Book recommendation...

Book recommendation...

I just finished Wendell Berry's "Life is a Miracle". Here are my notes from my post in GoodReads:

Berry continues to astonish me. This is not a fast and easy read; you have to work and pay attention. But Berry writes as a prophet of our times and has put his finger on a core - maybe the root - cause of dis-ease in our century.

He writes a critique of rationalism and scientific thought that we need to pay attention to.

A few memorable passages:

"For a while I proposed to myself that the only things really explainable are explanations. That is not quite true, but it is near enough to the truth that I am unwilling to forget it.

"What can be explained? Experiments, ideas, patterns, cause-effect relationships and connections within defined limits, anything that can be calculated, graphed or diagrammed. And yet the explanation changes whatever is explained into something explainable. Explanation is reductive, not comprehensive; most of the time, when you have explained something, you discover leftovers. An explanation is a bucket, not a well.

"What can't be explained? I don't think creatures can be explained. I don't think lives can be explained. What we know about creatures and lives must be pictured or told or sung or danced. And I don't think pictures or stories or songs or dances can be explained. The arts are indispensable precisely because they are so nearly antithetical to explanation." (p113)

"The time is past, if ever there was such a time, when you can just discover knowledge and turn it loose in the wold and assume that you have done good.

"This, to me, is a sign of the incompleteness of science in itself - which is the sign of the need for a strenuous conversation among all the branches of learning."

"In our present economic predicament, ethics, ecology, environmental law, etc. won't as specialties have much corrective force. They will be used to rationalize what is wrong." (p145)

I'd really enjoy a conversation about his book with Lew and Irregular Reflections.