“In Defense of Effective Altruism.” Tyler Cowen defends a flawed movement. It’s a helpful summary of their ideas and dispositions, but he’s still deeply wrong about the merits of this ethic: “effective altruism is directionally correct, even if you should not follow its recommendations all the way.”

“Veteran Conservative Lawyer Quits Trump’s Interior Department and Warns of ‘Assault on the Rule of Law.’” Jimmy Tobias reports on why Porcher John Murdock resigned from the US Department of the Interior: “John Murdock, an attorney and self-described conservative Christian, began working for the agency’s legal office in 2002. In his resignation letter, first sent to his supervisor earlier this year and obtained exclusively by the Guardian and Public Domain, Murdock cites ‘glaring legal flaws’ he witnessed within the agency during the course of the Trump administration, as well as concerns over offshore oil and gas drilling, the aggressive push to expand fossil fuels and the flouting of environmental regulation.” The kicker of the article is quite telling: “BOEM’s Giacona, meanwhile, departed the agency in September to go work for oil services giant Halliburton.”

“Doctor, Patient, and AI.” Brent Orrell tackles the question of whether AI should simply replace doctors: “Patients are not units of health care production. They are the ends toward which that production is directed. They are, in a word, the loop, the point of it all. Greater efficiency should not simply increase the medical system’s output. It should improve the lives of the people the system exists to serve, the inherently dignified persons who deserve more recognition than the current system, much less a hyper-efficient AI-powered one, is structured to provide.”

“Did Robert Frost Despair for His Soul?” Benjamin Paul Myers reviews a new volume of Frost’s correspondence and ponders his complicated religious affections: “One might interpret Frost’s spiritual ambiguity not only as extreme individualism, but also as acedia, the deadly sin of spiritual apathy. He confesses as much, writing to Louis Untermeyer in 1939, ‘My disease I guess is accidia (Fr. acedie) contracted I fear from having tried to get too much meaning out of the word in a lecture about my printers (Jo [sic] Blumenthal) at the Grolier Club recently.’ The lecture’s text has not survived, and while the letter makes light of his apathy, it nevertheless points toward a real spiritual struggle. That Frost opts for acedia’s medieval spelling suggests there is serious reading behind this self-diagnosis.”

“Bait and Switch.” Tyler Austin Harper mourns what AI-generated images are doing to the fishing community and contemplates the broader implications: “In our group chat, my fishing partners and I spend too much time scrutinizing photos of bass that other anglers have posted. People who fish are habitual liars (I say this fondly), and most of our conversations take the form of debates about whether a fish is really as big as someone claims. Lately, though, we’ve been asking a different question: Is that fish even real?”

“Are 60-Second Microdramas the Future of Hollywood, or the End?” Daniel Kolitz tries to understand the genre that appears to be printing money for producers. This is an incredibly well-written article about a subject that goes from grim to disturbing to horrifically bleak: “What tends to succeed on phones is phone stuff. A video of a panda being fed at the zoo. A deepfake of Jeffrey Epstein, Diddy and Charlie Kirk smoking huge cigars in a hot tub. The proliferating genre of monumentally upsetting A.I.-generated videos in which anthropomorphic strawberry women cheat on their hapless strawberry husbands with callous, hypermasculine bananas or heads of broccoli. It is the rare person who, in the truest sense, ‘chooses’ to watch this stuff — who looks forward to a long night in bed with Instagram Reels. It would be more accurate to say that, through a series of by-now-unconscious reflexes engineered by large technology companies, this content just sort of happens to people, like a food-borne illness. This is the terrain that ReelShort and its peers have precision-engineered their content to compete on.”

“The Literacy Cure.” Lydia S. Dugdale identifies the real stakes of illiteracy and reckons with why more and more Americans can’t read: “For much of my life, I took the gift of early literacy for granted. I just assumed that the richest country in the world had conquered illiteracy once and for all, and that, like smallpox, it would never plague us again. Boy, was I wrong.”

“Religion Is Not the Enemy of Reading.” Brad East has both praise and critique for James Merriott’s lament for literacy: “Marriott is not asking merely whether, after the kids are in bed, you scan words on a page or watch videos on a screen. Rather, it is about the role that literacy plays in our society as a whole, and whether the goods brought about by literacy can be retained without the practices of literacy that made them possible in the first place.”

“The Magical Worlds of Susanna Clarke.” Nadya Williams commends the redemptive fantasy of Clarke: “Our imagination has been stunted by modernity, Clarke’s tales repeatedly remind us. As a result, we fail to see the ordinary yet extraordinary beauty all around us, in the architecture of cathedrals, the glory of snow falling, the bloom of trees in parks and woods, the music of birds, the cry of an infant. What if we looked at all of them differently?”

“We Must Become Gods.” Ashley Frawley traces the shifting constituency for a politics of limits: “Perhaps Thiel is right that the “movement from chaos to order begins in Genesis,” and that Christianity preserves a confidence in humanity that the secular world has lost. But if Christianity has found itself keeping alive the Promethean flame, it doesn’t follow that it knows what to do with it nor that it fully realizes where it leads. If becoming more like God is to be less a burden and punishment than a responsibility, we must have the courage to follow wherever that ‘becoming’ takes us.” (Recommended by Adam Smith.)

Berry would not think too fondly of what modern public health has become: an overdependence on statistical methods of knowing and acting, a workforce which often presumes that those most equipped for the work must have several letters after their name, attempts to improve the health of the public through bureaucratic programming at a distance, and an epistemic bias that prioritizes technical knowledge in a professional’s head over the relationships and care fostered by the amateur. For much of our careers, Berry’s writings have haunted our thoughts and actions. For those with eyes to see and ears to hear, he has been a fly in the ointment of our profession and a voice calling us to a better way. (One of us has long considered placing The Art of the Commonplace in the mailboxes of fellow faculty members. Perhaps now is the time to do so.)

For we who have dedicated our careers to public health, there is no more devastating line to read than the opening line of “Health is Membership”: “From our constant and increasing concerns about health, you can tell how seriously diseased we are.” The great paradox is that talking about health without the proper relational context can actually contribute to our shared illnesses. Berry suggests our thinking about health must be within the activity of concrete communities, for genuine health is born out of “the sense of belonging to others and to our place; it is an unconscious awareness of community, of having in common.” It is an odd thing, Berry might say, to speak about rates of diabetes without immediately discussing the entire local food system—networks of farmers, grocery store owners, and families—which contribute to and can contend with those rates; or to debate interventions aimed at decreasing rates of opioid dependency without considering how those who suffer from opioid dependency can be better understood and cared for by those in their neighborhood or at their church.

We believe Berry would be proud of the story of Lillie B. Hall, as told within Dr. Wylin Wilson’s Womanist Bioethics: Social Justice, Spirituality, and Black Women’s Health. After her retirement from nursing in the early twenty-first century, Ms. Hall founded the Tuskegee Area Diabetes Support Group within her local church to help individuals manage their chronic illness. According to Wilson, support group meetings would feature “accessible presentations by physicians, dietitians, podiatrists, ophthalmologists, biologists, pastoral counselors, and many others who present on disease management and preventative care in ways that address the whole person—mind, body, and spirit.” Many from the surrounding region would go even though they themselves did not have diabetes, a practical implication of Hall’s philosophy that “when one person has diabetes, their family has diabetes, their church has diabetes, and their community has diabetes.”

Likewise, Berry’s account of health and community is evident in the work of Uplift Appalachia, a non-profit organization in eastern Tennessee which, among other programs, transports individuals who struggle with addiction to job interviews, career training, recovery housing, court appearances, probation meetings, and medical appointments. Importantly, the stated goal of this program is not merely to transport people to the manifold and interconnected resources they need, but to invite them into a deeper community with the local church.

To speak about health as such—that is, divorced from a particular community of people responsible for the cultivation of health—cannot help but introduce division, which is itself the hallmark symptom of disease. Berry shows us, time and time again, that the fundamental unit of health is neither the atomized individual nor the abstract public, but the community, “a place and all its creatures.” Berry’s health is incomplete without attending to the conditions of his family, the farm on which he labors, the citizens of Port Royal to whom he dedicated so much of his energy, and all the richness of the connections between these beings. And so, it must be for all of us—at least insofar as it’s the health of human persons (and not machines) that we’re interested in.

To consider the community as the fundamental unit of health is a serious charge for a profession that speaks so much about the health of the “public.” As Berry writes in “Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community,” “As I understand the term, public means simply all the people, apart from any personal responsibility or belonging… A community, unlike a public, has to do first of all with belonging; it is a group of people who belong to one another and to their place.” The difference therefore between what we might call “public health” and “community health” is therefore all the difference in the world. One is dealing with the reality of people and their loves often made visible through story; the other is distracted by abstraction often made possible through aggregate statistics. Berry challenges us to imagine how the trajectory of public health (statistics, credentials programs, technical reports and all) must find its home within concrete communities. For it is only a community which can claim, in the words of Hall, that “when one person has diabetes, … their community has diabetes.” If public health creates the conditions in which that claim is made more tangible, it has done its work well.

