Joe DeWitte

“The worst temptation of religious people has always been to publish and punish the sins of (other) sinners in this world, with no patience or deference for the judgment of God.”
― Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice

“we had better bear in mind also something that I am not the first or the smartest writer to notice: that for the making and sustenance of movements hatred is more effective than love.”
― Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice

“I am writing in another age of violence when, again beyond my understanding, gunmen have killed children in their schools and we continue to kill children in war. I can only ask the obvious question: How and how soon, from the high threshold of violence established by the Civil War in the seceded states and Kentucky, might a people be expected to descend to a level even of approximate peace? Or: How might they prevent the militarily acceptable violence of any war from inspiring and excusing unacceptable violence during and after the war?”
― Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice

“Heeding the divine instruction entails accepting what Wendell Berry calls “the discipline of unity” among the creatures, ourselves included; the only alternative to that acceptance is “the hideousness and destructiveness of the fragmentary.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible