09/01/2026
R.I.P., Wendell Berry
August 5, 1934 — August 31, 2026
Paper Crane: Wendell Berry (Aug 5, 1934-)
International Peace Month
“We have become blind to the alternatives to violence.”
~ Wendell Berry
Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry is best known for his poetry and writings. His philosophy of nonviolence and care for creation reflect his deeply held Christian beliefs. “Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you,” he says—his witty quip on The Golden Rule alluding to his life of farming.
Jedediah Britton-Purdy writes, “[Berry] has written against all forms of violence and destruction—of land, communities, and human beings—and argued that the modern American way of life is a skein of violence.” Berry contends that the nonviolent life-in-Christ is holistic, not compartmentalized, an observation he makes in his 2005 book, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Christ’s Teachings About Love, Compassion and Forgiveness. “Any observer would have to say that Christianity is fashionable at present in the United States,” he writes in the introduction. “This might be a good thing, except…It seems to have remarkably little to do with the things that Jesus Christ actually taught…war after war has been prosecuted by bloodthirsty Christians, and to the profit of greedy Christians, as if Christ had never been born and the Gospels never written.”
Our time on earth is to do God’s will—obedience to Christ’s teachings. This is the hard work: tilling, planting, and reaping. And yet ultimately, Berry concedes, full surrender to God alone is where we’ll find strength and sustenance to sweat in the fields. His following poem, The Peace of Wild Things, captures this theology:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
“I will write peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world.”
~ Sadako Sasaki
