a glimpse into the research...

I'm working on this course called 'Everyday Spirituality' and am really enjoying the lectures and reading. I'm pretty nervous about the assignments, mostly because my post secondary endeavors (which were many moons ago!) have focused on things like accounting and statistics; the kinds of courses where there is only one right answer. Can I really do this? Time will tell....

Anyway, for the paper I'll be writing on Rural Spirituality, I've been reading some essays by Wendell Berry. He's pretty radical, but I've been chewing on some of his ideas all day.
Here are a couple of examples:

(from an essay called A Remarkable Man, about Nate Shaw, a black farmer from Alabama wrongly imprisoned in the 1930's)

"... he burdens us with his character. Not just with his testimony, or with his actions, but with his character, in the fullest possible sense of the word. Here is a superior man who never went to school! ...." what a trial in fact that is for us, and how guilty it proves us; we think it ordinary to spend twelve or sixteen or twenty years of a person's life and many thougsands of public dollars on "education" - and not a dime or thought on character. Of course, it is preposterous to suppose that character could be cultivated by any sort of public program. Persons of character are not public products, They are made by local cultures, local responsibilities. That we have so few such persons does not suggest that we ought to start character workshops in schools. It does suggest that 'up' may be the wrong direction." (emphasis mine)

And..

"The organized church makes peace with a destructive economy and divorces itself from economic issues because it is economically compelled to do so. Like any other public institution so organized, the organized church is dependent on 'the economy'; it cannot survive apart from those economic practices that its truth forbids and that its vocation is to correct. If it comes to a choice between the extermination of the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field and the extermination of a building fund, the organized church will elect - indeed, has already elected - to save the building fund. The irony is compounded and made harder to bear by the fact that the building fund can be preserved by crude applications of money, but the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field can be preserved only by true religion, by the practice of a proper love and respect for them as creatures of God. No wonder so many sermons are devoted exclusively to 'spiritual' subjects..."
(from an essay called God and Country)

Not sure I could ever live up to Mr. Berry's ideals and practices; but its sure been interesting reading! Another interesting essay is called Why I will not use a Computer - not sure what to make of that one! :o)