Wendell berry on land and farming

"“We are talking about organic artifacts, organic only by imitation or analogy. Our ability to make such artifacts depends on virtues that are specifically human: accurate memory, observation, insight, imagination, inventiveness, reverence, devotion, fidelity, restraint. Restraint–for us, now–above all: the ability to accept and live within limits; to resist changes that are merely novel or fashionable; to resist greed and pride; to resist the temptation to “solve” problems by ignoring them, accepting them as “trade-offs,” or bequeathing them to posterity. A good solution then, must be in harmony with good character, cultural value, and moral law.”"

Wendell Berry in "The gift of Good Land" (thanks to Geoff Wells)

Updike on Joy

A very nice article from which I stole the quotes below.

It was a Saturday and...

...the men from the sulphur works were getting drunk. From within the double doors of a saloon there welled a poisonous laughter that seemed to distill all the cruelty and blasphemy in the world, and he wondered how such a noise could have a place under the sky of his father's God....

Then Caldwell remembers...

...his father turning and listening in his backwards collar to the laughter from the saloon and then smiling down to his son, "All joy belongs to the Lord."

It was half a joke but the boy took it to heart. All joy belongs to the Lord. Wherever in the faith and confusion and misery, a soul felt joy, there the Lord came and claimed it as his own; into barrooms and brothels and classrooms and alleys slippery with spittle, no matter how dark and scabbed and remote, in China or Africa or Brazil, wherever a moment of joy was felt, there the Lord stole and added to His enduring domain....

The Centaur (New York: Knopf, 1963) p. 296

Toward the end of his career, Karl Barth spoke of "the happy science" of evangelical theology, making it clear that, thanks to the covenant of grace, the first and last and decisive word about human life is this same irrepressible word of joy

...what God wills for us is a helpful, healing and uplifting work, and what God does with us brings peace and joy. Because of this, God is really the God of the euangelion, the Evangel, the Word that is good for man because it is gracious. With its efforts, evangelical theology responds to this gracious Yes.... It is concerned... with Immanuel, God with us! Having this God for its object, it can be nothing else but the most thankful and happy science!

Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (Anchor Books: New York, 1964), pp. 9-11