All my botany professors would agree!
My favorite botany courses were all centered around the field handbook. If I’d kept an example of every plant we studied in the field the collection would fill a minivan.
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I loved learning about plants in my biology class in 1982/83 in high school and a few years later in college. But there was no field work, and plants were only part of the classes. The return trips on my bike rides and putzing in the yard have become my lab.
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It was a bit different world in1971 in high school biology class. One of my friends and I were given the assignment to go rabbit hunting for specimens to dissect in class. We did so, bringing back a cottontail and a jackrabbit or two that were harvested by the light of our spotlight from the road, while watching for headlights that might have been a game warden. If we saw headlights, which you could see a mile or two away, we would cut out the lights and run dark a while on the dirt roads until we felt safe.
They were put in formaldehyde, and fortunately no one got tularemia.
We did have a great biology teacher, with a masters degree, something of a rarity in rural Texas. Never mentioned evolution, as the class was too busy just learning the basics and about the world around us.
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I was happy to finally find the entire article The Rational Mind vs The Sympathetic Mind by Wendell Berry online for free. It is part of his book Citizenship Papers (2003).
It ends with these words by Wendell Berry’s and then a quote of Leo Tolstoy.
The Sympathetic Mind is preeminently a faithful mind, taking knowingly and willingly the risks required by faith. The Rational Mind, ever in need of certainty, is always in doubt, always looking for a better way, asking, testing, disbelieving in everything but its own sufficiency to its own needs, which its experience and its own methods continuously disprove. It is a skeptical, fearful, suspicious mind, and always a disappointed one, awaiting the supreme truth or discovery it expects of itself, which of itself it cannot provide.
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“Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?” – Leo Tolstoy
https://riversong.wordpress.com/the-rational-mind-vs-the-sympathetic-mind/
I asked Google if Wendell Berry was a Christian and if so which denomination.
The answer I received seems to have been assembled by AI:
Yes, Wendell Berry is a Christian
, though he has described himself as a “marginal” and “eccentric” Christian, rather than a member of a specific denomination. While he was baptized at New Castle Baptist Church and attends Port Royal Baptist Church, his relationship with organized religion is complex, sometimes resembling his fictional character Jayber Crow’s distanced but devoted faith. Berry’s writing is deeply rooted in Christian tradition, emphasizing the interconnectedness of faith, stewardship of the land, and a belief in God’s love for the world.
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Mark,
Thanks for adding the section about Wendell Berry being a Christian. I don’t think it was there, when I first read and liked your post, and it’s valuable for people who don’t know what to make of Berry’s faith.
In the quote you shared from Berry’s essay, I like the way he plays with the word “faithful”, meaning both “having faith” as well as “showing fidelity.”
“Taking knowingly and willingly the risks required by faith” is worth its weight in gold ink. We can’t test this thing. THat bothers some of us. It’s a deal-breaker for a few. But it’s a risk.
I’m not sure I fully agree with Berry’s evaluation of the Rational Mind. I don’t think this is an absolute all the time, but I see examples of his description. I’m not convinced that we see a matter of causation, but certainly sometimes a correlation.
If so much depends on being in the right mind, I think an important question to ask is how one develops the skill or ability to use it. It’s not enough to state a think as fact, as many do the Gospel, and then condemn people for not making anything of it.
That might be a question from the flawed, Rational Mind, but it’s a fair one. I think.
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I think Berry’s preference for a sympathetic mind is born of farming. I forget now where I heard or read it but somewhere he mentioned how as a farmer you don’t just commit everything based on a narrow understanding of a highly abstract field of knowledge. Instead you ask the land what it can give and what it needs and ask oneself what I need to do in order to be worthy of its bounty.
I don’t find it here in this article but this quote addresses your objection somewhat:
My purpose here is to argue in defense of the Sympathetic Mind. But my objection is not to the use of reason or to reasonability. I am objecting to the exclusiveness of the Rational Mind, which has limited itself to a selection of mental functions such as the empirical methodologies of analysis and experimentation and the attitudes of objectivity and realism. In order to go into business of its own, it has in effect withdrawn from all of human life that involves feeling, affection, familiarity, reverence, faith, and loyalty. The separability of the Rational Mind is not only the dominant fiction but also the master superstition of the modern age.
