Every year since 1990, the Center for Peace and Justice Education at Villanova University has given the Adela Dwyer/St. Thomas of Villanova Award to one individual or group who has made “outstanding contributions to the understanding of the meaning and conditions of justice and peace in human communities.” Past recipients have included Habitat for Humanity, Noam Chomsky, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, among others. This year, the award was given to Wendell Berry, a novelist, poet, essayist, and farmer from Port Royal, Kentucky.  It is difficult to estimate the scope and richness of Berry’s insight. His teacher, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wallace Stegner, once called his stories “good like bread.” His essays span a number of topics, from the importance of land conservation to marriage and the family, from poetics to economics, from racism to feminism, and most things in-between. He has been an advocate for agrarianism and the renewal of human communities by calling persons to a sense of rootedness and place. And perhaps the reason that his thought is so wide-ranging is that he refuses to view one topic completely in isolation from the others; his cultural criticism is astute, both for its timeliness and timelessness. On Nov. 13, 2012, hundreds of Villanova faculty and students and members of the surrounding community crowded into Connelly Center to see Berry, the author of dozens of books and recent Jefferson Lecturer (“the most prestigious honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities”), receive the award and give a couple of short readings. Mr. Berry’s first remarks upon receiving the award were these: “To be the recipient of a peace award brings an occasion for thinking of all the reasons you don’t deserve it.” I was instantly reminded of his poem, “A Warning to My Readers”:

Do not think me gentle
because I speak in praise
of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace
that keeps this world. I am
a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies. That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is.

However short his failings may be, humility was the beginning of Berry’s wisdom in his address; for as he alluded, only through humility as a response to the sheer giftedness of the world can we begin to seek peace. He then read two pieces; one on some of the effects of government-subsidized farming, and the other a short story entitled “The Girl in the Window” from his new book A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership. Following his readings, there was a short question and answer section, wherein the final question was, “What are you thankful for this season?” His response was that one should be “skeptical” about being thankful for only one thing at one time of year. To truly “be thankful” is a response that can only be cultivated through a lifetime of reflection and care for the world and the people that surround us.

 AJ DeBonis, Graduate Student in Theology