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Brian Miller's Kayaking with Lambs is about the idyllic farm life of your imagination--fresh fruits and vegetables, livestock large and small, endless gatherings of kith and kin around a table of homegrown food and handmade drink. It is also about pain, blood, deaths, mud, storms, droughts, and failures. The author, who owns a small East Tennessee farm, lives an ""antiquated life,"" that is, a life often out of sync with modernity and closely in sync with the natural world. His book is structured as a breviary broken into the eight monastic offices of the day. Written as a series of meditative notes, it follows his efforts to live with purpose and stewardship.Kayaking with Lambs is about learning to dwell alongside neighbors, nature, and even the planet as if it mattered. In language that is poetic and writing that is honest, insightful, poignant, wry, and self-deprecating, Miller ponders everything from the cycles of life to his family heritage to what Wes Jackson refers to as ""becoming native to this place."" And, of course, he shares the many times along his journey that he's found himself in situations totally unforeseen when he began . . . like kayaking with lambs.

Brian Miller's Kayaking with Lambs is about the idyllic farm life of your imagination--fresh fruits and vegetables, livestock large and small, endless gatherings of kith and kin around a table of homegrown food and handmade drink. It is also about pain, blood, deaths, mud, storms, droughts, and failures. The author, who owns a small East Tennessee farm, lives an ""antiquated life,"" that is, a life often out of sync with modernity and closely in sync with the natural world. His book is structured as a breviary broken into the eight monastic offices of the day. Written as a series of meditative notes, it follows his efforts to live with purpose and stewardship.Kayaking with Lambs is about learning to dwell alongside neighbors, nature, and even the planet as if it mattered. In language that is poetic and writing that is honest, insightful, poignant, wry, and self-deprecating, Miller ponders everything from the cycles of life to his family heritage to what Wes Jackson refers to as ""becoming native to this place."" And, of course, he shares the many times along his journey that he's found himself in situations totally unforeseen when he began . . . like kayaking with lambs.

In the United States the conventional left/right distinction has become increasingly irrelevant, if not harmful. The reigning political, cultural, and economic visions of both the Democrats and the Republicans have reached obvious dead ends. Liberalism, with its hostility to any limits, is collapsing. So-called Conservatism has abandoned all pretense of conserving anything at all. Both dominant parties seem fundamentally incapable of offering coherent solutions for the problems that beset us. In light of this intellectual, cultural, and political stalemate, there is a need for a new vision. Localism in the Mass Age: A Front Porch Republic Manifesto assembles thirty-one essays by a variety of scholars and practitioners--associated with Front Porch Republic--seeking to articulate a new vision for a better future. The writers are convinced that human apprehension of the true, the good, and the beautiful is best realized within a dense web of meaningful family, neighborhood, and community relationships. These writers seek to advance human flourishing through the promotion of political decentralism, economic localism, and cultural regionalism. In short, Front Porch Republic is dedicated to renewing American culture by fostering the ideals necessary for strong communities.""Why reorient our lives toward local communities, economies, farmlands and forests? Because that's where you can be a citizen rather than a consumer, where you can see a need and help to meet it, where kinfolk might gather not just to visit but to live, where flesh-and-blood neighbors can offer one another aid and companionship, where public officials must answer for their actions, where you can grow food when the trucks stop rolling, where sun and wind offer free energy, and where you can protect and restore a piece of Earth. If anything in that list appeals to you, then you'll be stirred by this book--a bold reimagining of our lives and our places.""--Scott Russell Sanders, author of Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World and other books""If each of these essays is a gem--and it is--then coming upon them all in one place is what it must feel like to come upon a streak of emerald in a layer of shale. To find them embedded in one place, in a manifesto that is a paean to place itself, is a sight, and a site, for hope. Singly, they bring us--with equal parts humor, humility, and gravitas--to new vantage points from which to glimpse tantalizing glints of an alternative to today's creed of greed and gain. Together, they construct a non-military equivalent of a phalanx--with equal parts criticism, common sense, and ideals--against destruction of the particular local places and bonds that give us our lives. Only such patient words and intricately argued bridge-building can help us withstand the ravages of expansion without limits, exploitation without renewal, and social and political polarization without thoughts of perpetuity.""--Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Syracuse University, author of Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution ""Among the few remaining signs of civilization these days is this smallish salon of wonderful writers and thinkers, the Porchers, as they call themselves. In well-tuned prose, they celebrate rootedness and that elusive notion, a sense of place. Not to mention, a sense of the truly human.""--Elias Crim, editor and founder, Solidarity Hall""This is a book of serious ideas, well parsed, and rather brave considering the pervasive intellectual perversity elsewhere on the American scene. But mostly it is a lot of really good writing.""-- James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency and other books.""For over 30 years we have heard lamentations from across the political spectrum about the decay of community. Most sound quaint now, for we have lost so much more than community. We've lost contact with reality as we move through an environment of abstract