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I think this is from the video with Bill Moyers.
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I’ve been thinking of the relief of being no one very special.
Those who have read “The Horse and His Boy,” by Lewis, and enjoyed Bree’s reflection with the Hermit, may recall it with enjoyment, too.
I like this meditation by a Canadian pastor
As Long As You Know You’re Nobody Very Special
Thanks.
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There’s a paradox: we are each infinitely special, in the eyes of Yahweh, since we have each been bought by the Blood of Christ; yet in comparison each to the other, we are “nobody very special”.
Or is it a paradox? The first truth sort of implies the second.
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“People who know nothing about nature are of course neurotic, for they are not adapted to reality” Carl Jung, 1962, Memories, Dream, Reflections, p 190
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Scripture—the Old and New Testaments—is the story of creation and new creation. Within that, it is the story of covenant and new covenant. When we read scripture as Christians, we read it precisely as people of the new covenant and of the new creation. We do not read it, in other words, as a flat, uniform list of regulations or doctrines. We read it as the narrative in which we ourselves are now called to take part. We read it to discover “the story so far” and also “how it’s supposed to end.” To put it another way, we live somewhere between the end of Acts and the closing scene of Revelation. If we want to understand scripture and to find it doing its proper work in and through us, we must learn to read and understand it in the light of that overall story.
As we do this—as groups, churches, and individuals—we must allow the power of God’s promised future to have its way with us. As we read the gospels, we must remind ourselves again and again—because the pull of prevailing Western culture is so strong that if we don’t it will suck us back down into dualism—that this is the story of how God’s kingdom was established on earth as in heaven in and through the work of Jesus, fulfilling Israel’s great story, defeating the power of evil, and launching God’s new world. As we read the letters, we must remind ourselves that these are the documents designed to shape and direct the community of the new covenant, the people who were called to take forward the work of new creation. As we read Revelation, we must not allow the wonderful heavenly vision in chapters 4 and 5 to lull us into imagining that this is the final scene in the story, as though the narrative were simply to conclude (as in Charles Wesley’s hymn) with the redeemed casting their crowns before the throne. This is a vision of present reality, seen in its heavenly dimension. We must read on to the end, to the final vision of Revelation 21 and 22, the chapters that give final meaning to all that has gone before and indeed to the entire canon.
Likewise, when we read the Old Testament, we must read it—as it manifestly asks to be read—as the long and winding story of how God chose a people to take forward his plan to rescue his creation, not the story of how God had a shot at calling a people whom he would save from the world and how this was aborted, forcing him to try something else (a caricature, I know, but one many will recognize). And this means that though the Old Testament must be read as part of “our story” as Christians, we must not imagine that we are still living within that moment in the story. The story itself points beyond itself, like a set of parallel lines meeting in the infinitely rich narrative of the gospels and the sudden outburst of new life in Acts and the letters.
The Bible as a whole thus does what it does best when read from the perspective of new creation.
Wright, N. T.. Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (pp. 281-282). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
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Or at least to do so is flawed.
Though not a book, it’s a series by “The Episcopal Church” podcast called “Gender Justice Jam” which has been helpful for me better understanding general social conversation around this subject versus the way I typically prefer to dismiss emotional data unless it’s connected to animals. I tend to lean more heavily into trying to categorize everything with some sort of concrete scientific based evidence.
Anyways the quote is “when we lift from the bottom everyone rises up.”
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good stuff. A little variation on, “A rising tide lifts all ships.”
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Thanks, looks interesting.
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It’s been ok. I don’t speak Spanish and so it’s a bit off putting at times when they talk in Spanish for 20 minutes. I don’t have whatever auto translator they had in that class. But it’s still been worth listening to. The material they cite has been far more beneficial. Pages and pages of content. Most of the commentary they are putting out I’ve always came across in books and podcasts. I think the next thing I want to try to focus on is material
About how the Jewish people potentially held around 8 genders and that those genders are often actually in the Bible but have been translated through a binary system in American English bibles. It’s been a struggle because it’s the topic im least interested in but I feel it should be an obligation to try to accurately learn about it especially given part of our role as Christians is to hear the cries of the oppressed.
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I can imagine. Simply asking questions around the topic of gender is treated - I think mostly in advertently but also without check - as transgressive.
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