Likewise, it is common for public health to consider the causes of disease through the “socioecological framework,” which distinguishes the “five levels” which contribute to health: individual, interpersonal, organizational, community, society. In response to this framework, Berry would likely say that it’s simply all the same thing, much as he affirms the English agriculturist Sir Albert Howard’s observation that “the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal, and man [is] one great subject.” To insist that each of these layers is distinct—like the folds of an onion—is to risk corrupting what is ultimately a deeper unity. As Berry described in “The Body and the Earth,” “For no matter the distinctions we draw between body and soul, body and earth, ourselves and others—the connections, the dependences, the identities remain.” This is why health is not, contrary to the speculative hopes of folks like Christopher Boorse, fully reducible to the statistical normality of an individual’s biological functioning, but must also be seen as membership within the network of a whole community. This whole-of-community approach is, as one just example, practically documented in RAND’s 2023 report on “America’s Opioid Ecosystem,” which details over the course of 600 pages how “confronting the [opioid] crisis is not just about better pain management or treatment for opioid use disorder,” but must extend to change within the dozens of different interacting and interconnected systems which contribute to and are impacted by an individual’s opioid dependency (employment, food, criminal legal system, families, etc.).

Along with his insistence on the “wholeness” of health, Berry’s most important message for public health might very well be his critique of public health as a specialized and independent profession. Berry goes so far as to write that “It is therefore absurd to approach the subject of health piecemeal with a departmentalized band of specialists. A medical doctor uninterested in nutrition, in agriculture, in the wholesomeness of mind and spirit is as absurd as a farmer who is uninterested in health. Our fragmentation of this subject cannot be our cure, because it is our disease.” We see this as a direct challenge for us to get our heads out of our offices, textbooks, and computer models, and get to know the people and ideas which exist far away from the traditional halls of the health departments or public health academia: theologians, artists, urban planners, and, of course, farmers.

Leaving the desk to embody neighborliness would itself be a powerful corrective to the field. During the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines in the spring of 2021, tribal communities in the eastern part of our state were among the least vaccinated, and we were contacted to assist with education about these vaccines given the abundant misinformation and skepticism. Over the past five years, the resulting engagement—not with vaccine hesitancy in the abstract, but with Greg and Isabell and Nadine and so many others—has grown into relationships that deepen by the season. Leaving our offices not only led to vaccine Q&As, but to church homecomings, coffee shop conversations about grief, Pow Wow celebrations, talking circles, and a late-night text to see if “you and your students might be able to come help us harvest the sorghum.” The weather meant they needed to do a lot of work in a little bit of time and they reached out. Not to a professional or an expert, but to a neighbor. As a field, the public health profession might do well to ask honest questions about whether our public health work puts us in the kind of relationships in which this neighborliness is even possible.

In the words of the Institute of Medicine’s landmark 1988 report on The Future of Public Health, the best of public health will always be “what we as a society do collectively to assure the conditions in which people can be healthy.” Berry’s ecological, holistic vision of health and community constantly brings us back to this basic reality. In the best of worlds, we should all be seen and celebrated in the work of public health, as we all have responsibilities to care for ourselves, others, and the world in which we dwell in ways which contribute to our health. As Berry argues in “The Body and the Earth,” an attempt to go about the work of public health as an independent profession cannot help but tend towards control and isolation: “To try to heal the body alone is to collaborate in the destruction of the body. Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing.” This is a powerful lesson for a profession which is experiencing all-time low levels of trust.

As a case in point, last year one of us served as the keynote speaker for a public health conference in Iowa. The state’s public health association was celebrating the 100th anniversary of its first convening. As part of the celebration, the expo displayed records from the first meetings. These records evidenced the participation of physicians and nurses and pharmacists, but also farmers and firefighters and civic leaders. During one of the sessions, a participant noted the distance created between public health and its public by simply asking, “When is the last time you were at a public health conference with farmers and firemen?” In the spirit of this questioner, Berry’s writings make us wonder why there are so many summits, panels, and convenings aimed at public health without the expertise of local farmers—some of the foremost experts in creating conditions of vitality—as well as many other members of society whose labor contributes to the “conditions in which people can be healthy.”

Berry’s writings ultimately strike at the fundamental purpose of our profession. Consider how there is, in fact, no greater public justification for the work of public health than the extension of life expectancy in the modern era. According to the CDC, environmental improvements throughout the twentieth century contributed to a 29.2-year increase in life expectancy in the United States, and “25 years of this gain are attributable to advances in public health.” Not only would Berry challenge such a wholesale attribution of this improvement to a single group of specialists, but he would also remind us that discussing human life expectancy without considering the quality of the years added is inherently technocratic—as if the only measure of health were the raw number of years we remain alive: “The statistics of life expectancy are favorites of the industrial apologists, because they are perhaps the hardest to argue with. Nevertheless, this emphasis on longevity is an excellent example of the way the isolated aims of the industrial mind reduce and distort human life, and also the way statistics corrupt the truth.” The goal of simply adding more years to life must be seriously challenged if those years are spent in loneliness and isolation, as is increasingly the case for the elderly members of our population and many others besides. Rather than narrowly seeking to extend average life expectancy through policies and programs—including those vulnerable to eugenic motives—Berry challenges us to ensure that longer lives can be more meaningfully lived in community wherein “prolonged life is virtuous [and] … satisfactory.” In response to the grand ambitions of public health officials who seek to extend life expectancy—thousands of pages of reports, analyses, and plans for how the body can be kept alive—Berry reminds us to “think little,” for “Thinking Big has led us to the two biggest and cheapest political dodges of our time: plan-making and lawmaking.” In thinking little, we better see how so much of how we care for the health of others and our environment begins not with the construction of new organizations but with a conversion of our own hearts, and must therefore happen within a community in which that conversion is encouraged and sustained over the long haul.

In fact, we believe Berry offers us an even more expansive vision for the purpose of public health than merely the extension of quality life-years. If health is characterized by wholeness, then the task of any health professional is to facilitate the reunion of two or more parts that belong together within the whole. Again, from “The Body and the Earth,” “Healing … complicates the system by opening and restoring connections among the various parts—in this way restoring the ultimate simplicity of their union.” Critically, when done correctly, healing ultimately enables the body to restore its strength to a kind of homeostasis—its own ability to maintain balance amidst changing environments and demands. It is through this process that, as Berry writes, that “[the body] begins to live again by its own powers and instincts, to the extent that it can do so … it goes free of drugs and mechanical helps. Its appetites return. It relishes food and rest. The patient is restored to family and friends, home and community and work.” For Berry, to heal the body is to return it to itself.

How might such an account inspire the public health professional? If healing the body implies returning it to a state in which it “[lives] again by its own powers” and is no longer dependent on “drugs and mechanical helps,” perhaps Berry would characterize the work of public health as creating the conditions in which a community is no longer dependent on an external, technical apparatus to sustain its own being in the world. If healing returns the body to itself, then Berry’s vision of public health might very well be to return the community to itself.

We believe this Berry-inspired vocation resonates with the best of public health already being done in many places across the country. Consider the recent winners of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Culture of Health Prize. Community members in the city of Trenton, New Jersey developed the “Trenton Restorative Street Team” to implement various restorative justice practices, such as community circles and community-led first responders. Citizens from Green Bay, Wisconsin, developed localized evaluation tools to measure community well-being, leading to the declaration of racism as a public health issue; through the “cultivating Community” project, others in the city have developed initiatives to improve cultural connections to food through prioritizing sourcing food from local farmers of various ethnic minorities. Individuals in Juneau, Alaska are advancing dialogues on racial equity and reviving indigenous culture through traditional healing practices. Those in the Lower Eastern Shore, Maryland, and Sussex County, Delaware, have engaged citizen scientists to conduct community-owned research regarding environmental contamination. Community members in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin are working toward the development of mixed-use housing, along with a more pedestrian-friendly area of downtown Milwaukee. Those in Moloka’i, Hawaii are working towards the restoration of their shoreline from invasive macroalgae which is threatening nearshore fisheries, while others are developing Mobile Markets to expand access to locally sourced produce throughout the island. In Sacramento, California, a local nonprofit has centered the lived experience of youth in the juvenile justice system, as well as developed job training programs for young people leaving the foster care system. And Tribes in the Great Lakes Region are reestablishing traditional trade routes to generate economic pathways for tribal members to produce traditional foods and products. While the manifestation varies widely, each of these communities is, in their own way, healing their communities by healing the relationships within those communities and thereby restoring life and power to that community. To advocate for community-based policing, local measures of well-being, indigenous practices, pedestrian-friendly streets, the value of lived experience, and the economic viability of local producers is, at bottom we believe, to attempt to return the community to itself through the reintegration of whole persons and their relationships with others into the everyday practices of life. Once more, from “The Body and the Earth,” “Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is.”

