Alan Jacobs is a big Wendell Berry admirer, but he does not admire the way Berry tends to demonize people who choose to leave their hometowns — as if there were never a good reason, even a tragic reason, to do so. I appreciate very much Alan pointing out this about my book:

One of the things I most deeply admire about The Little Way of Ruthie Leming is that Rod doesn’t universalize his choices. He goes out of his way to insist that he isn’t telling everyone to do as he did and return to whatever their equivalent of St. Francisville is; and he makes it clear that leaving St. Francisville when he was younger was something that he was right to do, that he had to do. But, having said all that, he makes a powerful case — as Wendell Berry also does in most of his works — for the deep meaning and value and virtue to be found in the kinds of small communities that in our country today are being more-or-less systematically diminished. It’s just that Rod does it without feeling the need to separate everybody into the sheep and the goats, the wheat and the chaff, the stickers and the boomers.

I write this as someone who admires Berry this side of idolatry. I would owe him a great debt if the only thing he had ever written was the essay called “Poetry and Marriage,” or the one called “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community,” or the one called “What Are People For?” I could go on: I have been reading and profiting from his work for thirty years, and even did something to create a bit of a Berry cult at Wheaton College a long time ago. But about some of these matters pertaining to place — which is absolutely central to his concerns — his thinking is simplistic and Manichean and insufficiently aware of the real choices that many real people face.

My father is the Platonic ideal of Wendell Berry’s “Sticker.” And yet, at the end of the story I tell in Little Way, he makes a startling, and (to me) deeply moving back-porch speech reconsidering the virtue of sticking in his own case, making it clear that sticking is not always the right choice, and that we can’t always know that we have made the right choice. In retrospect, I think what my father said to me on the back porch after Sunday dinner is one of the most important parts of the book, precisely because he really is a stalwart Sticker, yet is now, in the twilight of his long life, painfully aware of the tragic costs of sticking in place.

None of this is simple or easy or clear.

Alan has a follow-up post on the idea of place within Christianity. In my own case, I could  only leave my hometown with confidence and lack of regret when I became convinced that I had a calling placed on my life by God. And I could only go back there when I became convinced, along with my wife, that God was calling us there.