Summer 2020 Letter

Citizenship, Wendell Berry wrote in 1968, “requires devotion and dedication, and a certain inescapable bewilderment and suffering… But it begins at home.” For him, this meant, quite literally, the care of one’s home and family, one’s relationship to nature and community. Polarization is, in fact, the result of a perversion and a misunderstanding of what it means to be a citizen. It is the result of a world full of radicals and empty of people. It is the replacing of real community with political abstractions and eschatological predictions that are too large for meaningful action, too difficult to implement, and...