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Wendell Berry and the Christian Liberal Arts Todd E. Pickett | Biola University Delivered at the Eighteenth Annual Conversation on the Liberal Arts March 21–23, 2019 | Westmont College, Santa Barbara, CA 1 Wendell Berry and the Christian Liberal Arts Dr. Todd E. Pickett, Biola University, ©2019 Although they have come in many shapes and sizes over the last hundred years, liberal arts models in higher education have justified themselves by connecting to something greater than an education’s disciplinary or professional specializations. In its various forms, it has sought to integrate, to connect, to re-member diverse fields of knowledge that in life are connected but in specialization can get dismembered. At its most ambitious, it has aimed at an educational wholeness. The assumption has been that knowledge, like life, does its best work in the person and in the world when it is whole and related, directed toward connections to “what really matters” beyond our individualized selves. Ironically, the growing dis-ease with the liberal arts among some constituencies has been that a liberal arts education is no longer connected to “what really matters.” Today, what does matter increasingly is that students are educated to find the best jobs with the highest salary upsides so they can afford to flourish in the modern industrial economy. I am sympathetic. I consider gainful employment one of the two primary ends of a college education and with two nearly post-college children currently trying to launch careers, I hold this value deeply. At least one criticism of a liberal arts education, and perhaps the chief one, is that it distracts from this end. Students and their parents wonder, often anxiously, what connection the liberal arts and general education have to career goals. The high cost of education and the distance-to-degree are making students more anxious about learning that does not appear directly connected to jobs. It may not be the subjects of history or art or biology that cause, say, Business majors anxiety (though they may cause boredom); rather, it is the perceived detour from the main road of career preparation that students question and sometimes resent. In this climate, a liberal arts education continues to have a hard time articulating its value in a way that is compelling. None of this is new for defenders of the liberal arts, but framing the topic in the terms of health, disease, and the body as this conference does, if not new, may have hit upon a critical context and a unifying framework for a liberal arts education. With issues of health in mind, I have found Wendell Berry to be the most helpful modern interlocutor for exploring the wholeness, 2 integration and connections of a liberal arts education, especially for those of us who teach at religious and specifically Christian colleges. Wendell Berry and the Great Economy Wendell Berry denies that he, as one interviewer put it, is a rock star.1 Yet the author of over 50 books of essays, novels and poetry, and recipient of both a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Humanities Medal has a broad fan base. His work brings together people from conservative and liberal positions, different socio-economic locations, and from various faiths. Some Christians see Berry as a prophet, speaking truth to power (most often corporate power), others as a conservative voice for traditional family values and the free market. (Berry has publicly identified as a democrat.) His popularity among Christians is in some ways strange. Berry himself is often critical of religious institutions and faults American evangelicals or at least evangelistic Christianity with spreading a dualism that has undermined a biblical view of God’s world. Berry, who says somewhat dispassionately that his “native religion, for better or worse, is Christianity,” says “I owe a considerable debt myself to Buddhism and Buddhists” (“Christianity and the Survival of Creation” 95). While he is a regular Sabbath-keeper (“as rich and demanding an idea as any I know”) who does attend church, on nice days he does not, preferring the woods near his home and in keeping with his claim that the Bible is an outdoor book (103). Yet, in many places in his writing, Berry sounds like a man of deep Christian faith, as when he says, “I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endorsed by love, and in that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love” (“Health is Membership” 146) Elsewhere, when pressed to come up with a term that describes what kind of economy could be considered the most comprehensive, he calls it (with Wes Jackson) “The Kingdom of God” (“Two Economies” 55). 1 Christenson, Allan Stromfeldt. “Wendell Berry: the Not Quite Rock Star Seer.” From Filmers to Farmers. fromfilmerstofarmers.com/movie-un-review-wendell-berry-the-not-quite-rock-star-seer/ (Accessed Feb. 2, 2019.) 3 For Berry, it is learning to live within this “Great Economy” that is also the most important and comprehensive context for education. It is this Kingdom of God Economy that, in an echo of Mt. 6:33, “should be sought first” and which an education for professional careers in the human-industrial economy (“the little economy”) ought to serve (“Two Economies” 55). Such an education must be, for Berry, connected through and through, and therefore requires a kind of liberal arts education--whether that be in a college or a village: “The Great Economy proposes arts and sciences of membership; ways of doing and ways of knowing that cannot be divided from each other or within themselves and speak the common language of the communities where they are practiced” (75). Berry’s notions of education are provocative not because they are new but because they are so old, rooted in a specifically Christian story, embracing ancient wisdom of many kinds, and the moral mandates that flow from these. Today, in a world supposedly “global” but nevertheless experiencing disconnection, disharmony, violence and widespread destruction, his views have a renewed relevance and pose a challenge to liberal arts and general education models of the last century. The Liberal Arts and General Education: What Contexts? Which Connections? Whose Coherence? (Note: because of the paper’s 35- page length, readers less interested in this overview may want to skip to the “Health” section on p. 7) The fundamental question in one form or another that has hovered around a liberal arts education for more than a hundred years is, what is an education for if it is for more than a preparation for gainful employment? We know that the deep history of the liberal arts educated the wealthy, those rich enough to be free (Lat. liberalis) from having to work for a living and so ideally free to take up the mantle of leadership and governance in their places, which sometimes took the form of religious leadership (clergy). The education believed to best form such men--and men they were--followed the classical, medieval trivium and quadrivium of subjects, of which much has been written. It was an interdisciplinary education. The well-educated leader needed to have a broader view--of literature, of history, of languages, of politics, of the natural world--to lead the rest (ostensibly) for the common good. Such a connected 4 education, of course, we know also preserved a social hierarchy, maintaining the elite as leaders and the masses as followers, certainly benefiting the former (Degrees of Inequality 11). With the rise of industry, innovation, and professionalization in 20th-century America, however, questions arose about what contexts the liberal arts should address and whom these connections should serve. We have not stopped talking about these questions since. What contexts and connections--both within a liberal arts curriculum to the world beyond it--justify such an educational model? The changing terms for such an education--”general education,” “breadth,” and “core”--indicate that reforms were afoot in the twentieth century and with them came alternative ideals of educational coherence and connection, each requiring its own justification. “General education” arose actually as an alternative to the traditional “liberal arts” model. “Where liberal arts education emphasized the study of the heritage of Western civilization for purposes of contributing to students’ intellectual development and cultural appreciation, the general education movement, inspired by the work of John Dewey and other turn of the century Progressives, focused on the integration of knowledge for purposes of engagement with problems of contemporary civilization” (“From the Liberal to the Practical Arts” 607). From there, general education reforms in the twentieth century developed several strands, each diverse and fluid. A team of researchers in 2009 examining curricula and general education from 1975-2000 found that four general models of general education or core requirements had survived into the 21st-century: the “core distribution model,” the “cultures and ethics” model, the “civic/utilitarian model” and a resurgence of the “traditional liberal arts” model (“Models of General Education” 2009). My interest is not so much in whether these classifications are the only ones--the authors themselves admit that the trends are variable from decade to decade and college to college--but rather that they all implicitly or explicitly presume connections and contexts that should matter most for an interdisciplinary education. For instance, the Core Distribution Model developed early on in order to bring the social sciences and natural sciences alongside the humanities for the sake of “breadth” with a view to complex contemporary problems whose solutions required multi-perspectival approaches.

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