Ragan Sutterfield is the author of Cultivating Reality: How the Soil Might Save Us, and a memoir, This Is My Body. His work has also appeared in a variety of magazines including The Christian Century, The Oxford American, Men's Journal, Triathlete, Gourmet, Fast Company, and Books & Culture. He is an endurance athlete and long-time naturalist who loves records, film, and seeking the good life with his wife Emily and their daughters Lillian and Lucia. He has worked as a teacher, librarian and farmer, but he is most of all a reader and writer. His work also appears regularly in the Englewood Review of Books. More on Ragan's work can be found at his website RaganSutterfield.com.
"Sutterfield's book is full of practical wisdom not just for those interested in Berry or agrarianism but for anyone interested in living a sane life. This is a compelling and transformative read." --William T. Cavanaugh, DePaul University "This collection of essays offers a reliable map to Berry's thought and life, beautifully distilled into a dozen keystone convictions (no small accomplishment). Sutterfield curates a pleasing mix of Berry's prose, poetry, and fiction to illustrate the social vision, faith, and practice of this 'contemporary St. Benedict'--perspectives essential to our survival and flourishing as a creaturely species." --Ched Myers, author, Watershed Discipleship: Reinhabiting Bioregional Faith and Practice "People of faith and goodwill are seeking ways to live lives of truth, beauty, and love in a society which seems to discard or disdain such things. Sutterfield's unpacking of Wendell Berry's wisdom, insight, challenges, and faithfulness offers ways of doing that in these perilous times. This is an important book for the living of these days." --J. Brent Bill, Quaker minister, author, Holy Silence: The Gift of Quaker Spirituality, and steward of Ploughshares Farm "Goodness and beauty, lament and hope, humility and resilience, soil and skin-- readers of Wendell Berry know how he celebrates treasures too many people treat as trash. Now Ragan Sutterfield has gathered a dozen central themes from Berry's work and offers them as a call to aliveness in this wonderful and endangered world." --Brian McClaren, author, The Great Spiritual Migration "This wide-ranging yet coherent introduction to Berry's work offers also a view of Christian life that engages the deepest threats to our humanity and our physical world, and at the same time provides concrete guidance for the patient practice of hope." --Ellen F. Davis, Amos Ragan Kearns Professor of Bible and Practical Theology, The Divinity School, Duke University "In Wendell Berry and the Given Life, Ragan Sutterfield has gotten to the spiritual core of Berry's work and elegantly introduced it to people of faith. This book is a beacon of hope in our bleak times, one that guides us not only deeper into Berry's work, but also toward a richer and more sustainable way of life." --C. Christopher Smith, founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books and coauthor of Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus
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