As it happens, we recently published a reflection on “Artificial Intelligence and the Purposes of Public Health,” in which we principally draw from Berry’s communal vision of the good life to challenge what we believe are dangerous temptations which exist at the intersection of public health and artificial intelligence (AI). There are simply too many parallels between his haunting question, “Is the obsolescence of human beings now our social goal?” and the implicit goal of certain versions of public health technocracy which AI will further enable.

In this age of runaway technological acceleration, we do indeed need Berry right now. We’re grateful that he leaves us with a treasury of writings and, more importantly, a community of friends who wish to bring those writings to life.

Thank you, Berry, for directing us toward “our real work” of healing. May you rest in peace and rise in Glory, and even “dance to the fiddle” while doing so.

References

The above is just a fantasy, of course, although I did occasionally consider shooting the leaf blower itself, especially when he was using it at 7:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning. But I share that fantasy as an example of consequentialist moral reasoning. FPR’s slogan is “place, limits, liberty.” Consequentialism runs roughshod over the first two, and can easily lead to the destruction of the third.

The breakdown of traditional European society, triggered largely by the print revolution (see Mary Harrington’s forthcoming book, The King and the Swarm, for more on this) prompted a rather desperate, four-century-long effort to reground morality on a “rational” basis. Bacon and Descartes kicked off that project, and it was picked up by any number of thinkers over the next four centuries. One of the less tasty fruits of that effort is consequentialism, and its subcategory, utilitarianism. (Consequentialism says we should judge actions solely by the consequences they produce, without specifying which aspect of those consequences we should be focused on. Utilitarianism says it is the utility, or pleasure, produced by actions that are the consequences that matter.)

By positing one universal solvent for moral dilemmas, consequentialism acts to erode the particularity of different places. All of a culture’s customs and mores must be evaluated based on their consequences, which for the consequentialist are easy to discern, almost by definition. If in a particular culture, for instance, everyone is required to take off their shoes before entering a home, this custom will be judged based upon some surface criterion, like “Is the time spent taking one’s shoes on and off worth the increased cleanliness inside the home?” Whatever answer one comes up with, it ignores the fact that there may be a deeper meaning attached to the practice: removing one’s outside shoes at the threshold of the home sets apart the world inside the home as a distinct realm from the world outside. But whatever the “consequences” of such a distinction may be, it is far too difficult for the consequentialist to pretend to calculate whether it is “worthwhile” to preserve. So such deeper meanings will simply be ignored, and the argument for and against the custom will turn on the utility of keeping the floor clean.

But even more dramatically, consequentialism entails a wholesale rejection of limits; in particular, our very limited knowledge of what “all” the consequences of some action will be. The repercussions of anything I choose to do can, over time, affect almost anyone on the globe, either negatively or positively.

For instance, I stopped at a local bookstore to work on this essay, and ordered a hot latte. While browsing the shelves, I found a book by two friends, which I did not know existed, and decided to buy it. Perhaps my purchase, by increasing the demand for coffee, will help prop up some cruel dictator in a coffee-growing country, or help fund a revolution leading to his overthrow. As I write this sentence, the extreme air conditioning in the bookstore is making me shiver: maybe my trembling hands will cause me to have an accident as I drive home later, and kill a man who is about to invent the cure for cancer . . .or kill a man who would become the 21st-century Adolf Hitler. It could be that, unbeknownst to me, one of my friends has a gambling problem, and the royalties from the book I bought will encourage him to gamble even more. Chaos theory famously points out that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil may help produce a tornado in Texas some time later. Obviously, every human action can have as great, or even greater, unforeseen consequences.

In contrast to consequentialism, respecting our inherited moral traditions is a way of acknowledging our own limits: they represent the accumulated wisdom of generations of our ancestors. It is very unlikely that my own limited mind can think up a superior moral code from scratch. Of course, those traditions may be in need of modification, but those modifications will always make use of other parts of the tradition in addressing the part that is in need of amendment. Consequentialism is a way to try to replace tradition all in one go, with “rational calculation.”

Given that no one can actually perform the sort of calculations that genuine consequentialism would require, what actually takes place when some action is justified based upon its supposed consequences? Australian philosopher John Finnis describes the usual procedure:

Now, individuals and societies do in fact solve these problems for themselves, and so make [consequentialism] seem workable. They focus on something which they have already set their hearts on [such as]… an end to the war, the detection of those heretics or criminals, re-election as president, an end to that young woman’s suffering… The good consequences of this, and the bad consequences of omitting or failing to get it, are dwelt upon… Thus, the calculus is forced through to provide a determinate solution [that will be] the quickest, cheapest way of getting what was first focused upon[, for example,] the nuclear or firestorm bombing of the enemy’s hostage civilians, the inquisitorial torture of suspects or informers, the fraudulent cover-up and destruction of legal process, the abortion of unborn and ‘exposure’ of newly born children… Of course, by focusing on some other alternatives, and on some other long-term or overall consequences of choosing the favorite alternative, and on the life possibilities of the proposed victims, and so on, one can in every case find reasons to condemn the favorite action on ‘consequentialist grounds’. But in truth, both sets of calculations in such cases are equally senseless. What generates the ‘conclusions’ is always something other than the calculus…” (Natural Law & Natural Rights, page 117)

In other words, consequentialism is a neat trick that allows you to cook up a justification for whatever it is you wanted to do anyway.

Finally, turning to the third member of our website’s triumvirate, consequentialism can also endanger liberty. There have been thinkers, such as Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt, who have used consequentialist reasoning to reach libertarian conclusions. However, since no one can really predict with confidence all the outcomes of any policy, much less prove them to everyone’s satisfaction, there are even more people who have used consequentialism as an argument for restricting liberty. For instance, it was an image of the horrific consequences that might result from allowing people to make their own health and safety decisions during COVID that were used to justify lockdowns. (And I’m not even making any claim about the wisdom of the lockdowns here, just noting that, whether wise or not, they most certainly restricted people’s liberty!)

None of this is to say that we should ignore the foreseeable results of our choices. If I am thinking of driving the family car down the highway at 120 miles per hour, the high chance of a fatal crash at such a speed should lead me to rule out that option. To ignore that danger would be a failure to exercise the virtue of prudence. The problem with consequentialism is not that it urges us to pay attention to consequences, but that it requires us to pay attention to nothing else.

Prudence should enter into our considerations only when choosing among actions that are otherwise licit. If I begin thinking about what the consequences would be of killing a relative so that I can inherit his money, I have had, as the English philosopher Bernard Williams put it, “one thought too many.” One can always imagine some scenario in which the money I inherit would be put to a much better use than how my relative presently uses it. And so, by inviting us to consider the “overall consequences,” it can create the illusion that killing him is a good idea. This is a trope in many detective shows, where some doctor or scientist, who is about to make a breakthrough medical discovery, kills the person who is going to report him for fraud because “their life was worth less than the many lives I’m going to save.” That person is rightly seen as a villain.

Oddly enough, many people, who would readily agree on the villainy of the detective show antagonist, throw that moral intuition out the window when it comes to the actions of their own government. So we can regularly find people online claiming that, if the U.S. has to wipe out the entire population of Iran in order to eliminate the threat of the Iranian government getting nuclear weapons, so be it.

I think there are two reasons this happens: first of all, many people understandably do not want to think badly of their own government. If they see that their government has acted based on this sort of consequentialist reasoning, it is more comfortable to accept it than not. Secondly, the governmental officials who have justified their actions based upon consequentialist arguments, or who hope to do so in the future, are anxious to “educate” the population to accept such reasoning.

Naturally, officials directing a nation’s war efforts, even in a fully just war, will often face difficult and tragic decisions. It may be impossible to strike at the enemy without a very high chance of injuring or killing non-combatants, perhaps very many non-combatants. And it won’t always be obvious just what exercising sufficient care for non-combatants will entail, or what military targets were truly vital to hit, despite probable civilian casualties, versus which ones actually could have been left alone without much risk. But as murky and fraught as such decisions are, those foggy areas are very benign weather compared to deliberately targeting civilians in order to bring one’s enemy to its knees.

As Finnis put it:

For every government that has the physical capacity to make its threats credible says this to its potential enemies: ’If you attack us and threaten to defeat us, we will kill all the hostages we hold; that is to say, we will incinerate or dismember as many of your old men and women and children, and poison as many of your mothers and their unborn offspring, as it takes to persuade you to desist; we do not regard as decisive the fact that they are themselves no threat to us; no do we propose to destroy them merely incidentally, as an unsought-after side-effect of efforts to stop your armed forces in their attack on us; no, we will destroy your noncombatants precisely because you value them, and in order to persuade you to desist.” (Natural Law & Natural Rights, page 224)

In short, we are not permitted to do evil merely because we contend, even if sincerely, that good may come of it.

