Wendell Berry
1 9 3 4 – 2 0 2 6
his ‘madness’ was
the lamp of wisdom
in our perilous era
of disconnection
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Archive for the ‘Words’ Category
Tuesday, September 1st, 2026
Monday, August 31st, 2026
“Subtlety is the curse of man. It is not found in the deity.”
— Flannery O’Connor
The 3rd of July ~ 250 years later
Friday, July 3rd, 2026“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
John Adams reportedly thought that today, the 3rd, should have been the true observance, since it more properly fit the signers’ act, with the 4th having been the public disclosure. It bears keeping in mind that tomorrow we also observe the bicentennial of the death of Adams and Jefferson, who both passed on the same day, July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration.
Of course they had flaws, but we can never learn too much about these great revolutionaries, who, perhaps more than anyone of their time, helped articulate for posterity the American heart and mind. It is now our job to preserve for the future the true principles of what it means to live free under God.
I finally finished the McCullough biography. The new Metaxas book is a holiday present from Dana — toward the noble cause of getting my knowledge past being merely “dangerous.”
On the deepening of conversion:
Friday, June 19th, 2026“I think once the process is begun and continues that you are continually turning toward God and away from your own egocentricity and that you have to see this selfish side of yourself in order to turn away from it. I measure God by everything that I am not. I begin with that.”
— Flannery O’Connor — 2/4/61
Many knew this five years ago.
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2026“It is the fact that these vaccines, whatever their efficacy in other areas, do not prevent transmission of the virus. This single fact — which has long been known but is barely ever mentioned — blows apart the case for vaccine passports, segregation, lockdowns of the ‘unvaxxed’ and all such similar measures. Even if you believe (or pretend to) that this virus is dangerous enough to justify the radical new forms of authoritarianism which have emerged around it — and I certainly don’t — those forms will fail anyway if both vaccinated and unvaccinated people can spread it; which we know they can.”
— Paul Kingsnorth — 11/24/21
Thursday, January 15th, 2026
“In his book, The Haunting of Bishop Pike, Dr. Merrill Unger chronicles the tragedy of listening to demons and provides a good warning we should all adhere to: ‘The [conveying of knowledge] through demonic power is not free and purely beneficent. They always operate under the principle of compensation, with a price tag attached to them … one that must be paid throughout eternity.’”
— Robin Schumacher
waters of the Jordan
Tuesday, January 13th, 2026“Why did Jesus, who is sinless, choose to be baptized? He steps into the muddy waters of our humanity, not becaue He needs cleansing, but because He chooses to stand where we stand. Scholars like William Barclay describe this moment as a turning point in Jesus’ life. It is a moment of decision, when He leaves behind the quiet years of Nazareth and embraces His mission. It is a moment of identification, when He stands with sinners rather than above them. It is a moment of approval, when the Father’s voice affirms Him as the Beloved Son. It is a moment of conviction, when He accepts the path of the Suffering Servant foretold by Isaiah — not the path of earthly power, but the path of the cross. And it is a moment of empowerment, when the Spirit descends upon Him, equipping Him to proclaim not a God of wrath and fire, but a Father rich in mercy and compassion.”
— Fr Jinto Thomas — 1/11/26
Friday, August 15th, 2025
“The problem is that AI absorbs and spits back conventional wisdom gleaned from every source, which makes its judgments no better than someone wholly uninformed on particulars but rather gains opinions from the mood of the moment. It has no capacity to judge good quality over bad so it puts it all into a melange of blather, distinguished only because it looks and feels like English. Any writer who thinks this is a good way to pawn off content on unsuspecting readers or teachers is headed for disaster. I shudder to imagine a future in which AI is training the population how to think. It is the opposite of thinking. It is regurgitating conventionalities without any serious reflection on the social or historical context. It is literally mindless.”
Friday, August 1st, 2025
“And so we have got to ask if there is a point at which Christian conscience, or any conscience, can say no to a technological ‘advance’ of any kind. I will mention again, as I have done often before, the Old Order Amish, who have maintained an effective freedom of choice for themselves by limiting the economic scale of their lives and by asking of any proposed innovation a single question: ‘What will this do to our community?’ Otherwise, the conscience of our country, Christian though it may be, is at one with or more or less surrendered to the doctrine of technological progress, which apparently reduces to the assumption that what can be done must be done.”
