Intriguing Links
Here are a couple of articles worth reading. Both have been pointed out by friends.
Wendell Berry’s Farm Manifesto Takes Root in Culture — about the long-term impact of Berry’s Unsettling of America. He is the forerunner of the many writers today taking up the subject of food production and how it relates to our humanity. There’s even encouragement for this home educator:
When people travel in rural areas, “you don’t see young people outside their houses anymore,” [Berry] said. Children “used to have all the outdoors to play in, to hunt in, to fish in, to work in. Someday they’re going to realize the free education young people got roaming the countryside has all been traded for staring at a screen. I just think they’re missing a lot of fun, a lot of essential learning.”
A Tribute to My Evangelical Leader Mom — Edith Schaeffer R.I.P. — Frank Schaeffer’s reflections on the death of his mother this weekend. An excerpt:
My mother read to me and introduced me to Shakespeare, Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, Anne Bronte, Susan Fennimore Cooper, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, Mary Shelley, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Beatrix Potter, E. Nesbit, Louis Carroll and A. A. Milne and… Woody Allen, amongst others. They are still my friends and companions and I have made them my children’s and grandchildren’s friends too. And that is my tribute to her example.
Here’s what my mother showed me how to do by example: forgive, ask for forgiveness, cook, paint, build, garden, draw, read, keep house well, travel, love Italy, love God, love New York City, love Shakespeare, love Dickens, love Steinbeck, love Jesus, love silence, love people more than things, love community and put career and money last in my hierarchy of values and — above all, to love beauty.
I haven’t read any of Edith Schaeffer’s stuff on homemaking and womanhood, but I’ve read most of L’Abri was moved by her and Francis Schaeffer’s experiment there and their insistence on trusting God rather than relying on marketing or other forms of human organization. In their most basic decisions and needs they prayed for God to provide, and he did.
