All posts tagged Wendell Berry

  • July 31, 2016

    How I’m Voting

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    How I’m Voting
    Brian Zahnd

    Election season. The worst of times. The bane of my pastoral existence. A forced march through Desolation Row.

    Praise be to Nero’s Neptune, the Titanic sails at dawn
    Everybody’s shouting, “Which side are you on?!”

    I’ve become so exasperated with America’s quadrennial descent into politicized madness that four years ago Peri and I made plans to take a seven week sabbatical and walk the Camino de Santiago during September and October of 2016. At this point that decision seems to be among the best I’ve ever made. Peri and I can’t wait to begin our five hundred mile pilgrim walk an ocean away from a million political ads and the hysteria they induce.

    You see, having pledged all my allegiance to the Lamb I have none left for elephants or donkeys. I’ve placed all of my hope in the kingdom of Christ. My short form politics is, “Jesus is Lord.” My long form politics is the Sermon on the Mount. And I know good and well that neither the elephant party nor the donkey party have the inclination or ability to seriously embrace the cruciform politics of Lamb. That’s the gist of my political theology.
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    No Comments / Politics /

  • October 30, 2014

    Halloween: A Search For The Sacred

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    Halloween: A Search For The Sacred
    Brian Zahnd

    It’s Halloween. The season of ghosts and goblins, haunted houses and horror movies. The modern observance of Halloween seems, for the most part, to be an innocent celebration of the strange joy of being scared. There’s no doubt that a significant number of us do enjoy being scared as a form of entertainment. After all, Stephen King has sold 350 million books! But why? Why do we like to be scared? I think it has to do with a search for what is most missing in the modern world: the sacred. We like being scared because we are so very secular.

    When modernity came of age it banished the sense of the sacred. Empiricism, materialism, positivism had won the day. Science was now the high priest that would answer all questions and religion was merely the superstition of the hopelessly naïve. We found ourselves in a world without God or gods, a world beyond good and evil (as Nietzsche said), a world without angels and demons. Religion was but hucksterism and nothing was truly sacred anymore. Bob Dylan captured it well when he said,
    Read more

    9 Comments / Christianity, Eucharist, Friedrich Nietzsche, Modernity, Sacrament, Sacramental Ontology, Secularism, Theology /

  • October 30, 2013

    Halloween: A Search For The Sacred

    the-bored-gargoyle-of-notre-dame-2

    Halloween: A Search For The Sacred
    Brian Zahnd

    It’s Halloween. The season of ghosts and goblins, haunted houses and horror movies. The modern observance of Halloween seems, for the most part, to be an innocent celebration of the strange joy of being scared. There’s no doubt that a significant number of us do enjoy being scared as a form of entertainment. How else do you explain that Stephen King has sold half a billion books?! But why? Why do we like to be scared? I think it has to do with a search for what is most missing in the modern world: the sacred. We like being scared because we are so very secular.

    When modernity came of age it banished the sense of the sacred. Empiricism, materialism, positivism had won the day. Science was now the high priest that would answer all questions and religion was merely the superstition of the hopelessly naïve. We found ourselves in a world without God or gods, a world beyond good and evil (as Nietzsche said), a world without angels and demons. Religion was but hucksterism and nothing was truly sacred anymore. Bob Dylan captured it well when he said,
    Read more

    1 Comment / Christianity, Culture /

  • April 9, 2012

    Resurrection Here and Now

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    Resurrection Here and Now

    An Easter Monday Meditation

    On that first Easter morning God’s new world began. The old world is still with us, still dying, but the new world is here too; the age to come has already begun!

    Or as G.K. Chesterton put it…

    On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of a gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.

    But what of it? Or as Francis Schaeffer might put the question, how should we then live? Read more

    7 Comments / Resurrection /

  • May 6, 2011

    So You Say You Want a Prophet?

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    So you say you want a prophet? Because you want to know the truth that lies beyond the official script. You want to see beyond the matrix. Good for you! But keep in mind what prophets are. Prophets are seers. They see what we do not. They’ve seen behind the curtain. They’re not fooled by smooth words or slight of hand. The prophet is vital because the prophet can help us recover our imagination. We had an imagination once, as children (children who could enter the kingdom of God); but we grew up and that imagination got conscripted by the so-called “real world.” Yes, we need the help of the prophet to recover our imagination. But remember, the prophet is ever and always controversial. The prophet doesn’t salute the status quo, the prophet offers his withering critique. The prophet dares to speak of other alternatives—alternatives that some will find threatening. The powers-that-be are wary of the prophets and their poetic imaginations…as well they should be. But you still want to find the prophet, don’t you? You want to see beyond the veil, don’t you? You want to hear something other than the “approved statement,” don’t you? That’s what I thought. So ladies and gentlemen, I give you Wendell Berry—the farmer-prophet from Kentucky. (Amos was a farmer-prophet too, wasn’t he?) But keep in mind prophets are not safe. Prophets aren’t ear-ticklers, they’re butt-kickers! So if you can handle a dose of prophetic truth, well, here goes… Read more

    1 Comment / America, Christianity /

  • April 9, 2010

    Practice Resurrection

    Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front
    Wendell Berry

    Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
    vacation with pay. Want more
    of everything ready-made. Be afraid
    to know your neighbors and to die.
    And you will have a window in your head.
    Not even your future will be a mystery
    any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
    and shut away in a little drawer.
    When they want you to buy something
    they will call you. When they want you
    to die for profit they will let you know. Read more

    3 Comments / Poetry /