— Wendell Berry, 10/3/24
Saturday, July 12th, 2025
“Writing, like all creative forms, is a human endeavour. At its best it is pulled up from the soul and put down on the page, or the screen. We all use ‘tools’ of some kind to do this, like the keyboard I am now writing on. But AI is different. It does not help you to do your job; it does your job for you. It sucks up from the worldwide web the usings and doings and scrapings of the already-created and it rearranges them, pretending all the while that it has ‘created’ them itself. It imitates reality but can never replace it. It is, at root, a shabby, boring and actually evil thing. It is the end of art.”
— Paul Kingsnorth, 7/12/25
Friday, July 4th, 2025
“Posterity, you will never know what it has cost my generation to establish and secure your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.”
— John Quincy Adams
Tuesday, July 30th, 2024
“The evidence was in plain sight. The question for historians is ‘Who knew the fix was in?’ And equally importantly, how could these powers behind the throne unseat Joe Biden the candidate and still leave the nation in the hands of Joe Biden the president for another six months?
That dangerous proposition is why we can’t wait for history’s verdict, and why it is imperative for journalists to dig down immediately and unravel the plot that sought to undermine not just Biden but America’s democracy and left us weaker and wounded on the international stage.
You can bet the mainstream media won’t take up the challenge. They have bought wholeheartedly into the narrative that Biden is an American hero for resigning his campaign, so it will depend on a fearless outsider like Sy Hersh or Bari Weiss to get to the truth. Let’s hope they get to it before Election Day.”— Frank Miele
Thursday, July 11th, 2024
“So, for multiple reasons, Murthy is probably the worst speech decision in American history. In the face of the most sweeping censorship in American history, the decision fails to recognize either the realities of the censorship or the constitutional barriers to it. In practical terms, the decision invites continuing federal censorship on social media platforms. It thereby nearly guarantees that yet another election cycle will be compromised by government censorship and condemns a hitherto free society to the specter of mental servitude.”
— Philip Hamburger
Monday, April 29th, 2024
“For each thorn, there’s a rosebud… For each twilight – a dawn… For each trial – the strength to carry on, For each storm cloud — a rainbow… For each shadow — the sun… For each parting — sweet memories when sorrow is done.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wednesday, December 13th, 2023
“Indeed, it is perhaps the notion of possessiveness that characterizes the fundamental problem of the human being. True freedom involves a kind of self-dispossession, and a letting go of the attachment to the ‘mine-ness’ of one’s actions… We need to be ‘still,’ to empty ourselves of worldly distractions and illusory attachments, to be able to ‘hear’ and come to understand the Word that is eternally communicated by the Father in the ground. In this sense, it is not as though God is absent in us and then becomes present due to some action of ours that we undertake of our own initiative. Rather, for Eckhart, our task as human beings is to come to be able to listen to — and thereby apprehend — the Word that is eternally and always poured out into us.”
— Amber Griffioen, on Meister Eckhart, 5/1/23
Saturday, August 12th, 2023
“We know that for most healthy people, Omicron is nothing more than a cold and for the young is usually a very mild cold and often asymptomatic. To use a gene-therapy-technology-based vaccine with a high-risk profile and uncharacterized long-term effects against a mild variant is the height of scientific ignorance and arrogance. It is time to stop.”
— Robert W Malone MD MS, Lies My Gov’t Told Me: And the Better Future Coming (Children’s Health Defense)
Tuesday, March 28th, 2023
“Many people (and physicians) rely on the CDC and NIH to guide them in healthcare and wellness decisions. It is way past time that these organizations step up to the plate and do their job and stop relying on the unscientific biases of highly influential bureaucrats. That job being to protect the health of the public. Not advancing the interests of the pharmaceutical industry and its shareholders.”
— Robert W Malone MD
Lies My Gov’t Told Me: And the Better Future Coming
Sunday, August 21st, 2022
“The buffoonish January 6 riot at the Capitol is often cited as proof of the insurrectionary right-wing movement. But the one-day riotous embarrassment never turned up any armed revolutionaries or plots to overthrow the government. In contrast, Antifa and BLM rioters were no one-day buffoons. They systematically organized a series of destructive and deadly riots across the country for over four months in the summer of 2020. The lethal toll of their work was over 35 dead, $2 billion in property losses, and hundreds of police officers injured.”
— Victor Davis Hanson, 8/19/22