I’m going to start with a few lines by T. S. Eliot, from “Choruses from ‘The Rock’”:

Let me show you the work of the humble. Listen:

In the vacant places

We will build with new bricks

Where the bricks are fallen

We will build with new stone

Where the beams are rotten

We will build with new timbers

Where the word is unspoken

We will build with new speech

There is work together

Those words were published in 1934, and they remain apt for the moment we find ourselves in, more than 90 years later. And how inspiring is it to have this insight time-travel to us? Remarkable really. Yet the import of these lines brings both good news and bad news. Let’s just get the bad news out of the way: all of our work is destined for failure and brokenness. All of it. Please, don’t kid yourself. But the good news is that failure happens every winter and is followed by the opportunity of spring. The good news is that failure is necessary—it is the path to springtime, to summer, and the harvest. There’s no way out but through. And it is our privilege to participate in that redemption. But what, exactly, does that participation look like? I think that can be a bit nuanced and maybe hard to describe plainly. So. I have a story.

I am the seventh of nine children. Five older brothers in stair-steps, a sibling that died in infancy, me, and then a younger brother and sister. When my older brothers were in elementary and middle school they had a game they absolutely LOVED after school. We lived in one of those center hall colonials that had this center entrance hall, rooms to either side, and the kitchen in back. But if you opened all the doors between the rooms there was this loop, like a race track, on the wood floors. And they would run in stocking feet until they were exhausted and then collapse on the couch until dinner. It was grand. Until one day, brother number four thought that he might beat brother number three this time, and in his haste, he slipped and went flying. Leaving a hole, the size of a nine-year-old’s bottom in the wall. My mother came in—horrified—and shouted “Oh my G*d!” (she didn’t say that, I’m not repeating what she said here.) “You rascals just wait until your father comes home!” And so my dad comes home, he looks at the hole, and then he just walks outside. He stands out there for like ten full minutes. When he comes back in, he just picks up the phone, and he calls a guy. Then we have dinner. NO ONE DISCUSSES IT. The next day, guy comes over, fixes the hole, my brothers are angels: They clean up, set the table, help without being asked, the whole bit. You know? Dad comes home, he sees the fix, admires it. He asks how much, the guy is sending a bill, the boys promise to be less rowdy. All is well.

So the very next day, brother number two thinks that maybe he’s faster than brother number one, and if just the two of them race, it will be less rowdy than all five of them, so they can settle this once and for all, AND, maintain their sincere commitment to reduced rowdiness. So brother number two trips on number three. He goes flying. Into the same wall. Leaving a hole the size of a thirteen-year-old’s bottom. And friends, let me tell you, that was the day we became a “play outside until dinner family.” Rain or shine. Hot or cold. Did you know it was my mom that coined the phrase “There’s no bad weather, only bad gear, put your snow pants on”? I think people only use the first part now, but that? That was her.

While it’s funny—no brothers were injured in this story, just to be clear—that event changed so much about our family. We didn’t live in a center hall colonial again until my youngest sibling was nine. And personally? I practically lived in the woods as a child. But the fact is, every community has events that change their trajectory.

My husband and I started a Catholic Worker (CW) house in Saginaw, MI in 2010. While you may not know Saginaw’s particular story, everyone in the manufacturing belt knows this story. General Motors (GM) once employed fifty thousand people—half the population—at a foundry on the river in Saginaw. By 2010, GM employed five thousand people at that foundry, leaving a hole the size of forty-five thousand people in the city. And I’m sure you understand, a hole that size is not just those individuals, but the pharmacies, grocery stores, diners, and schools that they used. All of those local businesses and resources… just gone. A hole that size is so many vacant lots. When we entered the conversation, the city was trying to call a guy to patch the hole, and they really didn’t want to discuss it. Community members had a nickname for the guy they were trying to call: GM Jesus.

The idea was some manufacturing business, somewhere—in response to enough compensation in tax breaks—was going to come out of the clear blue sky, like Jesus himself, and patch the hole in the city with forty-five thousand new jobs. The city just needed to get the compensation right. The concept was ridiculous on its face, even if framed in more flattering terms. But like my father, all the city could envision was the restoration of what was in the hole. It literally did not occur to them to imagine how we might participate in redeeming Saginaw. Possibly the greatest insight for us was realizing that what had become of our place happened in a specific context with specific incentives that led us to where we were in that moment. And because of those factors there was really no going back to what was. The context was the offshoring of US manufacturing. The incentive was to enrich the haves that were in privileged positions to benefit from extending public money to their own connections. They’d already had a false start on the enterprise in the 90s and early 2000s by luring a second tier auto supplier to town, and while the haves came out of that deal okay, the city, after ten years, had lost more jobs than the supplier had brought.

Which reminds me of the second incentive fueling the city’s drive to find “GM Jesus”: they were desperate not to have the population fall below fifty thousand. Falling below that threshold would make the city ineligible for a tier of federal funding reserved for “large cities.” A few years into our time there, I made acquaintance with Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns. And in 2013 as he was passing through for a different talk, he stopped to talk to us. I and several other community members attended a hastily organized event and learned about a new path toward reclaiming the city’s former glory, to creating a wonderful place for the forty-seven thousand people that actually live there. Marohn’s talk helped us shift the focus from growing the city to changing the fundamental dynamics that caused the hole in the first place.

Ultimately what Saginaw—and my parents—came to understand, was that repairing what was broken is less about restoration in itself. Fully participating in repair is about seeing how things have to be different now, in light of what’s happened. And Mr. Eliot says it so plainly that it’s easy to miss: In the vacant places, we will build (not restore) with new (not old, not replacement) bricks; reading further in that same passage, it might be stones (something else altogether) and not bricks at all.

After all these abstractions and metaphors, you may ask yourself, “but what does creating a wonderful place for forty-seven thousand people actually look like, in material reality?” Let me tell you. The Saginaw community had a wonderful farmer’s market open six hours a day, four days a week. But they decided to take that a step further. They negotiated a deal for a vacant industrial office building downtown. Then fully renovated the parking lot into a permanently covered, outdoor seasonal farmer’s market. The inside became a year-round farm market, food court, and small business incubator. There’s even a ballroom community space. My children go to cons there, like a comic-con. And right now the community is working on renovating their train station, literally with volunteers. Volunteers that aren’t reclaiming bricks are petitioning the DOT to reestablish passenger rail to the city for tourism. They recently completed work on what is the second largest mural in the United States. They salvaged neon signs from the city’s demolished buildings and created a public, outdoor sign park in collaboration with the County Museum.

Now as wonderful as these initiatives are we need to keep in mind the acceptance of failure from the start. Embrace it, even. What is that clip from the internet? “I am shocked to discover that the process of trial and error, involves error.” When the folks that created the Saginaw with a population of 100 thousand, made that place, there was no consideration of a day when there was no GM. Because before GM, there were beans (at one point Saginaw, Michigan was the bean capital of the world, I’m not even kidding), and before that lumber. They worked with what they had, where they were, with the people and the place around them. Part of the stalling out after the reality of GM leaving and nothing filling its place was the expectation that the project that had worked for so long would somehow just keep working. But in fact it was time to learn the lessons from that season and start anew. There will come a day when that beautiful farmer’s market fails. It will somehow no longer be able to meet the community’s needs in the time and the context that it finds itself. Maybe the train station project will never work, and they’ll just need to cut their losses and move on. The day of failure might come sooner, and it might come later. But it will come, and that doesn’t mean anyone did anything “wrong” in the time and context where it flourished. Even if that time and context was brief the effort wasn’t wasted: The community that coalesced in the effort is what nourished the people in it.

The thing is, in a kinda secret way, the failures themselves are the good news. But full disclosure, and I want to be completely clear about this part, those failures are going to feel like failures, and it won’t feel like a good day. For those here that profess the Christian faith, we know that there is no Easter without Good Friday; and that reality applies to every part of our lives and everything that we do.

In what might be his most famous quote, T. S. Eliot cautions that “Humankind can’t bear very much reality.” But we can bear some. And the reality we must bear is that we can’t even make failed attempts without each other. Later on in “Choruses” Mr. Eliot asks: “What life have you, if you have not life together? / There is not life that is not in community.”

We have to—all of us—learn how to eat a slice of humble pie and be grateful for it if we want to live in community. We also have to learn either up front, or the hard way, that inclusion means everyone. So I’ve talked a bit about not dwelling on the restoration of the past, instead accepting—even embracing—failure and grounding your actions in the realities of the present. But that is not in any way to say, that we should disregard the past, and pretend that we are working on a tabula rasa.

