Life Is a Miracle An Essay Against Modern Superstition

by Berry, Wendell

• ISBN13: 9781582431413
• ISBN10: 1582431418
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-04-19
• Publisher: Ingram Book Co

Summary

“[A] scathing assessment . . . Berry shows that Wilson's much–celebrated, controversial pleas in Consilience to unify all branches of knowledge is nothing more than a fatuous subordination of religion, art, and everything else that is good to science . . . Berry is one of the most perceptive critics of American society writing today.” —The Washington Post



“I am tempted to say he understands [Consilience] better than Wilson himself . . . A new emancipation proclamation in which he speaks again and again about how to defy the tyranny of scientific materialism.”—The Christian Science Monitor





In Life Is a Miracle, the devotion of science to the quantitative and reductionist world is measured against the mysterious, qualitative suggestions of religion and art. Berry sees life as the collision of these separate forces, but without all three in the mix we are left at sea in the world.

Author Biography

Wendell Berry is the author of fifty books of poetry, fiction, and essays. He was recently awarded the Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the Louis Bromfield Society Award. For over forty years he has lived and farmed with his wife, Tanya, in Kentucky.

Table of Contents

Ignorance	3	(10)
Propriety	13	(10)
On Edward O. Wilson's Consilience	23	(70)
Materialism	25	(2)
Materialism and Mystery	27	(3)
Imperialism	30	(8)
Reductionism	38	(8)
Creatures as Machines	46	(9)
Originality and the ``Two Cultures''	55	(34)
Progress Without Subtraction	89	(4)
Reduction and Religion	93	(12)
Reduction and Art	105	(16)
A Conversation Out of School	121	(8)
Toward a Change of Standards	129	(14)
Some Notes in Conclusion	143