SOURCE: “On Devotion to the ‘Communal Order’: Wendell Berry's record of Fidelity, Interdependence, and Love,” in Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. XXVII, No. 2, Fall, 1994, pp. 9-28.

In the following essay, Whited views Berry's work as a repudiation of consumer culture in favor of an appreciation and understanding of a value system based on spiritual, communal, and familial concerns.

For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is plenteous redemption.—Psalm 130 

From my first reading of Wendell Berry's polemical essay The Unsettling of America (1978) and on through his other essays, fiction, and poems, I have been amused by the contradiction between my admiration for Berry's precise observation of the nature of things and observations by critics who object to his work as anachronistic, romantic, sentimental, naive, elitist, or merely foolish. Often in my classes, I have been surprised by non-traditional students with families and careers...