Wendell Berry thinks of himself as a storyteller. It's somewhat ironic then that he is better known as an essayist, a poet, and an advocate for small farmers. The essays in this collection consider the many facets of Berry's life and work, but they focus on his efforts as a novelist and story writer. Indeed, Berry had already published three novels before his seminal work of cultural criticism, The Unsettling of America, established him as an ardent defender of local communities and sustainable agriculture. And over the past fifty years, he has published eight novels and more than forty-eight short stories set in the imagined community of Port William. His exquisite rendering of this small Kentucky town challenges us to see the beauty of our own places and communities and to tend their health, threatened though it inevitably is. The twelve contributors to this collection approach Berry's fiction from a variety of perspectives--literary studies, journalism, theology, history, songwriting--to shed light on its remarkable ability to make a good life imaginable and compelling. The first collection devoted to Berry's fiction, this volume insists that any consideration of Berry's work must begin with his stories.""The next best thing to reading Berry is to read those who write about Berry's writing. We should be extremely grateful that we now have this collection of wise investigations of Berry's novels and short stories. These essays do what they were meant to do which is nothing less than celebrate Berry's fertile imagination.""--Stanley Hauerwas, Professor of Divinity and Law at Duke University""When I encounter readers, who share Wendell Berry's concerns but are unfamiliar with his work, I urge them to begin with his fiction. One finds there, more fully arrayed than in his essays or poetry, the web of relationships connecting persons, place, and community. The weaving of that web, on the page and in the world, is the subject of the dozen studies in this book, a worthy guide to the storytelling art of an essential author.""--Scott Sanders, author of Earth Works: Selected EssaysJack R. Baker is an Associate Professor of English at Spring Arbor University. He and Jeffrey Bilbro have previously co-authored Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place (University Press of Kentucky, 2017).Jeffrey Bilbro is an Associate Professor of English at Spring Arbor University. He is the author of Loving God's Wildness: The Christian Roots of Ecological Ethics in American Literature (University of Alabama Press, 2015) and Practice Resurrection: Wendell Berry and the Virtues of Sustainable Forms (forthcoming from University Press of Kentucky).

Wendell Berry thinks of himself as a storyteller. It's somewhat ironic then that he is better known as an essayist, a poet, and an advocate for small farmers. The essays in this collection consider the many facets of Berry's life and work, but they focus on his efforts as a novelist and story writer. Indeed, Berry had already published three novels before his seminal work of cultural criticism, The Unsettling of America, established him as an ardent defender of local communities and sustainable agriculture. And over the past fifty years, he has published eight novels and more than forty-eight short stories set in the imagined community of Port William. His exquisite rendering of this small Kentucky town challenges us to see the beauty of our own places and communities and to tend their health, threatened though it inevitably is. The twelve contributors to this collection approach Berry's fiction from a variety of perspectives--literary studies, journalism, theology, history, songwriting--to shed light on its remarkable ability to make a good life imaginable and compelling. The first collection devoted to Berry's fiction, this volume insists that any consideration of Berry's work must begin with his stories.""The next best thing to reading Berry is to read those who write about Berry's writing. We should be extremely grateful that we now have this collection of wise investigations of Berry's novels and short stories. These essays do what they were meant to do which is nothing less than celebrate Berry's fertile imagination.""--Stanley Hauerwas, Professor of Divinity and Law at Duke University""When I encounter readers, who share Wendell Berry's concerns but are unfamiliar with his work, I urge them to begin with his fiction. One finds there, more fully arrayed than in his essays or poetry, the web of relationships connecting persons, place, and community. The weaving of that web, on the page and in the world, is the subject of the dozen studies in this book, a worthy guide to the storytelling art of an essential author.""--Scott Sanders, author of Earth Works: Selected EssaysJack R. Baker is an Associate Professor of English at Spring Arbor University. He and Jeffrey Bilbro have previously co-authored Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place (University Press of Kentucky, 2017).Jeffrey Bilbro is an Associate Professor of English at Spring Arbor University. He is the author of Loving God's Wildness: The Christian Roots of Ecological Ethics in American Literature (University of Alabama Press, 2015) and Practice Resurrection: Wendell Berry and the Virtues of Sustainable Forms (forthcoming from University Press of Kentucky).