Many years ago I taught a class on collaborative strategic planning, using a tool called Future Search. It’s an incredibly effective method. I was a good hour into a ninety-minute class, and a woman shot her hand up and said: “Wait a minute. So if I want to shut down the pipeline in my community. I need to include $hell in the planning?!?”

I said: “You want to get rid of it, right?” “Yes!” “Shut it off, and it never comes back on?” “Obviously.” “That is never going to happen if Shell is not a part of the conversation.” Now what does happen when clear stakeholders are excluded, is that everyone gets on a treadmill, has a great workout, and goes nowhere. And certainly, $hell is an unimaginably powerful stakeholder, but this isn’t just true of the powerful stakeholders. You can’t meet just ends without the most vulnerable stakeholders either. One of the founders of the DC Catholic Worker house, more than forty years ago, told the story of making pots of soup for homeless men sleeping over the heating grates near the entrance to his apartment. After doing this several times, the largest of the men confronted him and poured the soup over his head. The large man said, “We’re not your pets. You set food and bowls out here on the sidewalk like we’re stray dogs. Do you know if we can even eat this food or if we have allergies?” It was in that moment that our nascent CW discovered he was not getting anywhere on his treadmill.

Going anywhere and accomplishing anything as a community means taking the journey there as a community. And every community has a past: past successes and disappointments, past grievances and friendships, past investments waiting to be realized, and past debts waiting to be paid. We can only ignore the past at our own peril. Recognizing the past reveals the clearest path forward, and the roadblocks that have to be removed to get anywhere at all. In a genuine community, even the individuals you don’t like belong there. Please don’t mistake that for letting the powerful and the bullies have their way. It is not. It means discerning just ends for having a community and then meeting those ends for everyone in the community. If one of your ends is that everyone governed by the town has safe access to town hall, maybe you build a protected walkway to town hall, and make certain it is accessible to everyone, even the powerful and the bullies, but especially to vulnerable people. In community, everyone is a stakeholder. Wherever you’re going, the only way there is together.

In closing, consider again Mr. Eliot’s wisdom, this time from “Little Gidding”: “What we call the beginning is often the end. / And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we start from.”

In The Early History of Greenwood, Maine—written by our friend and a local amateur historian who attended the one-room school with Sandy—Blaine Mills describes the town’s beginnings:

Many early pioneers did not settle in the known neighbor-hoods. A number of settlers were still making payments on their homesteads and did not receive a deed for many years. There are no Greenwood census records for 1810. Without registry or census records, we have difficulty finding where many of the early pioneers settled. The 1820 census is the oldest one of this town. There are 77 names in the 1820 census of Greenwood, and about 14 have no known homestead.

Here in Maine’s rural towns, life in the mid-1900s involved the unrelenting hard work of joy and survival. Joy is the fleeting reward of hard work coupled with a good spirit. The book is filled with many mitigating small joys and wonders for Sandra—the child called “Muff” by her father. She had to work in the household, work essential to the survival of her family and to the whole quiet rural community with its many kinfolk. Houses weren’t insulated, Ma’s kids peeled potatoes, carried and heated water, sawed wood, and warmed the frozen house before their parents arrived home from work in the wood mill or the woods. These are the people to whom we owe this place, who cherished its character and whose descendants still hope to keep it going.

The character of Maine was passed from early settlers forward toward the twenty-first century where we’d like to see kids taught history today as happened in Sandy’s day. These concerns are especially acute if the digitizing of life is destroying character. Or is it? How can we tell until today becomes history—as it will be tomorrow, or the next moment, depending on how fast we swipe, click, press enter. Who’s going to read ours as local history? Will there be any reading of such as we receive here in Morgan’s Growing up Greenwood?

Among my favorite features of Sandy’s narrative are her wonderful shifts, as when she longs for a yo-yo and suddenly, she’s practicing with one. Her toys were our toys growing up: marbles, caps, the yo-yo. And so were her games: “Simon says” and paper dolls. Sandy’s child-size point of view is caught up in the present, the conversational. She’s standing by our comfy chair, explaining it. Hers is a subtle soft telling, always ending on a slight but firm note, very real in familial experience. Her family is alive in this narrative: mother, father, brothers, and grandparents.

There are people here I recognize from participating in oral history interviews. For instance there’s Diddy Johnson, who sometimes worked as a dowser (water witch), and worked in Bob’s Corner Store and Texaco where The Local Hub is today. When we first moved here, broke and broken down, Bob extended us credit in this place of community, the store in Locke Mills mentioned in Sandy’s memoir.

Oral histories help provide context for Sandy’s story, and there are also plenty of published local histories, but you could start with this memoir, and then also The Smile of Providence, A History of Gilead, Maine 1804-2004, put out by Long Point Press and compiled by local authors, Howard C. Reiche Jr. and Hugh G. Chapman. Too, there’s Lapham’s The History of Bethel, William Bingham 2nd: A Life, and The Diaries of Jacob Holt Lovejoy of Albany, all available at the historical society. These books contain stories of how our rural places came about and maintained their character, the character of their peoples. We need these stories in order to help us do better at establishing our own stories. Our own lives.

Sandy’s Ma, at under five-feet tall, is a giant of a woman, a giant human being. As in these or other rural Maine families, she worked, as her husband worked, in area wood-turning mills. Women might work other jobs, but they also kept house. While their working husbands might take it a little easier after work, the women kept working at home. Ma had to wash the family’s clothes using scrub-board, a tub or sink, and Fels-Naptha soap. The soap came in big brown bars like bricks, maybe smaller. Sandy would help her hang clothes out to dry, handing her clothespins.

Lunch for the kids was always peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and food was purchased at the local store near the mill, put on the slip (or on the cuff) until payday. Supper was generally fish sticks or hotdogs, the latter disliked by Dad, always with potatoes peeled and prepped by Sandy who also fetched the wood through knee-deep snow to get the stove going for heat, supper, dishwater, and coffee. This was after school and before her parents came home from the mill. Her dad would drink coffee while reading Zane Grey Westerns or, toes tapping, telling tales of his own after supper.

Her mother was creative, making a chest of drawers out of boxes covered with wallpaper and pretty make-do knobs. It was a treasure. Ma loved the dances in rural towns around the area, the chance to dress up a bit and “kick up her heels.” She taught Sandy how to polka, how to “step round the corners,” in the kitchen of their three-room house. The children shared the attic at bedtime—a blanket hanging between the boys’ half and Sandra’s own section—lit with candles for reading. The family had no electricity until the kids were mostly grown.

The book ends not too far from its beginning. There’s a range to Sandra’s life displayed in details of place and people—character unfamiliar to metro areas current and past but known to those who come here—or came here once upon a time. I tried to capture it myself—a stranger—but could not. I had not Sandra’s experience of hard physical labor and immersive love of nature, animals, fish, flying things—including bats (intimately). The child, from whose point of view the memoir is largely told, and the character of her adults is wholesome in a hard and fruitful way—like sweet pulp wrapping a hard seed. One that could go down, die, and bring forth new life. May it do so. May we know this again—this hardship and stunning self-discipline. The swift love of parents willing their children to grow and be good, to grow sweet with that hard life at its center. Greenwood Center is where she grew up. We lived there for a while. (We now live in the rural town next door.)

It would be good if history, both local and regional, were taught in schools, along with history national and international, and also the history of science, mathematics, English, and even the technology. I feel a deep loss when I turn the final page of Salt Pork and Dandelion Greens: Growing up Greenwood. I wish I could keep reading it, keep hearing more from Sandy’s time and place and not put it down.

How did a Baptist, Kentucky farmer come to sound so much like the Magisterium of the Catholic Church? Having studied both ecology and theology, I am repeatedly struck by the profound resonance between the Church’s social and environmental teaching, especially as expressed by popes in the last two centuries, and American conservationists, especially Wendell Berry. One tradition is headquartered in Rome and built on millennia of Christian thought. The other was born an ocean away in the forests, prairies, and mountains of a largely Protestant and increasingly secular nation. Both traditions have asked the question, “what does it mean for human beings to live well on the earth?” Their answers are remarkably similar: the earth is a gift, man has a unique position within the order of creation while being dependent upon it, we are obligated to steward it, and love of neighbor cannot be separated from care for the land. Both extremes of the environmental spectrum, whether radical environmentalism or gung-ho industrialism, dispense with one or more of these convictions. The American conservation tradition, especially in the voices of people like Berry, offers an alternative which closely resembles teachings found in Catholicism and explicated in papal encyclicals.

The American conservation movement began with the discovery of limits. The first European settlers encountered a land of seemingly limitless abundance. Within just a few generations, they had exhausted much of that abundance through deforestation, land conversion, and market hunting. The first conservationists wrestled with questions of sustainability, multiple use, and resource management—all necessary considerations to avoid total destruction. But eventually questions of moral significance arose.

