Nathan Brasfield

While he lived Wendell Berry understood and articulated as only our greatest living writer could how the biblical tradition as it is put into proper practice is not about escaping the earth to go to heaven, and much less is it about becoming beholden to economic and political powers that destroy soil, air, and water and at the same time and in the same ways compromise our true love of neighbor. It is rather about how to be truly and fully human—as earth beings made of earth. No one has ever and will probably never again explain it like him, as he did so imaginatively and honestly through parable and poem, and through narrative and argumentation. He is one reason why the creedal line I most confidently assert is the one about the holy spirit speaking through the prophets. The question we’re left with now is whether or not we’ve heard.

(It was also, I have to mention, always a comfort to me to hear an old heterosexual white man with a southern accent affirm the validity of my identity and my right to marry accordingly.)