Wendell Berry and Religion: Heaven’s Earthly Life ed. by Joel James Shuman and L. Roger Owens (review)

462 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE Foster's habit is to produce a cerebral kind of poetry. No one would mistake his poems for Hallmark cards: this is their strength. Very few would slip them into the folds of a love letter or use them to remind themselves of the pleasures of the natural world: this is their weakness. In "Sponge Bath as Answer to the Problem of Knowledge:' the speaker observes a group of art students at Stanford who are cleaning the famous bronze sculpture of Rodin, "The Thinker:' And then the speaker laments of himself, "I cannot live off the life of the mind. / Should I take hikes instead... ?" (11). What I wrote in the margin: Yes. That, or explore the collarbones of some of O'Donnell's saints. Paul J.Willis WestmontCollege Wendell Berry and Religion: Heaven's Earthly Life. Edited by Joel James Shuman and 1. Roger Owens. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009. ISBN 978-08131 -2555-8. Pp. 266. $40.00 Nearly fifty years ago, against the advice of everyone who thought he might one day become a writer, Wendell Berry forsook the nation's literary capital for his native Kentucky county, and ever since, from that humble seat, far from the madding crowd, he has been out-pacing his critics and acolytes by a country mile: not quite a book to mark each year by,but close. And if you consider how consistently lucid his prose is, how vivid his poetry, how precise his diagnoses of our besetting maladies, the body of work is astonishing-especially if you bear in mind that Berry also farms by traditional methods and frequently lends his hand and voice to the public causes he believes most strongly in. But the critics and acolytes are trying to catch up. Fritz Oehlschlaeger recently brought out a sensitive treatment titled The Achievement of Wendell Berry (2011, reviewed below). Mark Mitchell's and Nathan Schlueter's fine edited volume, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry, is new from lSI Books (2012). Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life, by J. Matthew Bonzo and Michael R. Stevens (Brazos Press), appeared in 2008,preceded a year prior by a special issue of Christianity and Literature devoted to Berry (Winter 2007). My own edited volume, Wendell Berry: Life and Work (also Kentucky), appeared the same year. Amid this recent flurry stands another welcome, if uneven, volume, Wendell Berry and Religion: Heaven's EarthlyLife, edited by Joel James Shuman and 1. Roger Owens. This book consists of fourteen essays divided into four sections: the first of these, "Good Work;' includes four pieces that consider "what have traditionally BOOK REVIEWS 463 been called the professions:' namely, "teaching, medicine, law,and ministry" (6); the essays in part two, "Holy Living:' attempt to understand the biblical injunctions to holiness in the broad context of health and wholeness; section three, "Imagination:' assumes that"[t]he task oftheologyisin good measure an enterprise ofimagination," and so, by "pars[ing] Berry's views on love, forgiveness, hope, and life eternal:' the essays there examine his fiction and poetry as works that help us to "imagine a better way to live" (9); and, finally,"Moving Forward" is comprised of a single essay that, arbitrating a feud between Jeffery Stout and Stanley Hauerwas, takes up the question of Christian political engagement and suggests that Berry provides "a way forward that avoids the misguided division of Christians into withdrawn, tribal 'sectarians' and cosmopolitans adept at engaging the secular on its own terms" (11). The introduction avers that all the essays should be read as "the attempts of members of Christ's body to discern together from one of our fellow members how to move forward, to try yet again to say something useful and interesting about the good work to which we and all women and men have been called" (5). This must certainly have been a difficult manuscript to bring to press. The unevenness that often marks such collections is fairly pronounced here, a consequence not only ofthe varied rhetorical skills and dispositions-scholarly or otherwise-ofthe contributors but also of the kinds of essays the book is composed of, which range from the academic to...