A forester from the Midwest named Aldo Leopold was arguably the most influential conservationist of the mid-twentieth century. In his famous book, A Sand County Almanac, he asks a question deeper than mere utilitarian management and sustainability: what if the land itself is a moral community? He summed up his land ethic with a straightforward standard: “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” In his writing, Leopold moved conservation beyond resource management or aesthetics and toward an ethic that emphasized the natural world as having moral status. He had asked how humans should live within nature, not just how we ought to manage nature to meet our desires.

Where Leopold asked what obligations humans have to the land, Wendell Berry began asking the practical questions—what kind of person, and what kind of community is capable of fulfilling those obligations? As a young writer, he studied under the great Wallace Stegner at Stanford in the 1950s with other great writers including Larry McMurtry and Edward Abbey. Back in Kentucky, Berry would later befriend Thomas Merton of all people. Though Berry identifies as a rural American Christian with a Baptist background, his practical suggestions for a flourishing human life are remarkably convergent with the Catholic social teaching found in papal encyclicals of the last two centuries.

Both Berry and the Popes have criticized industrial agriculture, consumerism, radical individualism, Marxist collectivism, unregulated capitalism, technocracy, the postmodern notion of liberty as the absence of limits, and an economy that increasingly isolates individuals from their families, their communities, their food, and the land. Echoing Dostoevsky, Berry argues that in such a society, we cannot love or care for that which we do not know, whether it be our neighbors or the land we all call home. Berry, like the Catholic Church, eschews our modern political binary. Paul Kingsnorth notes this quality in his introduction to The World-Ending Fire with a description that could be equally suited for Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum, Pope Francis’s Laudato si’, and now the recent Magnifica humanitas from Pope Leo XIV.

Berry’s questing thoughtfulness challenges traditional political categories, challenges notions of activism, of movements, of politics itself on a national and global scale. All this makes liberating reading for those who enjoy thinking for themselves. To the “right” he shows the consequences of a love of money and markets, of government by corporation, of an economic growth unmoored from place, which eats through nature and culture and leaves ruins. To the “left” he shows the consequences of a rootless individualism, of rights without rites, of the rejection of family and tradition, of the championing of the cosmopolitan over the rooted and the urban over the rural.

Berry’s conservation ethic, like that enjoined by Catholic teaching, avoids two errors. On one hand is an environmentalism that subordinates human dignity or even human life to ecological objectives. Such is the case in those circles where environmentalism often coincides with misanthropic calls for population control in its various forms. On the other hand is a vision of nature as having no inherent value beyond its immediate utility. This vision is apparent in politicians willing to accept any amount of environmental exploitation to boost the GDP, or simply in the greed of large commercial institutions. How do Berry and the Catholic Church avoid both of these errors?

The answer rests in having a distinctly Christian understanding of creation. Berry and the Catholic Church maintain as fundamental assumptions the teachings of Genesis: that creation is inherently “good,” and man is part of its being “very good.” That every creature reflects its Creator, while man is uniquely made in the image of God with the capacity of likeness unto God. Despite our woundedness in original sin, human dignity remains an organizing principle in both ethics. As G.K. Chesterton put it, man is both the “chief of creatures” and “the chief of sinners.” According to Genesis, man’s position within the hierarchy of creation implies a responsibility to the rest of creation and not mere license to consume. Pope Francis references this obligation in Laudato si’:

We do not understand our superiority as a reason for personal glory or irresponsible dominion, but rather as a different capacity which, in its turn, entails a serious responsibility stemming from our faith.

Berry lays out his own conservation ethic in his essay, “Getting Along With Nature.” In it, he proposes an authentic understanding of our relationship to the natural world and diagnoses popular errors. With clear eyes, he argues that our relationship with nature is not necessarily adversarial. As the Church teaches, nature is not something to be worshipped and neither is it something to be conquered. Rather than an either/or, both Catholicism and the American conservation movement propose a both/and. They reverence both creation and humanity, rejecting the false dichotomy between the two. Once we dispense with reverence for one or the other, the game is up. Berry’s environmental essays serve as an agrarian Laudato si’ in many ways. Following is an excerpt from “Getting Along With Nature”:

The defenders of nature and wilderness sometimes seem to feel that they must oppose any human encroachment whatsoever, just as the industrialists often apparently feel that they must make the human encroachment absolute or, as they say, ‘complete the conquest of nature.’ But … pure nature, anyhow, is not good for humans to live in, and humans do not want to live in it—or not for very long.… It is equally true that a condition that is purely human is not good for people to live in, and people do not want to live for very long in it.… People cannot live apart from nature; that is the first principle of the conservationists. And yet, people cannot live in nature without changing it.

Berry also argues in favor of the traditional anthropology that views humans as being positioned between animals and angels in the “Chain of Being.” The notion of man as the “rational animal” is pre-Christian and emphasized by Aristotle but maintained by the Christian tradition. He claims that our culture has simply rejected this ancient idea without an adequate replacement. The result is that “we do not know how ambitious to be, what or how much we may safely desire, when or where to stop.” We lack an understanding of moral limits, not just in ecology but in every realm of human life. Berry stands with Pope Francis in criticizing the technocratic and economic paradigm that knows no limits.

Pope Francis similarly emphasizes what he calls “integral ecology.” By integral ecology, he reaches many of the same conclusions found in Berry’s agrarianism: that the health of the natural world cannot be separated from the health of human communities, families, and cultures. He reiterates that creation is a gift that belongs ultimately to God, that human beings possess unique dignity among creation but are not domineering masters, that our freedom carries moral responsibility, and that material goods exist for the common good.

Leopold, Berry, and the Catholic Church seem to converge in their conservation ethics albeit with differing vocabulary and under different aspects. The simplest embodiment of their ethic, I might argue, is in the hunter. There is an apparent contradiction in loving an animal and killing it. Yet responsible hunters are unusually aware of limits, a sense of place, gratitude, the need for restraint, and active participation within an ecological system. Hunters voluntarily accept limits. They know that abundance does not imply license. They must be familiar with a particular place, its patterns, the flora, and the fauna. They intuit man’s place within the order of creation. Hunting imparts an understanding of creation as a gift—not something we are entitled to. Modern life is seldom capable of these things. Apart from hunting and fishing, it’s all too easy to forget that we live within creation and are not masters standing outside it.

As Jon Harris wrote recently, hunters are a shrinking demographic. If hunting disappears, so goes a tradition, a primary source of funding for habitat and wildlife conservation, and one of the few constituencies capable of opposing the extremes—radical environmentalism and industrial exploitation. Hunters have always faced serious opposition from the power of industry, but Harris cites recent opposition in the form of anti-hunting initiatives from environmentalists in Oregon and Colorado.

With a shrinking population of hunters, it is even more important that Christians, and I might say Catholics especially, recall their own conservation ethic. The culture has made environmental advocacy appear to be a “left-wing” preoccupation, while many Christians and conservatives have understandably recoiled from rhetoric that catastrophizes or subordinates human dignity in the name of ecological progress. However, I propose that Christians and conservatives are needed more than ever to seize the cause and draw on our rich doctrine of creation. They don’t need to borrow the environmental ethic of the political left; they have their own. Without an authentically Christian understanding of creation in the conservation movement, we are doomed to treat humanity as nature’s adversary, either conquering or conquered by nature. Christians and hunters are in a unique position to advocate for ordered stewardship.

“At the Center of Things in Newton, Kansas.” Jeff Reimer’s account of life in Newton, KS, which I had the privilege of visiting this summer, opens with some advice about what to do if you encounter a train coming through town: “The train will likely have more than 100 cars and be over a mile long. Sometimes it will slow down and stop, reverse course, and go back the direction it came from. And sometimes the train, for reasons unknown to all but God, will just stop. It will sit right there at the intersection, the crossing lights flashing, the bells ringing, the arms down, and everybody in their cars sighing and groaning. You will likely recall that at Newton’s 150th anniversary celebration, they sold shirts that said, ‘Waiting on trains since 1872.’ Your other option is to try to beat the train.”

“Why Do You Hate the South?” Alan Jacobs writes about his complicated relationship with the South: “The food, the music, the vast pine forests, the big slow rivers, the long low ridges that divide the valleys there at the Southern terminus of the Appalachians — this is the South of my dreams and my imagination. All these have marked me deeply and continue to nourish me. But my primary loyalties, I find now, as my seventh decade nears its end, are with the Republic of Letters and, above all, with my fellow Christians wherever they are found. I am grateful for so much of my Alabama upbringing, but my mind is usually elsewhere, and that too is something I am neither proud nor ashamed of.”

