for us our own past, when our lives were lived outdoors, in close connection with other creatures, and within an admixture of dependence and independence that today seems odd, even impossible.

But not to him. "I seem to have been born with an aptitude for a way of life that was doomed," he muses in the opening essay. "Free of any intuitions of its doom, I delighted in it, and learned all I could about it." That learning has steadily continued, as these essays attest, even as he himself has tried to pass it along to us. The slow refining of his thinking, from the strict, dusky organicism of his earlier essays to a theism more rich and bright, bespeaks a salutary restlessness and a deep yearning, the yield of which continues, year upon year, to impress.

I suspect that we will be reckoning with Berry for decades—at least I hope we will. His supposition, for instance, that the abolition of man and the abolition of the earth proceed as one could provide thematic focus for any number of conferences. Still, to read Berry is to raise questions, and The Art of the Commonplace occasions at least two that that might guide continued consideration of his remarkable oeuvre.

First, does Berry possess a sufficiently capacious vision of goodness?

Believing industrial civilization to be structured by principles and practices that violate the moral and ecological order that makes life possible, Berry has, in a thousand diverging ways, tirelessly attacked the corporate order and the culture it has spawned. His rhetoric has been angry, doleful, exaggerated, earnest, and sweeping: "The fur trade was only the first establishment on this continent of a mentality whose triumph is its catastrophe," he wrote in 1977, in a typical passage.

But a theology of goodness leads believing eyes to regard goodness as, in at least certain respects, irrepressible. Its irrepressibility requires that we affirm what goodness there is, wherever it is. Accordingly, the pivotal question to ask is this: Even within political and economic structures that tend toward palpable destruction, can there emerge that which requires not just affirmation but celebration? And if so, how must this penchant to bless affect our reading of our world?

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June (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46