Today, we share an excerpt from a video discussion moderated by Christopher Rios-Sueverkruebbe (full interview here). Christopher had the opportunity to sit down with Norman Wirzba and Jeffrey Bilbro to discuss Wirzba’s book, Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land.
JB: I thought I would start off with a question about the intellectual lineage that you’re working in. You’ve been writing about agrarian theology and philosophy for a long time, and early on in your career you wrote or edited what remains, I think, the best anthology of [Wendell] Berry’s essays. So I’m just curious if you could draw out for prospective readers what aspects of [Agrarian Spirit] are consonant with that early work and with Berry’s writings, but also how your thinking has evolved or sharpened over time, and where else you’ve been drawing inspiration from.
NW: I think I’d start by saying that when I first encountered Wendell, I was completely surprised by this body of work that we call today agrarian writing, because, you know, I had grown up farming, I had thought that I had left farming behind—I had been studying French and German philosophy and theology, and there was never a farmer in sight. And so I just thought that this would be interesting to read for more personal reasons—you know, hearing from a Kentucky farmer—and I was completely unprepared for the insight that I got from Wendell and from any others that he introduced me to, and to the idea that agrarianism is a comprehensive cultural position. That it’s not simply some writing that we might do for farmers who are, as you know, decreasing in number all around the world.
And so I really put my mind to thinking about, Well, what would this mean for philosophers and theologians to take seriously the agrarian position?, which is not something as simple as saying, “Well, let’s add land to the varying themes that we might take up in our work,” but [rather] “What would it mean if land and human embeddedness in the land were the starting point for our reflection about major philosophical and theological questions?”
And I think that has been a project that is ongoing—it’s a long project, I’m never going to finish it—and I think what this book Agrarian Spirit does is, it tries to really focus in on what I think are the changes in spiritual practices that people might want to consider when thinking about how they pray, when they think about how they perceive the world ,or when they think about something as important as hope in our context. Because I think agrarians have so much to teach people even if they are not farmers, and the reason that’s important to stress is that, as Berry says, as long as we eat, we can’t ever think we’ve exceeded the land or escaped the land.