Mr. Wendell Berry of Port Royal, Kentucky, died on August 31, 2026. He was 92 years old, having lived most of his life in his hometown of Port Royal, farming on his property at Lane’s Landing since 1964. He is the author of many books, novels, essays, and poems.
Mr. Berry was a complex figure. He was “too liberal” for some conservatives, and “too conservative” for some liberals. His writing ranged widely, but he examined nearly every issue with an eye to the local, keenly aware that global problems are, in some sense, all local ones. Agriculture’s call to “get big or get out” sounded good on paper, but Mr. Berry showed how that USDA-led agenda, under Earl Butz, destroyed local communities and harmed the land. His 1977 book The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture addressed such issues, and it is likely his most famous work.
Mr. Berry also rejected many modern conveniences, including television and computers. So, it is deeply ironic that I was introduced to his work in 2019 through the documentary Look and See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry, and that I’m writing this on a computer now. I once published an academic journal article on his work, and I sent him a copy along with a lengthy letter thanking him for how it had shaped my own. It wasn’t until after I sent the letter that I realized that sending him a two-page typed letter felt … weird. He was kind enough to send me a handwritten note in return.
As I began to read through Mr. Berry’s work, I was struck by the deeply pastoral tone running through much of it. Of course, I don’t agree with everything he wrote. If I did, I suspect Mr. Berry would cast a sideward glance at me, wondering whether I had even read his material. I’d like to address one issue that he returns to often: language that is spoken but not understood.
The Unknown Tongue
Mr. Berry is best known for his essays, but I’ve always been drawn to his Port William novels. It isn’t “world-building” in the Tolkien or Lewis sense, but Mr. Berry does construct a small community that mirrors his native Kentucky. And what is most fascinating to me is how simple and ordinary the lives of these people are. They work together, fellowship with one another, and live out an old, unseen world slowly being taken over by the “new” world of fast-paced living and “greener pastures.”
Mr. Berry makes this case for a responsible language throughout his work, and two stories illustrate it well.[1] In the novel Remembering, Andy Catlett attends a conference on “The Future of the American Food System” in San Diego. Andy is not impressed with what he hears; these former farmers are now living luxurious lives despite the harm their policies have caused many communities and—importantly—the soil. What is seen as “progress” is nothing more than harm to families, healthy communities, and good land. The language they’re speaking, Andy concludes, is only known to themselves. The average, everyday farmer hasn’t the slightest idea what is being discussed.
The same thing is seen with Nathan and Hannah Coulter’s son. Caleb loved farming, but his professors convinced him there was no future in it. To help farmers like his father, he’d have to not farm. So, Caleb became Dr. Coulter, a respected academic who taught agriculture to fewer and fewer students who wanted to farm. But his publications, Hannah says, are written in the Unknown Tongue. “Reading them always makes me think of this farm and how it has emerged, out of ‘agriculture’ and its ‘soil types’ and its collections of ‘species,’ as itself, our place, a place like no other, yielding to Nathan and me a life like no other.”[2] Her point is clear: farming, and the life it provides, cannot be so easily dissected.
Pastoral Responsibility
This has vast implications for pastoral ministry, especially for young pastors fresh from seminary and seasoned scholars alike. It’s simply this—know your people. Mr. Berry wrote, “We must speak, and teach our children to speak, a language precise and articulate and lively enough to tell the truth about the world as we know it. And to do this we must know something of the roots and resources of our language; we must know its literature.”[3] Mr. Berry wouldn’t object to learning and specialization, so long as they’re rightly used and understood.
But what we must do, as he points out, is not read merely to learn about something, but to be shaped by it. We learn from it, not just about it. His criticism of those who treat the Bible as mere literature is, in my opinion, vintage Mr. Berry:
It is conceivable that the Bible could be well taught by a teacher who believes that it is true, by a teacher who believes that it is untrue, or by a teacher who believes that it is partly true. That it could be well taught by a teacher uninterested in the question of truth is not conceivable.[4]
So, pastors: Preach in a language that is coherent, not unknown. Academic jargon has its place, but the truths of Scripture must come in clear, effective, and persuasive language. I’m always reminded of this whenever I attend an academic conference. How does what they’re saying translate to our local church? Would Mrs. Bonnie understand what they’re saying? Can we make it accessible without dumbing it down? I’m not saying specialized study is unimportant; it is. But we must speak in the known tongue of our people, and that means actually being among them and learning their language.
I think of this most when I remember the note that Mr. Berry sent me a few years ago. It is brief, only a few handwritten lines, but it was written by a man who spent his whole life speaking a language that his neighbors could read. That, among other things, is something I thought about when I learned of his death. Mr. Berry never traded Port Royal for the lecture circuit, and he refused to write in Caleb’s “Unknown Tongue.” And perhaps that is one reason why his reach is so far.
I never had the privilege of meeting Mr. Berry, but I do have this letter and a stack of books by him. By reading his books again and again, I learned his language and how the patient, local way of seeing helped shape him. Pastors would do well to learn that language. Know your people, love your place, and speak so that the ones in front of you can understand what you’re saying. Mr. Berry did, and I intend to keep learning how.
[1] See “Standing by Our Words: Learning a Responsible Language,” in Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place, eds. Jack R. Baker and Jeffrey Bilbro (University of Kentucky Press, 2017), 47–69.
[2] Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter (Counterpoint, 2004), 132.
[3] Quoted from Baker and Bilbro, 63.
[4] Quoted from Baker and Bilbro, 64.