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Second, does Berry possess a sufficiently capacious vision for the church?

Though he affirms "Christian tradition" and, increasingly in the past two decades, relies on Christian theology for his doctrine of creation, Berry regards the church as at best a disappointment and at worst a colluder with the enemy. "[I]n its de facto alliance with Caesar," he warned ten years ago, "Christianity connives directly in the murder of Creation."

But Christian eschatology understands the church to stand at the very center of God's redemptive activity, a foretaste of true freedom. Without gainsaying the deadly accuracy of much of Berry's criticism of modern Christianity, it is imperative to underscore that churches have historically fostered and preserved many of very the social ideals that Berry represents. Is the locus of his hope, then, properly placed? How does the absence of the church in his understanding of the good skew his critical vision?

Agrarianism requires no certain, total triumph over industrialization in order to prosper; at its best it defies such grandiosity of intention. What it does require is the simple, piecemeal emergence of groupings of neighbors trying to enact alternate visions of the good life, hoping all the while to attract others into the neighborhood. If in this century agrarianism gains ground, its success might well—as Allan Carlson suggests in his recent study, The New Agrarian Mind—depend in no small part on Christians at the center of it, bound as they are by their belief in the goodness of the Creator and in their need to care for the earth and its people. The presence at the conference of Christian students, both Protestant and Catholic, from self-consciously Christian colleges (housed, I might add, in churches), gives hope that Berry may yet find reason to adjust his judgment of organized Christianity.

This would be no easy feat. Berry writes as if in submission to a beauty, an awful beauty, that far exceeds his ability to grasp and of which he, inexplicably, is a part. He asks that we surrender to it too. Can we, so full of our own seeing and making, ever do so? The more useful question is, What will happen if we do not?

Eric Miller is assistant professor of history at Geneva College.

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Books & Culture Corner appears Mondays at ChristianityToday.com. Earlier Books & Culture Corners include:

Stop, Drop, and Cover … | Then hack your lungs out and die. (June 3, 2002)

Death of an Evolutionist | RIP Stephen Jay Gould. (May 31, 2002)

Closing The X-Files … | … with the sign of the Cross. (May 20, 2002)

And the Next Thing Is … | Marxism (or not). (May 13, 2002)

God Bless the Eliminator | Mother Jones magazine makes known a shocking discovery: evangelicals are sending missionaries to Muslim countries! (May 6, 2002)

'A Peculiar People' | The uniqueness of the Jews. (April 29, 2002)

'Nebuchadnezzar My Slave' | Was the Holocaust God's will? (April 15, 2002)

'In the Beginning Was the Holocaust'? | Blasphemy, rage, memory, and meaning of the Shoah. (April 8, 2002)

The Gospel According to Biff | A conversation with novelist Christopher Moore. (April 1, 2002)

Baseball 2002 Preview | Part 2: Saving the game? (March 25, 2002)

The State of the Game | After one of the best World Series ever, baseball faces a crisis. (March 18, 2002)

America's Homegrown Islam—and Its Prophet | The strange story of Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam and onetime mentor of Malcolm X. (Mar. 11, 2002)

'Must Be Superstition' | Rediscovering spiritual reality. (Mar. 4, 2002)

Science Holds a Meeting | A report from the annual convention of the AAAS. (Feb. 25, 2002)

Saint Frodo and the Potter Demon | The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter series spring from the same source. (Feb. 18, 2002)

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June (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46