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But Woodiwiss says that Berry is not a theologian. He says we should ask, "What does he have to offer us in terms of imaginative possibilities that Christians can really buy into?"

While Wendell Berry has become the enigmatic subject of both academic and theological inquiry, he doesn't claim to have all the answers. After looking down the long patchwork furrows at his son's farm, Berry drives me back to his house and along the road that stretches through his hillside farm, which Wendell and Tanya have owned for more than four decades. We go past the tree-house stand, through a river-bottom forest, and up to the barn, where he keeps his old draft horse mare. It has begun to rain, and Berry cuts the engine. We sit in silence, watching a small band of chickadees, sparrows, and cardinals in the trees.

"I'm only one voice in all of this," Berry says. "There are many others. What I have written I have written to start a conversation. I don't have the final word."

Ragan Sutterfield is a farmer, writer, and teacher in Arkansas.

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Here is a website about Wendell Berry which, although it isn't sanctioned by him, compiles interviews, reviews, essays, poetry, prose, biography, and other resources.

Wikiquote has many quotations by and attributed to Berry.

Books and Culture has commentary on Berry's works in "A Sabbath Vision" and a short review of "Another Turn of the Crank."

On the 25th anniversary of Berry's most famous book, The Unsettling of America, Eric Miller reflected on how Christians should respond to his vision.

Alan Jacobs says we have something to learn from Wendell Berry in his Christian Vision Project article.

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November 2006, Vol. 50, No. 11