“Cosmic Anger.” The most recent issue of The Lamp is online, and it’s got some excellent essays. Take this one from A.E. Stallings on wrath as it threads through Homer, Virgil, and contemporary life: “Wrath is one of those engines by which evil is done—wrath is, I would argue, more than hate, the opposite of love. If one can define by opposites, is not wrath precisely the opposite of Paul’s famous definition of love in his first epistle to the Corinthians? . . . . Hatred, one might say, has at least a focus on the other, however twisted; but wrath’s deadly focus is on the self, a kind of weaponized self-pity.”

“The Last Whole Earth Agrarian.” Alan Cornett reflects on Wendell Berry’s life and influence: “In a world of AI, lab-grown meat, life in the pod, and a growing push for space colonization, Berry foresaw that perhaps the important delineation would not necessarily rest with Right and Left. He wrote in his book Life Is a Miracle, ‘It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.’ For Berry, we needed to embrace the gift and freedom to live as God’s creation.”

“Remembering Wendell Berry.” Brian Miller considers Berry from the context of his own place and farm: “A small farm cannot completely escape the market. As a wise Kentucky elder once said, make sure you get in the habit of selling something every week. For all the joy and pleasure that we get from living on this land, it takes work and a continued focus to build and sustain an income stream. That is not, or shouldn’t be, a contradiction to being a good steward to the land and a good husband to the livestock.”

“Last Night, College Athletes Lost.” Joe Nocera isn’t impressed by the bill the Senate passed to address the mess that is division 1 college sports. It’s long past time to jettison the educational arm of the multiversity and let the medical complexes and sports industry and real estate investments do their thing while the work of education happens somewhere else: “Nobody put a gun to Ohio State athletic director Ross Bjork’s head and forced him to pay his star wide receiver $5 million. Nobody forced Northwestern University to raise $875 million to build its new football stadium (which will open this Saturday). And certainly, nobody forced LSU’s president Wade Rousse to give the university’s new football coach, Lane Kiffin, a seven-year, $91 million contract and pay the coach it fired, Brian Kelly, a $54 million buyout—even as Rousse was complaining that ‘we’ve got to stop the bleeding.’ That’s what I mean when I say that the college sports pooh-bahs wanted Congress to save them from themselves.”

“Inside the Biggest Feud in Artificial Intelligence.” In this excerpt from his new book, Kevin Roose describes Anthropic’s messy split from OpenAI and the personal feud at the core of the AGI race: “Despite the companies’ recent willingness to cooperate on safety measures, few people who know Altman, Brockman, and the Amodeis expect them to make amends anytime soon. Workers at both companies have noted the irony that although their bosses train AI models to be kind and compassionate, they can’t stop trashing one another. For now, it seems, the ‘machines of loving grace’ will be built by humans of bitter spite.”

“Religious Scholars Met With Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them.” Elizabeth Dias details Anthropic’s efforts to convince people that Claude might be conscious: “A key part of the presentation, participants said, was what Anthropic called the model’s ‘persona selection,’ about how to get Claude to see itself as a virtuous actor. The company argued that how people treated Claude could affect how Claude treated people. ‘They really made a strong case,’ said Andy Crouch, an evangelical author and partner at Praxis, a network of Christian entrepreneurs. ‘We’ve got to treat it like a person if we want it to interact with people in a morally consistent way and for it to make the best moral and emotional judgments.’” Well, no, we do not have to treat machines as if they are persons.

“The Humanism Driving the Anti-A.I. Movement.” Becca Rothfeld reports on the recent Pro-Human Assembly: “Perhaps it’s unsurprising that some of the richest critiques of A.I. have come from artists and religious leaders, both types whose professions oblige them to become comfortable with the sort of philosophical language that the political establishment tends to avoid. Many of the people I called were interested in what a flourishing human life looks like, and in how A.I. alters the texture of daily experience.”

“AI Promises Intimacy but Delivers Isolation.” Keith Plummer reviews Sherry Turkle’s new book: “Tech companies producing AI chatbots want to maximize user engagement with their products. Making them as humanlike as possible is one of the most effective means of accomplishing that end. A program that refers to itself with pronouns like ‘I,’ ‘my,’ and ‘mine’ is deceptive. Turkle calls such anthropomorphizing ‘the original sin of artificial intimacy.’”

“Cormac McCarthy’s Desert Wanderings.” Michael Crews reviews the first biography of Cormac McCarthy: “Daugherty is attuned to the role of places in McCarthy’s life. In one particularly lyrical observation, he writes, ‘McCarthy knew that in legends and myths the desert is the site of temptation, sometimes a place of redemption, and certainly a place of death for those who come to it unprepared. A place for exiles and solitaries seeking enlightenment.’ Early in the book, Daugherty correctly notes McCarthy’s love for Thomas Merton’s The Wisdom of the Desert, a collection of sayings from the fourth-century Desert Fathers. The book extols the wisdom of a life in which the pregnant silence of spiritual contemplation is cultivated, a silence that is the fruit of a mystical encounter with God. McCarthy’s papers, housed in The Wittliff Collection at Texas State University, contain several references to Merton, and the book itself, now part of the McCarthy archive, is full of McCarthy’s marginal highlights.”

When we ran the land, our growth spurts and milestones showed the passage of time. It’s more subtle now as my parents age and are the only ones who live there. The seasons, of course, come and go, turning the pages of the calendar with them, as they have been since long before we were and will continue to long after we are.

The land has many stories we don’t know. Long before us, a mill was built on these acres to serve the Huguenots in Virginia. Almost two hundred years later, in the late 1980s, my parents bought a house on six acres that used to belong to the mill. We don’t know the exact history, but my parents’ home tells a bit of it. A stone room on the side of their house is thought to have once been part of a mill building. Hand-sawn wooden beams still sit under that room, offering their support after all these years. What the stone room was for, I don’t know. But it gives a unique aesthetic to the farmhouse where I grew up and where I’ve returned over the past twenty-five years to see Mom and Dad.

The stone room is the lower level of the living room. The fireplace is there, and in the winter, that’s where you go if you want to be warm. When we moved into the house, it wasn’t a fireplace, though. It was an old wood stove, similar to the one that was in the kitchen. Sometime in the seventies or eighties, the house had a furnace added, though I don’t know what part of the home the furnace heated—I never found that room.

I’d be interested to see pictures of the house throughout the years because it has undergone so many changes. These changes are more significant than the usual repairs and cosmetic updates my husband and I have done to the much younger house we’ve owned for twelve years. My parents’ house had been added onto multiple times before they bought it, and the floor plan had already changed dramatically from the original building.

My parents continued to make renovations, expanding the kitchen and dining room, adding a laundry room and an office. They moved a stairwell and a hallway. They closed off rooms and made new ones. The house was built in so many stages, it sort of represented us, a family forged by melding together a mom and her kids, a dad and his son, and later adding another son for everyone to call theirs. We were a motley group, our big family of eight. It is a motley house, that stone mill building turned family home, changed bit by bit, year by year.

I’m not sure exactly what attracted my parents to that particular land out of all the options available; it couldn’t have been because it would be easy. It was in a county new to us, with no relatives close by. They knew such an old home would come with unique problems. It was also removed from the help of neighbors, unlike the suburban house we were moving from. Despite all the challenges they must have known they were getting into, I think the space for us to roam and tend drew them there.

I remember when we first walked the property, some time close to my parents’ wedding. My siblings and I ran the length of the six acres that day, excited about all the space compared to the suburban neighborhood we were leaving. My hair blew in the breeze as I ran, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt as free. Two cows came with the property, and we stopped to say hi to them. We laughed as we dodged their giant droppings and squealed in disgust over their smell. We got back to the pond and wondered what we might do there. We were kids, and we didn’t think about the big changes in life or the mortgage or the upkeep of such a place; we just ran and played and laughed and dreamed.

Some time after the cows were gone (eaten, if I remember correctly), pigs took over the back paddock nearest to the pond. My dad was never scarier than when he was ringing the pigs’ noses. The pigs squealed and fought and tried to take him down. A few neighbor boys, my siblings, and I were back there to help him, but he ended up doing all of the wrangling himself. Everyone else was too scared. He was a big, strong man capable of the task, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget him wrestling those monsters to the ground.

Later we shared the land with goats and chickens, too. The goats were my favorite. We’d climb the big mulberry tree behind the garage and pull down branches for the goats to eat. Because the big trunk grew funny, it had a slight slope that allowed us to crawl up it. It eventually shot out parallel to the ground, and three or four children could sit on it with a goat. We’d stain our hands and the goat’s beard purple before we were done. I loved the goats, especially Sarah and Hannah. I also loved the milk they provided for us. Later, I’d help my mom deliver a stillborn kid from one mama goat. I’ve never rid my memory of that dead baby goat nor of my mother’s whole body shaking as she wept. I’ve been slightly skittish around animals ever since, but when I see a goat, I still want to pet it.

