The Power of Homeplace: The Hospitality of Celtic Christianity in Wendell Berry’s “Watch With Me”
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2020-05-01
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Abstract
Wendell Berry is well known as a writer and scholar on the importance of place and community in daily life; while his works speak to the importance of caring for a place, the way he lives in turn influences the way he writes. For Berry, the experience and scholarship of place and community go hand in hand, each affecting the other. For this reason, it is logical to look at Berry’s own homeplace to see how it shapes his writings; his emphasis on the value of place should lead to an analysis of his place. While scholars have looked to the community of Henry County, Kentucky-Berry’s lifelong home-for answers on how place outside of Berry’s writing has affected his perception of place within his writing, there is another community that Berry is directly connected to, one that has not yet been explored in context of Berry’s ideals of home and community: Ireland. Berry’s ancestors hail from Ireland, the land of rolling green hills that produced the place-and-community-orientated tradition of Celtic Christianity. Ireland, and therefore the traditions of Celtic Christianity that have so greatly shaped the culture of the Emerald Isle, forms part of Berry’s place, though removed a few generations.
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Wendell Berry, Watch With Me, Celtic Christianity, Spring Arbor University, Emily Dimmick, hospitality, place, southern literature