Tag: Wendell Berry

From Competition to Contribution: The Communal Context of Vocation

Wendell Berry critiques competition-driven economic systems, particularly in U.S. agriculture, arguing they diminish communal bonds and promote self-centered ambitions. Higher education perpetuates this by encouraging students to view success as individualistic. Instead, fostering a sense of contribution to the community can reshape students’ sense of vocation and enrich societal collaboration.

A series on vocation, the dignity of labor, and the misconceptions that prevent us from valuing all work.

In “Economy and Pleasure,” Wendell Berry writes, “No individual can lead a good or a satisfying life under the rule of competition … no community can succeed except by limiting somehow the competitiveness of its members.” This impulse to compete, Berry argues, drives our economic system, which divides people into two categories: winners and losers. His particular focus in this essay is on agriculture in the United States, where he sees such competition as the dominant mentality: farmers race to acquire the education and resources necessary to defeat other farmers in a game governed by “the rules of competitive economics.”

Continue reading “From Competition to Contribution: The Communal Context of Vocation”

Re-Imagining Life Together (Staying with the Trouble)

Since we cannot escape our interdependence and interconnectedness, we are forced to confront our life together as kin (or “oddkin,” as Harraway says). To re-configure our relations, we must unmake, make, and remake; we must indulge in the work of imaginating, speculating, and fabulating a future for all creatures and life forms. This is not fantasy, but justice.

A series of posts about a collaborative project at Wingate University, resulting in a first-year course called Food and Faith: Health and Happiness Around the Many Tables of Our Lives.

This third blog in our series will explore how our pedagogy reflects our belief in Earth’s entangled banks as a source of wisdom. We model our course design and teaching on our belief that we are all interdependent beings living in webs of relations and education for vocation is a co-creative process. We thrive when we live and learn by re-membering these elements of our identities as individuals and societies. This post will focus on our nature as co-creative creatures and how to teach with co-creativity as a guiding principle.

Continue reading “Re-Imagining Life Together (Staying with the Trouble)”

(Re)-reading Wendell Berry on vocation and community (part 2)

BerryLookandSeeImage
From Look and See, documentary on Wendell Berry (2016)

I am afraid that some amount of doubt may have crept into this project since my last post on Wendell Berry and his definition of community.  My argument in that post was simple: it would be good if professionals, and those who train them, might spend at least a few moments thinking through the implications of Berry’s ideal community along with his critique on modernity — both are described in his 1969 essay, “The loss of the future.”

The doubt crept in after I took my own advice and re-read Berry’s 2014 essay, “Our deserted country,” which can be found in the 2015 collection entitled Our Only World.

The essay contains the following definition of vocation:

The idea of vocation attaches to work a cluster of other ideas, including devotion, skill, pride, pleasure, the good stewardship of means and materials.  Here we have returned to intangibles of economic value. When they are subtracted, what remains is “a job,” always implying that work is something good only to escape: “Thank God it’s Friday.”

Continue reading “(Re)-reading Wendell Berry on vocation and community (part 2)”

(Re)-reading Wendell Berry on community and vocation (part 1)

Wendell Berry (Photo by Guy Mendes)
Wendell Berry (Photo by Guy Mendes)

One definition of  “community” that I have become fond of lately comes from a quote by Wendell Berry.  You don’t have to look very hard for a good quote by Wendell Berry about almost anything.  I could get lost on Berry’s BrainyQuote page and never find my way out.  The connection between vocation and community is strong throughout Berry’s work, but David Guthrie’s recent post, which highlights the many shortcomings of our academic communities, has convinced me that  Berry has something important to say about this connection.  My plan is to look at two of Berry’s essays, the first (in this post) published in 1969 and the second (next time) published in 2015, that contain definitions of community and vocation that may very well be… definitive.  Continue reading “(Re)-reading Wendell Berry on community and vocation (part 1)”