Agrarian Theology after Berry
The tradition of agrarian theology that I seek to dialogue with in my research and in this blog owes much to the writing of Wendell Berry and his interpreters. Agrarianism, in its North American register, is inescapably bound up in the structures of settler colonialism that has been incredibly displacing to the indigenous peoples who have called these lands home from time immemorial. [1] This form of agrarianism has had such a displacing edge specifically because it has been driven by the settler demand for new land. The agrarianism that shaped my own life in Western Canada was largely created by a race between new immigrants and American ex-pats who were hungry to swallow up land as quickly as the Canadian government could sign treaties with the remaining indigenous nations that centuries of war, famine, and disease had not already extinguished. [2] With this settler-colonialist edge, agrarian thought, particularly as it has been popularized in Berry’s wr