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Wendell Berry defies easy description. His book jackets call him everything from social critic to farmer to conservationist, and he is all of these, though they do not contain him. He is a writer—poet, essayist, and novelist. Everyone from The Progressive to National Review has claimed him. Eugene Peterson names Berry one of the seven most important writers on spiritual theology for him, saying that Berry's combination of "prophetic bite and Christian winsomeness … keeps our identity as followers of Jesus in sharp focus."

Increasingly, his readers are young Christians, particularly evangelicals seeking community life and character transformation. Wheaton College political science professor Ashley Woodiwiss says, "Students are attracted by the imaginative alternatives and possibilities that Berry sets forth." While some students offer the standard criticism of Berry, that he is a romantic idealist, most see him as a Christian thinker, albeit not an evangelical. Woodiwiss told me that of all the writers that he teaches, including many very "realist" political thinkers, Berry has the most practical impact on students' lives well after college.

For the last four-plus decades, Berry, 72, has been asserting in various ways that we Americans live without much care for the world and our place in it. Berry points out that most of us consume and adopt new technologies without considering the hidden costs. Berry asks, how many of us think about environmental degradation when we start up our computers, which in cases depend on electricity from coal gouged out of the mountains of Appalachia?

Berry does not mean that no one should use a computer or technology. Indeed, at the 125-acre farm he calls home at Lane's Landing, near Kentucky's tiny Port Royal (population 116), Berry drives a truck, uses a chainsaw, and has a CD player—though there is no computer. He writes in a tree-house stand on his hillside farm.

"For some," Berry writes, "their involvement in pollution, soil depletion, strip-mining, deforestation, industrial and commercial waste is simply a 'practical' compromise, a necessary 'reality,' the price of modern comfort and convenience. For others, this list of involvements is an agenda for thought and work that will produce remedies."

What Berry advocates is a sort of Sermon-on-the-Mount conservationism. If we are going to care for the world, if we are to walk away from our modern hubris and destruction, then we must "wash the inside of the cup" and "take the log out of our eye." What makes Berry different from so many other conservationists is his argument that we must live with a consistency that finds its roots not in our institutions, but within ourselves.

Berry is a careful reader of the Bible, which I found out during an interview at his home. He quoted easily from the Gospels and Paul's epistles. He is attractive to Christians because he offers a vision of care for creation that is tied up with the sacredness of life. "What Christians offer is an understanding that the world is not ours, that we are not the ones that give things value," he told me in his warm, gentlemanly Southern drawl.

But as Berry's friend, philosophy professor Norman Wirzba, says, he "sees the church as deeply and willingly implicated in an economy that has been unremitting and unrepentant in its destruction." As Berry told me, "The church and all of our institutions have failed to oppose the destruction of the world."

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November 2006, Vol. 50, No. 11