My grandfather built us a chicken coop. I never cared for those chickens, but I don’t know why. I didn’t like the way they looked when they molted or that they sometimes startled me when I was playing in the yard. Sometimes I’d collect eggs, but I tried to get out of it if possible. My mom loved having chickens and didn’t ever seem to mind any of the work they required—feeding them, cleaning their pen, breaking up their water on cold days. I dream of having chickens for their eggs now, but I haven’t told my mom that mostly because I know I’d mind the work even despite her good example.

It’s not just the chickens I have grown into yearning for. It’s the space, the privacy, the variety of the land in the open paddocks and woods, the pond and the marsh. My husband and I have grown so fond of the little home and yard and neighborhood where we’ve raised our kids that I believe he now wants to be buried here. It’s not like the big lots we grew up on, but it is ours. Despite this love and attachment to our place, to the only home our kids remember, I still dream of owning a big open yard and the woods just beyond it like the one of my childhood.

I left my parents’ house, their land, and my hometown more than twenty-five years ago when I went off to school. I married my high school sweetheart, so we came back often to visit both sets of our parents. But when we left, that town no longer felt like ours. Jobs and missions work took us to other states and even across the world. At some point, I became a snob, believing that the people who stayed in our hometown were underachieving.

I now, thanks to the lessons I’ve learned from Wendell Berry, I believe many of those who stayed were choosing to belong.. For almost my first fifteen years as an adult, we flitted from address to address, for what seemed to be good reasons, and had little attachment to any one place. It became easy to look forward to the next move, to the next adventure, and to see any roots grown in a place as temporary. I believed that as long as I was committed to the people I moved with, I was doing it all right. But now I think a commitment to place is almost as important as a commitment to the people. It’s hard to disentangle the two.

My parents have never read Wendell Berry, and neither were raised in the area they’ve called home for forty years. They didn’t set out to stay for decades and outlast everyone else. They weren’t making a statement or trying to beat a record. They just kept living, kept learning, kept knowing. They naturally fell into their commitment to their land, some reasons being pragmatic and some being idealistic. In the last decade, my dad took to riding his golf cart across the acres, bumping across uneven land and sticks and branches in ways that golf carts probably aren’t meant to travel. My mom continues walking her property, often multiple times a day. They both know the stories of the tree and the plants. They can tell you what areas to avoid if you don’t like poison ivy and which trees they planted and which ones just grew and stuck around long enough that they get to stay. They know the wild animals who, despite no invitation, creep quietly on their acres.

My parents are still filled with joy when children run the land. It’s happening less these days as many of their grandchildren are reaching adulthood. When my children were younger, they used to tumble out of the car as soon as we arrived at my parents, flanked immediately by their cousins, and for hours, they’d play the same games my siblings and I did growing up. My dad loved to sit outside by his garage and watch the kids playing. My mom, not someone to sit still for very long, often joined the play. It’s been years now since my family has been at my parents’ house at the same time as my siblings’ families, so memories of the cousins playing are fading. But when my husband and I take our family, the kids find something to do—a golf cart ride with my dad or a walk in the garden with my mom. And I look at the land and think of all the years that have passed since my parents brought us children to look at that land for the first time.

It’s not the same as it was then. The mulberry tree was struck by lightning and eventually had to be chopped down. New trees were planted along the front and side fences to provide more privacy. A gate was put in by the road after a dog was hit by a car. The chicken coop eventually rotted and needed to be torn down. Some fences were mended and others ripped out. Countless flowers have been planted and tended, and many others have just decided to sprout on their own and grow where they pleased. Landscaping, buildings, pets, livestock, and even people came and went over the years.

Did my parents improve the land? I don’t know. But I know they accomplished something better. They made it theirs. They were not merely residents or owners. No, they were members of that land and the land surrounding it, growing and changing it, loving and grieving it. They planted and tended. They had successes and failures. They gave, and they received. The land soaked up their tears, sweat, and blood. The trees knew their cries and laughs.

My dad had a stroke last month, and for the first time in forty years, we’re wondering how much longer the land can possibly be theirs. I’m gently listening to my mom process what a move would look like and what she needs to take care of my dad. Selling seems imminent, as the demands of the property are probably too much now. It won’t be too long after my parents leave that no one remembers it as their place. Their county, with its close proximity to the D.C. metropolitan area, is home to mostly military or other government commuters who usually stay less than three years before moving on.

There’s a good chance that I won’t ever meet the people who come to the land after my parents. I suspect whenever there are new owners, at least at first, I won’t want to meet them. It seems too hard. But I hope they love the land. I hope they love every bit of it, even the toil and the hardship. I hope that they belong to the land and know that even though the land belongs to them, it belongs to others as well. It belongs to my parents and my siblings and me. It belongs to the spouses and children we brought to the land, all of whom were part of keeping it. It belongs to the people who were before us, whose sweat and tears and blood fell to the ground.

What will the land be like without my parents? Their road? Their county? I don’t know. None of their neighbors do either, because my parents have lived there much longer than everyone else. But such is the way of life: we come, and we go, one way or another. Will the new owners love that land as much as my parents? I hope so. But I know they won’t love it more.

The Mid-Ohio Valley has made news twice in the last few months for disturbing reasons. In late June, details of the “House of Horrors” involving child-marriage victim Elizabeth Siders emerged from Vinton County, Ohio. More recently, The New York Times reported that radioactive wastewater from fracking was “bubbling up out of the ground” near Marietta, Ohio. These crises might seem unrelated, but they stem from strikingly similar causes: government authorities had the power to act and failed to do so. Why are the people of Appalachia so routinely neglected by the governments meant to protect them?

In Elizabeth Siders’s case, government failure was written into law. Elizabeth Russell was fifteen and pregnant in 2008 when she was taken across state lines to West Virginia to seek permission to marry Gary Siders, the 18-year-old who had impregnated her. At the time, West Virginia law allowed an 18-year-old to marry a child under 16 with parental or guardian consent if a judge determined the marriage was in the minor’s best interest.

Yet state law did not consider children under 16 capable of consenting to sex. Nor could a minor independently petition for divorce; Elizabeth would have needed a next friend to do so. The law allowed her to enter a marriage while denying her the legal capacity to consent to sex or to leave that marriage on her own. In practice, the law left Elizabeth with few options but to marry the man who had had sex with her when she was legally incapable of consenting.

Stereotypes about teen pregnancy and child marriage in Appalachia are not entirely unfounded. But Elizabeth Siders’ experience—and the abuse and neglect suffered by her 16 children— shows the devastating human cost of laws that leave children vulnerable to abuse. West Virginia lawmakers later considered raising the minimum age of marriage to 18 without exceptions, but opponents defeated the bill, some arguing that child marriage is a part of Appalachian culture. As a proud Appalachian, I reject that characterization. Child marriage is not Appalachian culture, and no appeal to tradition justifies leaving children in these states vulnerable to abuse.

The failure of government oversight extends beyond child marriage. Ohio has become a destination for fracking wastewater, much of it containing heavy metals and radioactive material linked to cancer and other illnesses. Fracking uses proprietary chemical liquids to fracture rock deep underground to release oil and natural gas, generating large quantities of this toxic wastewater in the process. Pennsylvania and West Virginia produce much of it but have relatively few injection wells. Ohio, which has more than 200 and regulates them under authority granted by the federal government, accepts much of its neighbors’ waste. The result: Ohioans bear the risk.

The warning signs came early. In 2019, just one year after the Redbird #4 injection well opened in Marietta, Ohio, evidence emerged that fracking brine had seeped into conventional oil wells. Seven years later, the brine has reached the surface and threatens drinking water in the area. Authorities have known about the problem for years. Yet instead of stopping it, the state has made it harder for Ohioans to seek justice in court. Local communities and governments are left fighting the state and federal authorities that ought to be protecting their interests.

Appalachians are known for their self-sufficiency and loyalty to their local communities. That mindset can make them especially likely to look at situations like these and conclude that, if the government is going to wreak havoc on their communities, less government is better than more government. But it is not necessarily the case that these communities need less government. What they certainly need is better government.

Regulators could have acted when Appalachians first discovered bubbling brine in 2019. West Virginia judges could have protected Elizabeth from the marriage that trapped her and left her and her 16 children to suffer years of abuse and neglect. Ohio’s Job and Family Services could have intervened during Elizabeth’s repeated pregnancies as a minor, particularly when she gave birth in hospitals. But government has repeatedly failed those without the money or political influence to make their interests impossible to ignore.

Elizabeth Siders and her children deserved better. So do the Ohioans living with the consequences of contaminated fracking wastewater. Neither should be collateral damage of a government that assumes the authority to regulate but fails to exercise that authority responsibly. When the government regulates marriage or injection wells, it assumes a duty to prevent harm. In Appalachia, too often, the vulnerable and overlooked and have paid the price when it does not.