Health is Membership: 25 Years Later

Joe Waters, Ryan Peoples
  • 5.0 (4)
  • MEDICINE

Just over 25 years ago in a speech in Louisville, Kentucky, farmer, poet, critic, and theorist Wendell Berry sought to restore love, healing, wholeness, and health to the lexicon of modern American health care. It is perhaps less remarkable that he did this than that the words themselves had been lost to health care systems at all and replaced with words like efficiency, value, specialization-- words that have more to do with business management than with the tasks of healing and care to which health systems are dedicated. Our task in this series is to probe and understand the relevance of Berry’s thinking for health, healing, and healthcare 25 years on from this speech. As we face an America that spends increasing sums on health care with poorer outcomes, Berry’s thinking might just have something to say that can reorient us and help us all flourish.

Episodes

  1. 07/03/2020

    Mary Berry

    The Berry Center Executive Director Mary Berry and her brother, Den Berry, were raised by their parents, Wendell and Tanya Berry, at Lanes Landing Farm in Henry County, Kentucky from the time she was six years old. She attended Henry County public schools and graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1981. She farmed for a living in Henry County starting out in dairy farming, growing Burley tobacco, and later diversifying to organic vegetables, pastured poultry and grass fed beef. Mary is married to Trimble County, Kentucky farmer, Steve Smith, who started the first Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farming endeavor in the state of Kentucky. If daughters Katie Johnson, Virginia Aguilar and Tanya Smith choose to stay in Henry County, they will be the ninth generation of their family to live and farm there. Mary currently serves on the Board of Directors of United Citizens Bank, in New Castle, Kentucky, and is on the board of directors of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. She speaks all over the country as a proponent of agriculture of the middle, in defense of small farmers, and in the hope of restoring a culture and an economy that has been lost in rural America. Recently she has written a letter for inclusion in the book, “Letters to a Young Farmer: On Food, Farming, and Our Future” (Princeton Agricultural Press, 2016), and the introduction for a new edition of essays, “Our Sustainable Table”, Robert Clark, ed. (Counterpoint, 2017).

    47 min

  2. 06/11/2020

    Warren Kinghorn

    Warren Kinghorn is a psychiatrist whose work centers on the role of religious communities in caring for persons with mental health problems and on ways in which Christians engage practices of modern health care. Jointly appointed within Duke Divinity School and the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences of Duke University Medical Center, he is co-director of the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative and is a staff psychiatrist at the Durham VA Medical Center. He has written on the moral and theological dimensions of combat trauma and moral injury, on the moral and political context of psychiatric diagnosis, and on the way that St. Thomas Aquinas’ image of the human as wayfarer might inform contemporary practices of ministry and mental health care.

    38 min

  3. 04/30/2020

    Matt Finn

    Matt is passionate about how the built environment influences human health. As a social entrepreneur and architect, Finn founded Cognitive Design in 2016 - a consulting and design firm that works with a network of people from outside the design profession, including clinical psychologists, social workers, and healthcare practitioners, to help inform the design process. Finn grew up in Atlanta (proof that natives exist) where he works and resides with his wife, Stephanie, and their daughter. After graduating from Kennesaw State University, he began his professional career at Perkins and Will, where he gained valuable experience delivering exceptional client service while working on complex architectural projects. Finn is known for asking the right questions and for maintaining continuity of thought from concept through design, documentation, and construction. Matt’s interdisciplinary research and innovative thinking have been recognized by Healthcare Design magazine, who named Matt the 2016 HCD 10 Researcher. Additionally, Matt’s work has been featured by numerous academic institutions, media outlets and conferences including the U.S. Green Building Council, Academy of Neuroscience For Architecture and the American Institute of Architects. Cognitive Design is the convergence of Matt’s passion for collaborative practice-led research and creative design thinking in service of others. And he has fun doing it.

    57 min

  4. 04/11/2020

    Grace Hackney

    Rev. Grace G. Hackney is an elder in the United Methodist Church and the founding director of Life Around the Table. She tends 12 acres in Efland, NC with her husband Tony and a smattering of animals, bolstered by visits from her two grown children.  Source: https://lifearoundthetable.org/

    44 min

  5. 03/18/2020

    George Scialabba

    George Scialabba grew up in East Boston, in the shadow of Logan Airport. He distinguished himself as an altar boy at Our Lady of Mount Carmel parish and a third-baseman for the Mount Carmel Mohawks. He graduated Harvard College in 1969 and spent a year in graduate school at Columbia (European intellectual history), dropping out in 1970, never to return. Through most of the 1970s he meandered around the counterculture, knowing that something was happening there but never knowing what it was. In 1980 he debuted as a freelance book critic, becoming a regular contributor to the Village Voice, Boston Phoenix, Boston Globe, Boston Review, The Nation, Dissent, L.A. Weekly, Bookforum, and Commonweal before breaking into the big leagues (i.e., The Baffler) in 2012. He has published four essay collections: What Are Intellectuals Good For? The Modern Predicament, For the Republic, and Low Dishonest Decades (all available from Pressed Wafer). His writing is archived at www.georgescialabba.net, where you’ll also find his email address and an invitation to write him about anything you read there that interests you. He is nominally on Facebook and Twitter (@GeorgeScialabba) but pretty much invisible on both. Source: The Baffler

    37 min

  6. 03/04/2020

    Norman Wirzba

    Norman Wirzba pursues research and teaching interests at the intersections of theology, philosophy, ecology, and agrarian and environmental studies. He lectures frequently in Canada, the United States, and Europe. In particular, his research is centered on a recovery of the doctrine of creation and a restatement of humanity in terms of its creaturely life. He is currently the director of a multi-year, Henry Luce-Foundation-funded projected entitled “Facing the Anthropocene.” In this project, housed at Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics, he is working with an international team of scholars to rethink several academic disciplines in light of challenges like climate change, food insecurity, biotechnology and genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, species extinction, and the built environment.   Professor Wirzba has published several books, including The Paradise of God: Renewing Religion in an Ecological Age, Living the Sabbath: Discovering the Rhythms of Rest and Delight, Way of Love: Recovering the Heart of Christianity, From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating (in its 2nd Edition), and (with Fred Bahnson) Making Peace with the Land: God’s Call to Reconcile with Creation. He also has edited several books, including The Essential Agrarian Reader: The Future of Culture, Community, and the Land and The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry. Professor Wirzba serves as general editor for the book series Culture of the Land: A Series in the New Agrarianism, published by the University Press of Kentucky, and is co-founder and executive committee member of the Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology. Source: Duke University Divinity School.

    52 min

  7. SEASON 1 TRAILER

    Trailer: Health is Membership

    "Health is Membership" can be read HERE.

    2 min

Trailer

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
4 Ratings

About

Just over 25 years ago in a speech in Louisville, Kentucky, farmer, poet, critic, and theorist Wendell Berry sought to restore love, healing, wholeness, and health to the lexicon of modern American health care. It is perhaps less remarkable that he did this than that the words themselves had been lost to health care systems at all and replaced with words like efficiency, value, specialization-- words that have more to do with business management than with the tasks of healing and care to which health systems are dedicated. Our task in this series is to probe and understand the relevance of Berry’s thinking for health, healing, and healthcare 25 years on from this speech. As we face an America that spends increasing sums on health care with poorer outcomes, Berry’s thinking might just have something to say that can reorient us and help us all flourish.

Information